Brussels — On March 21, the EU Parliament held the first ever public hearing on climate change denial addressing the special role ExxonMobil played in its decades-long campaign to distort the truth about global warming. The impetus for this hearing was a petition submitted by Food & Water Europe urging the Parliament to act on the case.
ExxonMobil was invited to attend the hearing and give parliamentarians an opportunity to publicaly answer questions about misleading the public, but the multinational fossil fuel giant refused the invitation. Instead, ExxonMobil sent the organizers of the hearing a private letter attempting to discredit one of the expert witnesses, MIT and Harvard researcher Dr. Geoffrey Supran, using a non-peer-reviewed report commissioned and paid for by ExxonMobil.
Reacting to this, more than 100 Brussels and international NGOs and organizations submitted an open letter heavily criticizing ExxonMobil’s behavior and calling on parliamentarians to revoke the fossil fuel corporation’s direct access to the EU Parliament.