Reply to Comment on ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)’ Supran and Oreskes (2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 084019)

ExxonMobil Corp Vice President Vijay Swarup’s criticisms of our 2017 study (2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 084019), which demonstrated that ExxonMobil misled the public about climate change, are misleading and incorrect. Thanks in part to his feedback, we can now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp have all, variously, misled the public. We introduce new evidence that by the early 1980s, more than a decade before Mobil launched a vast advertising campaign to attack climate science and its implications, they were already explicitly aware of the potential for their products to cause dangerous global warming. We also observe that part of the comment is based on material provided by a contributor recruited and paid by ExxonMobil Corp, in our opinion as part of a product defense strategy. The comment does not disclose that. This is a case in point of what we argue is misleading behavior documented in our original study.