Welcome to Bob's Grill.

Each week this August, I'm inviting you to join me in my backyard to fire up the barbecue and turn up the heat.

What with rising temperatures, I might not even have to light the colds.

Last year, the website Inside Climate News published an investigative series examining ExxonMobil's rich history of scientific study on fossil fuels and global warming.

Yes, you heard that right.

Exxon was at the forefront of climate change research in the 1970s and 80s, before pivoting to

funding climate change denial groups in 1989 and for 20 years thereafter. Enter the publication

called Inside Climate News. Its series on those abandoned research efforts titled Exxon, The Road Not Taken,

was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and took home many of the most prestigious journalism awards of

the year. But the plotits haven't stopped Exxon from denying the investigation's conclusions.

In September, I spoke with Richard Kyle, ExxonMobil's Senior Advisor for Global Public Affairs.

Inside Climate News had just published the first installment of its series.

I asked him to explain why Exxon was so furious about what the website had reported.

Well, they have accused us of knowing for certain that climate change was a real problem

in the early 1980s and then abandoning our research into that to fund climate denial.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We have an uninterrupted continuous 30-year history of researching this important

topic. And in the last decade alone, we spent more than $300 million into both reducing

emissions and fossil fuels and researching and exploring alternative energy sources.

The reporting is simply flat out wrong. I don't believe the piece asserted that Exxon

had scientific certainty. The piece I read said that Exxon was doing some of the early research

about the possibilities, and those possibilities were alarming, but not that there was any scientific certainty about how it all would play out.

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