MARIA BARTIROMO: Let me move on to some policy issues, because Hillary Clinton, Al Gore -- you know what's coming here -- more than 40 of the country's leading environmental and social justice groups are demanding a federal investigation of ExxonMobil, accusing the company of deceiving the American public, basically, about the risks of climate change to protect profits. What do you say to it?
REX TILLERSON: Well, the charges are pretty unfounded, you know, without any substance at all, and they're dealing with a period of time that happened decades ago, so there's a lot I could say about it. I'm not sure how helpful it would be for me to talk about it, particularly as we're leading up to some very important meetings that are going to occur in Paris, here in just a few weeks. I don't want to be a distraction, I really don't want this to be a distraction, there's some serious issues that need to be talked about at that -- at that convention. I think, as -- all I would say is that we were very open during that period of time with all the research we were doing, we were spending a lot of time trying to understand this issue in the early days. We were very open with the work we were doing, most of it was done in collaboration with academic institutions and many government agencies, for us to understand this better, and I think as we began to understand that then people began to think about policy choices, we had a view on policy choices, which has not changed very much over the years, and we've been very open about that, so --
BARTIROMO: We should point out that you actually helped finance accurate scientific research about climate change, and yet Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Al Gore -- they're basically saying you and your industry are hiding the risks of climate change, just like the tobacco companies hid the risks of smoking.
TILLERSON: Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Again, as you point out, we've been very active participants in supporting scientific discovery. We funded some of the very early attempts to model the climate.
BARTIROMO: Right, I know that.
TILLERSON: And still do. At MIT we were the only major oil company that has been a participant in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, since its inception, and we still are a participant. Our scientists have peer reviewed the work done by the IPCC, we have authored many of the IPCC's reports and have published more than 50 of our own reports on subject, so we're hardly hiding from the issue.
