writes for The New York Times.

Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was paid $686 million over 13 years. But that's not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive ' compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other gross- ly overpaid business leaders, Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders. There's a better reason to ex- coriate Raymond: For the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrich- ment, he turned Exxon Mobil in- to an enemy of the planet. To understand why Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil compa- nies, you need to know a bit about how the science and politics of climate change have shifted over the years. Global warming emerged as a major public issue in the late 1980s. But at first there was considerable scientific uncer- tainty. Over time, the accumulation of evidence removed much of that uncertainty. Climate experts still aren't sure how much hotter the world will get and how fast. But there's now an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer and that human activity is the cause. In 2004, an article in the journal Science that sur- veyed 928 pa- pers on climate change that were published in peer-reviewed scientific jour- nals found that "none of the pa- pers disagreed with the consen- sus position." To dismiss this consensus, you have to believe in a vast conspiracy to misinform the public that somehow embraces thousands of scientists around the world. That sort of thing is the stuff of bad novels. Sure enough, the novelist Michael Crichton, whose past work in- cludes warnings about the im- minent Japanese takeover of the world economy and mur- derous talking apes inhabiting the lost city ofZinj, has become perhaps the most prominent global-warming skeptic. (Crich- ton was invited to the White House to brief President Bush.) So how have corporate inter- ests responded? In the early years, when the science was still somewhat in doubt, many com- panies from the oil industry, the auto industry and other sectors were members of a group called the Global Climate Coalition, whose de facto purpose was to oppose curbs on greenhouse gases. But as the scientific evi- dence became clearer, many members — including oil com- panies like BP and Shell — left the organization and conceded the need to do something about global warming. Exxon, headed by Raymond, chose a different course of ac- tion: It decided to fight the science. A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petro- leum Institute, in which Exx^n (which hadn't yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, de- scribes a strategy of providing "logistical and moral support" to climate change dissenters, "thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom." And that's just what Exxon Mo- bil has done: Lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics. The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't ac- tually engaged in climate re- search. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects. But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-^ing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said- she-said conventions of "bal- anced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major news- papers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indi- rect financial support from Exxon Mobil — about the same amount of attention as the sci- entific consensus, supported by thousands of independent re- searchers. Has Exxon Mobil's war on cli- mate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most govern- ments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it's not clear that poli- cies would have been any bet- ter even if Exxon Mobil had act- ed more responsibly. But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of ac- tion to limit global warming be- came even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good sci- ence. And that, not the pay- check, is the real scandal of Raymond's reign as Exxon Mo- bil's chief executive.