‘A Pretty Ugly History’: How Exxon Exported Climate Denial to the Global South

In early September, the Danish climate crisis denier Bjørn Lomborg travelled to São Paulo to deliver a stark warning. On the sidelines of a conference called the Forum Caminhos da Liberdade, happening just as Brazil was gearing up to host annual global climate talks (known as “COP30”) in November, Lomborg claimed that if implemented poorly, government efforts to address climate change could “destroy economic growth.”

Lomborg had some behind-the-scenes assistance to help his message land, because one of the top 2025 sponsors of the conference (whose speakers in previous years have included Silicon Valley billionaire and Donald Trump ally Peter Thiel), was Atlas Network, a United States-based worldwide coalition of more than 500 free-market think tanks and allied partners. This wasn’t the first time that a foreign conservative activist aimed to stir up doubts in Latin America about climate action on the eve of global climate talks.

Starting in earnest around 1997, during the early years of United Nations-led efforts to forge a global climate pact, Atlas Network and its partners created and executed a playbook to sabotage support for international treaties across the Global South, according to hundreds of Atlas Network documents obtained by DeSmog. 

A key early funder of this strategy: ExxonMobil.

It’s now public knowledge that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Exxon helped fund and lead a constellation of U.S.-based organizations that sought to discredit climate science, assure the public that it was safe to burn fossil fuels, and block America’s participation in the international climate treaty — a campaign that is now the subject of dozens of lawsuits across the U.S. accusing the company of deceiving the public. 

DeSmog’s newly obtained documents, which included copies of checks mailed to Atlas Network for amounts ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 at a time, show that Exxon, with the help of Atlas Network partners, was also quietly financing climate denial in developing countries.

These strategy memos, funding proposals, personal letters and progress reports reveal in specific detail how Exxon and Atlas Network (which was formerly known as Atlas Economic Research Foundation) sought to amplify diplomatic tensions ahead of climate treaty summits, which are focused on bringing countries with vastly differing economic and social needs to consensus on reducing carbon emissions.

In stoking confusion and doubt about climate change among developing nations during critical early moments of climate diplomacy, Exxon and Atlas Network exacerbated geopolitical fault-lines and raised economic fears that persist to this day, according to Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity, who is a long-time expert on Exxon’s climate denial campaigns.

“That’s a pretty ugly history,” Davies said. “Exxon seemed to think that if you could make developing nations, and all nations, skeptical that climate change was a crisis then you’d never have a global climate treaty.”

The checks Exxon wrote to Atlas financed activities ranging from Spanish translations of English-language books denying the reality of climate change, to flights to Latin American cities for U.S. climate deniers. They funded public events that enabled those deniers to reach local media and network with policymakers, as well as Atlas Network partner reports warning of dire economic consequences from climate policy.

The goal was to make countries across the region “less inclined” to support treaties on cutting carbon emissions, even though these agreements would be essential to stopping global temperature rise from spiraling out of control.

Three decades later, the consequences of insufficient global climate action are impossible to ignore. Scientists announced in mid-October that worldwide carbon emissions are so high that the planet has passed the tipping point where a mass die-off of the planet’s coral reefs is likely irreversible, and that unless there are drastic global cuts to emissions and deforestation within the next 10 to 20 years, a collapse of the Amazon rainforest could be locked in.

‘Never an Important Donor’

Exxon’s climate obstruction in the Global South had the potential to increase profits, according to a 1997 strategy plan “dealing specifically with the problems of international treaties” that Atlas sent by mail to the company’s headquarters in Irving, Texas. “This investment in market-oriented public policies is a vital key to our future prosperity and well-being — and to continued strong returns to Exxon’s investors,” Atlas Network explained.

Asked about this document and others viewed by DeSmog, Atlas Network spokesperson Adam Weinberg replied that “these questions deal with memos and materials drafted by former employees from more than a quarter century ago, addressed to a corporation that was never an important donor to our organization, and which indeed has not been a donor at all for close to two decades.”

But considering that over 50 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1751 have been released since the early 1990s, Exxon and Atlas Network efforts to stall carbon cuts are extremely relevant to where the world finds itself today.  

“What happened 30 years ago matters very much,” said Carlos Milani, a professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro State University’s Institute for Social and Political Studies. “The atmosphere has a huge historical memory when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.”

