Oil giant in environmental gun

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Environmental groups are gathering evidence for an unprecedented legal battle to pin part of the blame for global warming on a single company, Exxon Mobil.

A report by New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), released by Friends of the Earth in London last month, says Exxon Mobil's oil products have caused between 4.8 per cent and 5.5 per cent of the global increase in carbon dioxide in the past 120 years.

The director of the London-based Climate Initiatives Fund, Simon Retallack, says research is under way to prove direct economic costs of the resulting rise in global temperature.

Mr Retallack visited New Zealand last week to work on a new edition of the 1972 environmental classic Blueprint for Survival with an author of the original Blueprint and founder of the London Ecologist, Teddy Goldsmith.

His Climate Initiatives Fund is financed by the Goldsmith family and funds several legal battles as well as the one against Mobil, including threatened action against Australian companies over the recent drought and bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.

The case against Exxon Mobil is based on two reports. The first, by a researcher at Colorado's Rocky Mountain Institute, added up all emissions by Exxon Mobil, its predecessor companies and their customers since their original ancestor, Standard Oil, was formed in 1882.

It found that the company's main effect on global warming came from carbon dioxide emissions by customers who burned its oil. The company had a much smaller effect on global levels of another greenhouse gas, methane, and its effect on nitrogen oxide levels was "negligible".

Niwa scientists Jim Salinger and Greg Bodeker then put these results into a global climate model and calculated that Exxon Mobil could be blamed for between 3.4 per cent and 3.7 per cent of the 0.6C rise in global temperatures since 1882.

They said the company also accounted for about 2 per cent of the 8cm average rise in sea level in the same period.

Dr Salinger declined to comment on the report last week and referred calls to Niwa chief executive Rick Pridmore.

Dr Pridmore is in Britain and could not be contacted.

Mr Retallack said researchers were assessing the costs of global warming to people such as farmers suffering from droughts, tourist operators on the Great Barrier Reef, and residents of low-lying islands in Sri Lanka and the Pacific whose homes were being damaged by more frequent storms and rising sea levels.

"The hardest thing is to prove your crops are being wiped out by global warming, but there are some things that can't be put down to freak weather events," he said.

"For example, right around the world glaciers are melting, and can sometimes dam up and cause a sudden release of large quantities of water. Villages downstream are flooded."

Exxon Mobil spokeswoman Lauren Kerr told Reuters when the two reports were released that the company had already cut carbon emissions at its refineries and chemical plants by more than 200 million tonnes through greater efficiencies in the past 20 years.

The company hasdalso given US$100 million ($141 million) to Stanford University research into new technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Retallack's Climate Initiatives Fund is also supporting a law suit against the US Environmental Protection Agency for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Twelve US states including California and New York have joined that action.

Outside the legal arena, the fund supports a lobbying campaign to get the World Bank and various national export credit agencies to stop lending money for projects that would increase the use of fossil fuels in developing countries.

A World Bank review group headed by former Indonesian Environment Minister Emil Salim recommended in December that the bank should phase out all investments in oil production by 2008, and "aggressively" lift its investments in renewable energy by 20 per cent a year.

The bank's managers are due to consider the review on February 25.

Mr Retallack is also working with a London think tank on alternative strategies for cutting world greenhouse gas emissions if Russia decides not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which would cut global emissions and create a global market for emission rights.

European nations and New Zealand have ratified the protocol, but the US and Australia have rejected it and it will lapse if Russia also opts out.

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