Then, in 2016, the Rockefeller Family Fund, under Mr. Kaiser’s leadership, announced its own divestment in an even more pointed way, taking aim at what it called Exxon Mobil’s “morally reprehensible conduct.”
“Evidence,” it said, “appears to suggest that the company worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change’s march, while simultaneously spending millions to fortify its own infrastructure against climate change’s destructive consequences and track new exploration opportunities as the Arctic’s ice receded.”
The evidence cited in the divestment announcement was developed, in part, with Rockefeller money.
In 2015, after mining corporate archives, The Los Angeles Times published an investigation into the company’s history of climate research, working with students from the Columbia University journalism school, whose program received more than $500,000 from the Rockefeller Family Fund and a lesser amount from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Inside Climate News, an environmental journalism organization that also received money from Rockefeller philanthropies, produced its own in-depth report the same year. Activist groups, many of which received Rockefeller funding as well, then kicked off an initiative known as #ExxonKnew.
Next came lawsuits. With the family’s encouragement, a number of state attorneys general, drawing on the journalists’ reporting, began their own investigations of Exxon Mobil, starting with one in 2015 by New York’s attorney general at the time, Eric T. Schneiderman. Three years later, New York sued the company, accusing it of violating shareholder protection statutes and other laws; Exxon won the case last year.
(A case brought by Maura N. Healey of Massachusetts over deceptive advertising and consumer and investor protection laws, filed in 2019, is pending. Minnesota and the District of Columbia have recently announced lawsuits of their own.)