Having failed last year to discredit the International Panel on Climate Change, the Fraser Institute is hoping to have better luck brainwashing today’s youth. The ExxonMobil-funded organization has developed a global-warming booklet for distribution to high school students and teachers across Canada.

Allegedly aimed at “helping them understand the issue and make their own decisions about what actions are needed,” the manuscript was compiled by rookie scientists and retirees with strong ties to oil and gas pressure groups.

At the risk of sounding like the proverbial Grinch, I fear the British Columbia government’s new carbon tax is just going to punish the victims of global warming while letting the perpetrators go unscathed and doing nothing to mitigate climate change.

The government is still subsidizing oil and gas exploration, along with highway and pipeline construction, which is precisely the kind of favored treatment for oil companies and auto manufacturers that got into this fix in the first place.

HOUSTON - Exxon Mobil Corp. posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company -- $40.6 billion in 2007 -- as the world's largest publicly traded oil company benefited from historic crude prices at year's end.

Exxon also set a U.S. record for the biggest quarterly profit, posting net income of $11.7 billion for the final three months of 2007, besting its own mark of $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.

ExxonMobil, the largest publicly traded oil company in the world, is set to announce their largest annual earnings ever. Which also means ExxonMobil will break their own record set last year as the most money ever made by a company in US history.

CNN Money is reporting that ExxonMobil will announce next week $10.37 billion in earnings for the fourth quarter - a paltry $111 million a day.

Aides and staffers of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney are listed among the principals of a new Astroturf group set up last fall to deny the science of global warming.

The new group advertises itself as the American Environmental Coalition - "working to keep America beautiful, strong and prosperous." But the sole focus of its expensive website is to question the science of climate change. As for its outreach activities, the AEC seems intent only on attacking Romney's presidential competitor John McCain, the Republican candidate with the best record on responding to climate change.