Since news broke that ExxonMobil’s CEO was president-elect’s choice to be the next Secretary of State, desperate #ExxonKnew activists, who continue to be all but absent in mainstream media coverage of the nomination, have been desperately trying to get media to loop them into the story. Unable to accomplish that on the merits, though, they’ve shifted to a new strategy: trot out people with famous last names to see if they can finally move the needle in their direction.

Enter: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. To kick off his media tour, RFK Jr. sent a petition yesterday through his group WaterKeeper Alliance to the EPA asking it to end all contracts it has with ExxonMobil because of “misinformation spread over a period of many years…denying the very existence of climate change.” He then appeared on a CNN segment on the Rex Tillerson nomination to rehash these same tired #ExxonKnew talking points.

So let’s take a moment to look at his claims in both the petition and the CNN segment, and then provide the facts.

RFK Jr. Claim: “They’ve had a 50-year propaganda campaign. Exxon has known about global warming since the 1970’s and that it was going to raise the temperature six degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This is the end of the planet and they knew it. They had 16,000 scientists that knew more about the fate of the carbon atom than any company or government institution in the world.”

FACT: RFK Jr. is, of course, referring to the Exxon hit pieces written by InsideClimate News and the Columbia School of Journalism – both funded by the Rockefellers – which claimed that Exxon somehow knew about climate change in the 1970s and 1980s, before the world’s top scientists had come to any firm conclusions, and then hid that research from the public. This claim has been so thoroughly debunked it’s surprising that they’re even still pushing it.

First, as EID’s video clearly shows, InsideClimate News and Columbia School of Journalism cherry-picked some facts, and ignored others, to produce a completely distorted view of the company’s work on climate change. To provide just one example, InsideClimate claims ExxonMobil’s 1982...