http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf

By 1997, scientific understanding that human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases were causing global warming led to the Kyoto Protocol, in which the majority of the world’s industrialized nations committed to begin reducing their global warming emissions on a specified timetable. In response to both the strength of the scientific evidence on global warming and the governmental action pledged to address it, leading oil companies such as British Petroleum, Shell, and Texaco changed their stance on climate science and abandoned the Global Climate Coalition.30 ExxonMobil chose a different path. In 1998, ExxonMobil helped create a small task force calling itself the “Global Climate Science Team” (GCST). Members included Randy Randol, ExxonMobil’s senior environmental lobbyist at the time, and Joe Walker, the public relations representative of the American Petroleum Institute.31 One member of the GCST task force, Steven Milloy, headed a nonprofit organization called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which had been covertly created by the tobacco company Philip Morris in 1993 to manufacture uncertainty about the health hazards posed by secondhand smoke.32