Energy

This Mysterious Activist Is Doing A Lot Of The Heavy Lifting For The Climate Lawsuits

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A climate activist who has become a major media commentator in recent years is apparently moonlighting as one of the masterminds behind a series of climate lawsuits directed at ExxonMobil.

Environmentalist Richard Wiles frequently provides commentary on stories discussing aspects of citywide lawsuits targeting ExxonMobil, according to a report Wednesday from Energy in Depth. But his biggest contribution might be to the lawsuits themselves, the report notes.

Wiles heads Climate Liability News (CLN), a news organization created in 2017 to report on various climate lawsuits. One of CLN’s founding editors, Lynn Zinser, worked on a series of articles from InsideClimate News hashing out Exxon’s supposed history of hiding global warming.

LCN’s reports have gotten a lot of help from several billion-dollar philanthropists. Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for instance, are crucial players behind the climate lawsuits and anti-oil investigations. CLN has a page on its website dedicated to anti-Exxon content.

The family uses various funds — including the Rockefeller Family Fund, Rockefeller Brother Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation — to direct millions of dollars to green energy groups. Most of their efforts are directed toward creating public policy, but they’ve also been at the forefront of the campaign against Exxon, a descendant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

Wiles uses a 501(c)3 organization called Climate Communications & Law to prop up CLN’s finances — the CC&L has no website and no apparent financial disclosures, EID reported. CC&L operates out of Wiles’s house and serves as a shell organization for CLN, the report notes, meaning the news group is a type of public relations firm for activists targeting oil companies.

Wiles is also the founder of Climate Central, another Rockefeller-founded group that researches on how fossil fuel production affects the climate. He served as Climate Central’s senior vice president for Strategic Communications and Research between 2008 and 2017.

He supervised several of the studies cited by Sher Edling, a law firm handling six lawsuits filed by California cities and counties against oil companies, including Exxon, Chevron and BP. The firm handles these cases in exchange for a percentage of court winnings, called a contingency fee.

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