"We made them an offer they couldn't refuse." - Today's WSJ has done us the favor of printing a letter sent by Senators Jay Rockerfeller and Olympia Snowe to the CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. As I read the content, I could scarcely think of a more blatant attempt at bare-knuckles political intimidation. The Senators begin by linking the "climate change denial strategy carried out by and for ExxonMobil" to a perceived loss of American prestige in the world (as if U.S. Senators sounding like a bunch of schoolgirls worried about being liked increases our stature.)

After accusing ExxonMobil of contributing to "the overall politicization of science," by contributing to "no fewer than 29 climate change denial front groups in 2004 alone" these would-be Robin Hoods make their big pitch.

In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world's largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts.

Always with their hand wringing and sanctimonious bleating about global warming's impact on the "developing world." If these folks or their confederates in the climate change caliphate gave an airborne copulation through a rotating pastry, they would concern themselves with the results of the most current report from the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Global warming gadfly (and author of the Skeptical Environmentalist) Bjorn Lomborg recently convened a group of 24 United Nations ambassadors and senior diplomats, and asked them to rank priorities for dealing with major world challenges. As with the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus of internationally-noted economists, the ambassadors placed a priority on "initiatives on communicable diseases, sanitation and water, malnutrition, and education."

As for global warming:

In the lower reaches of the joint ordering, a marked degree of agreement was apparent. Initiatives in the challenge areas of financial instability, and all but the Kyoto Protocol of climate change were placed toward the bottom of the list by almost all of the representatives. With the Kyoto Protocol, some countries placed it high or very high on the list, but the large majority placed it low or very low.

Hopefully, a pattern is emerging throughout these posts on global climate change. The crux of any argument I would make regarding global warming would be that if it is a legitimate theory, then the science should bear that out without strongarm tactics on the part of biased politicians or fearmongering from a less-than objective media. To it's credit, ExxonMobil plans to continue to fund research that questions the global warming "consensus."