WASHINGTON, DC — ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue, the Union of Concerned Scientists claims in a new report published Wednesday. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded corporation, responded Thursday by calling the Union of Concerned Scientists’ paper ‘deeply offensive and wrong.’ Tillerson Rex Tillerson is chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. (Photo courtesy ExxonMobil) ‘ExxonMobil engages in public policy discussions by encouraging serious inquiry, analysis, the sharing of information and transparency,’ the company said in a statement. According to the report, between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil ‘directed nearly $16 million to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.’ ‘ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,’ said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a 200,000 member organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ‘A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 […]