ExxonMobil planned Arctic drilling to exploit the very melting its funded skeptics denied

Evidence

Since 2008, ExxonMobil has claimed to have stopped funding all organizations that deny climate change. This while investigators have turned up the fact that even while ExxonMobil was spending money to obfuscate the facts about climate change, they were making plans to explore new drilling opportunities in the Arctic once the polar ice cap had melted. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 73

Categorization

• SEED: The internal contradiction — paying to deny a forecast while betting a business strategy on that same forecast coming true — is a vivid essay hook about motivated reasoning at corporate scale.
• XREF: connects to: Exxon deliberately reversed its climate research to fund denial when regulation loomed — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 246; Fossil fuel companies knowingly obscure climate science rather than believe their denial — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 247

Broader Connections

• Exxon deliberately reversed its climate research to fund denial when regulation loomed #expands (0.92) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 246
• Fossil fuel companies knowingly obscure climate science rather than believe their denial #corroborates (0.80) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 247