When the Exxon Valdez spilled more than 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, Exxon President Lee Raymond oversaw the cleanup and a US$1 billion federal settlement for the extensive damage to the coastline and wildlife. Afterward, he helped lead a 14-year legal battle that ultimately got courts to cut a $5 billion punitive damages award for business and property owners harmed by the spill to $500 million.

Along the way, Raymond denounced environmentalists as “extremists” and “ideologues,” falsely blaming them for exacerbating a disaster that investigators attributed to errors by the ship’s crew.

But Raymond’s most consequential legacy will be his role in spreading doubt about climate change.

Leveraging his scientific credentials – a Ph.D. in chemical engineering – Raymond, who died on June 9, 2026, at the age of 87, sought to challenge the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are driving global warming.

In a 2005 interview with broadcaster Charlie Rose, Raymond repeated his attempts to link present-day climate change, which is far faster and more severe than at any time in the geological record, to natural causes rather than human activities like burning fossil fuels.

“It has to do with sun spots. It has to do with the wobble of the Earth,” Raymond said before reminding viewers, “Look, I am a scientist.”

Raymond, Exxon’s CEO from 1993 through 2005, including after its 1999 merger with Mobil, made these claims despite mounting global evidence that burning fossil fuels was driving climate change. Exxon’s own scientists had produced some of the most accurate early models of human-caused climate change years earlier, showing how greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels worldwide would continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and raise global temperatures.

Under Raymond’s leadership, Exxon also helped........

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