Exxon Mobil is accusing the Rockefeller family of masterminding a conspiracy against the company on climate change. New York Times reporter John Schwartz tells the story.

LAKSHMI SINGH, HOST:

Oil and gas giant ExxonMobil is accusing one of America’s best known philanthropic families, the Rockefellers, of using their wealth and influence to mastermind a conspiracy against ExxonMobil. To find out more, we reached John Schwartz, a science writer for The New York Times. He joined us from New York, and I asked him to walk us through Exxon’s allegations.

JOHN SCHWARTZ: They’re saying that the Rockefeller family through funding lots of private organizations and encouraging attorneys general has been at the center of a network of activism that has gone after ExxonMobil both for its past research and its present statements and past statements about climate change. And they used the word conspiracy in saying it, and the attacks have gotten pretty fierce.

SINGH: It’s not unusual for them to use the word conspiracy or is it?

SCHWARTZ: It’s not the kind of language that you normally hear from corporations, but Exxon when challenged can be pretty tough. Now, the point of contention is over how much Exxon actually knew. There’s a whole hashtag and activist movement built around the idea that Exxon knew uniquely that climate change had catastrophic consequences for the planet and used this knowledge both to improve its processes and to plan its – for instance, floating platforms and stuff like that, but that it also fought climate change regulation and fought action in Washington by funding activist groups, by funding groups that would spread doubt about whether climate change is real or not to emphasize the controversy.

SINGH: How is the Rockefeller family responding to ExxonMobil’s accusations?

SCHWARTZ: You know, they’re very private people. I mean, Rockefellers have run for office, but they don’t generally go out and make big public statements about things. And, in this case, as they’ve increasingly come under fire, they’ve decided to fight back.

And so David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman who runs the Rockefeller Family Fund, they together wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books that lays out the Rockefeller family positions over time, how they’ve tried to work with Exxon quietly as large shareholders to get the company to change its ways and then talked about their funding and who they funded and why, what they’re doing is civic engagement and not a conspiracy. And so they are going out and, you know – and standing their ground.

SINGH: You know, John, your article points to irony in these claims because much of the family’s wealth actually comes from John D. Rockefeller’s founding of Standard Oil which later became ExxonMobil. So how does this generally – taking a step back – how does this generally square with the family?

SCHWARTZ: Well, first of all, they are fully conscious of the fact that Rockefellers going against Exxon is news in and of itself. And they hoped that the weirdness of that would propel the story, and it has. Look, they got in the New York Times, OK? You know, it’s – it is an attention-getting stand for them to take, but it is not a stand inconsistent with the way the family has been over the last few generations that they have been very big in conservation, environmental protection and very, very focused on climate change both in their personal work and their philanthropies since the ’80s.

You know, when they talk about their – like David Kaiser’s great-great-grandfather John D. Rockefeller and other members of the family I’ve spoken with, what they say is, look, he was a very smart person. If he were alive today, he wouldn’t be betting everything on fossil fuels, and he would be looking toward moving into renewable and alternative energy because those things are going to be the profit centers of the future. And he was always looking toward the future.

SINGH: That’s New York Times science writer John Schwartz. John, thank you so much for joining us.

SCHWARTZ: It’s a pleasure.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Early indications are that Black Friday will be healthy for retailers, But analysts say the Black Friday fever has broken. Almost all the growth in holiday retail sales are in online and mobile shopping. One in six holiday dollars will be spent online giving consumers more bargaining power.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

As I probably don’t have to remind you, today is Black Friday, when retailers traditionally begin turning a profit. NPR’s Sonari Glinton has been out with shoppers since he got up from the Thanksgiving table last night. He is now at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall in South Los Angeles where he’s been talking to people about their plans. We’re going to listen to a little bit of what they have to say first.

CLAUDETTE JOHNSON: I’ve been to Black Fridays many times.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: She’s a veteran.

JOHNSON: I’m a veteran.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: That’s right.

JOHNSON: I am, and I hated them. They’re crazy. They’re nuts.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: She got up at 3 o’clock in the morning and got TVs.

JOHNSON: (Laughter).

GAIL OTERO: Yeah, I’m being a little bit more conservative.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Why is that?

OTERO: Just not knowing what to expect in this new administration.

KAREN KEARNS: You avoid the crowds, you avoid the parking, the hassle, and you get – sometimes you get better specials online.