Exxon did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Influence Government Policies’

During his September trip to Brazil, in addition to attending the Forum Caminhos da Liberdade, Lomborg gave a lecture at a private research university in Belo Horizonte known as IBMEC, which he later said in his newsletter was “broadcast to hundreds of students unable to fit into the auditorium.”

Lomborg had been described in Brazilian promotional materials as one of the world’s leading experts on environmental issues and other global challenges, even though many actual climate scientists regard his statements on climate change as misrepresentative of the mainstream consensus that global temperature rise is an urgent and escalating crisis.

Lomborg did not reply to detailed questions about his activities in Brazil. The university event was hosted by IBMEC professor Adriano Gianturco, who is a board member of the Instituto Liberal, a Rio de Janeiro-based think tank and Atlas Network partner with a history of spreading climate disinformation throughout Latin America.

In videos posted to social media during the summer, Instituto Liberal repeated in Portuguese the long-standing climate denier trope that COP30 is an expensive get-together for the United Nations’ globe-trotting technocratic elites that will leave nothing but debt for ordinary Brazilians.

Instituto Liberal did not respond to a request for information. “We did not convene any of the meetings or activities with Bjørn Lomborg,” Weinberg of Atlas Network said in email. “We do not take institutional positions on topics like COP30.”

Instituto Liberal has been fine-tuning its critique of the international climate treaty process since at least 1997, when it was contacted by Atlas Network about “an important new donor” looking to foster think tanks in the Global South.

The proposal explained that the donor was particularly interested in “international treaties and agreements that force Latin and other developing countries to adopt stringent labor, environmental or other laws that may not reflect the developing nation’s own needs, priorities or viewpoints on these issues.”

That donor was Exxon, which — as detailed in a 1997 letter from Exxon executive William Hale to Atlas Network — was “interested in nurturing free-market think tanks outside the United States,” particularly in Asia, the former Soviet Union, Europe, and Latin America. Exxon was prepared to give Atlas “up to $50,000” — adjusted for inflation, roughly $100,000 in today’s money — to grow “international groups which have the ability to influence government policies.”

In a 1998 letter to Exxon’s Hale, then-Atlas Network president Alejandro Chafuen spelled out how its partner organizations could amplify the company’s influence in the Global South. They would provide “entrees to government officials”; “access to local and national TV and radio programs”; “a distant early warning system on emerging issues”; “an improved ability to respond to legislative and regulatory initiatives”; and, “a greatly expanded ability to carry corporate messages…beyond Washington and the United States.”

Latin American academics who study Atlas Network see in such activities a coordinated effort to create favorable political conditions for big business and foreign investors. “It is a movement,” Ana Lúcia Faria and Vera Chaia wrote in a 2023 paper, “to legitimize and pave the the way for the unbridled escalation of capital.” The research was published in the London Journal of Research Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Atlas Network in its 1998 funding proposal to Exxon stressed “that even relatively small investments in developing nations can produce substantial results.” The proposal explained that Exxon funding would “enable new and established think tanks to undertake or expand studies of vital importance to business in general and the petroleum industry in particular.”

In March 1998, Exxon mailed a $50,000 check to Atlas Network.

‘Adverse Consequences’

Exxon’s financial support of Atlas Network came at a crucial early moment in global climate diplomacy.

World leaders had met in Japan in 1997 to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, the first-ever legally binding international treaty designed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Over two weeks of negotiations, tensions surfaced about which countries should bear the costs of addressing the mounting climate crisis. The wealthiest nations had created most of the climate-heating pollution over two centuries of coal- and oil-fired industrialization, but emissions from developing nations were rising in the present as they industrialized their economies and pulled their citizens out of poverty.

Countries were planning to convene in Buenos Aires in November 1998 to find a solution that could help unite the Global North and South more decisively in the worldwide climate fight. It would be just the fourth annual “conference of the parties” to the United Nations climate treaty process, thus known as “COP4.”

To Atlas Network, this meeting would be “a rare opportunity” to create opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for those “who doubt the claims behind the global warming theory, and worry about the devastating results that any treaty could have on the United States, the world economy and the energy industry.” With Exxon’s support, Atlas Network believed it could help persuade the developing world of “the adverse effects of global climate change treaties.”

In September 1998, just two months before global delegates were due to meet, Atlas Network requested supplementary financing from Exxon to fund a series of global warming seminars. The money would pay for Atlas Network to fly Patrick Michaels, a U.S. climate denier, to Buenos Aires to speak at the events. Michaels was connected to several think tanks and groups that had previously receiv

Geoff Dembicki / DeSmogمصدر