SHAPIRO: That was Claudette Johnson, Gail Otero and Karen Kearns. And Sonari Glinton is on the line with us now. Hey, there.

GLINTON: Hey, Ari.

SHAPIRO: Besides all the shoppers you’ve been talking to, you have been checking in with some economists and analysts. What are they saying about this Black Friday?

GLINTON: Well, we expect more foot traffic. The presidential election distracted shoppers, and so they’re coming back after that. The stock market is good, so that means that people at the top end of the scale will have more money to spend. And also you might think that this isn’t that important, but there isn’t a big blockbuster in movie theaters like last year when there were “Star Wars” that hit right in the middle of shopping season. So we expect malls to be packed and people to be standing in lines, but it’s not as big as it used to be.

SHAPIRO: Not as big as it used to be – why not? Especially when unemployment is low, wages are up, gas is cheap, seems like it would be a big deal.

GLINTON: Well, the election is one thing. A recent study by ShopTalk showed that people who are making less than $50,000 say that they’re going to spend less because they’re concerned about the election. Also, retailers are offering discounts literally that began at Halloween, so it’s become more like Black November. And also, this has been an unseasonably warm year, so folks haven’t had to invest in, you know, that heavy winter coat yet. And then finally there’s the online sales where shoppers are getting smarter about finding deals.

SHAPIRO: It seems like we hear every year that online sales, mobile sales are growing. Are they threatening to overtake in-store sales?

GLINTON: Well, 1 in 6 dollars spent this holiday season will be spent online, and that’s double what it was just a few years ago. Overall, retail is looking like it’ll grow between – about 3.7 percent. But online sales – they’re going to increase by 15 percent. So, Ari, people will still go out and stand in line and have fun, but Black Friday has kind of jumped the shark. It’s like “The Godfather” – the third “Godfather.” You know, it still has Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, but it’s a little different. And that’s the way Black Friday is going to be.

SHAPIRO: (Laughter) NPR’s Sonari Glinton speaking with us from the Black Friday crowds in South Los Angeles. Thanks, Sonari.

GLINTON: Always a pleasure, my friend.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Beekeepers are still losing honey bees to colony collapse disorder, though the crisis isn’t as bad as a few years ago. Scientists are looking at other kinds of bees to pollinate crops: wild ones.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

OK. Now let’s look at the business of bees. Much of the food on the Thanksgiving table depends on bees for pollination, like the apples in your apple pie, for example. Well, turns out, professional beekeepers have had a rough go recently because of something called colony collapse disorder. Some farmers have been using wild bees as Molly Samuel from member station WABE reports.

MOLLY SAMUEL, BYLINE: Joe Dickey picks apples in his orchard in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Georgia on the Tennessee border.

JOE DICKEY: Right now I’m just kind of lightening the load of these small trees so they won’t break.

SAMUEL: He bought the property more than 50 years ago, when he was 17, with money he saved from shining shoes.

DICKEY: We’ve got a couple of thousand trees now. We’ve got 16 varieties of apples – planted every tree with a shovel.

SAMUEL: One thing Dickey doesn’t need to do is rent honeybees.

DICKEY: I didn’t know I didn’t need to because everybody else was using them.

SAMUEL: The reason he didn’t is because wild bees already swarm his orchard. Honeybees aren’t native to North America. But there are more than 4,000 species of wild bees that are.

NICK STEWART: The first time I came here during bloom was eye-opening for me.

SAMUEL: Nick Stewart studies bees at Georgia Gwinnett College.

STEWART: It looked almost like the entire orchard was kind of on fire a little bit. It was smoking a little bit, like a faint black mist. Get up in there and you actually realize it’s not smoke. It’s just thousands and thousands and thousands of bees. And they’re all native.

SAMUEL: He’s working with his colleague Mark Schlueter to study how more farms can use those wild bees.

MARK SCHLUETER: What we have right here is this wildflower patch.

SAMUEL: Everything is in bloom and vibrating with bees. Schlueter says this is where the science is happening. The idea is to attract wild bees with these flowers when the apple trees aren’t blooming, so that when the trees do Bloom, the insects will already be here, ready to get to work.

SCHLUETER: You can see that they’re – just in a small area, you’ve already seen over a dozen species.

SAMUEL: Bumblebees, carpenter bees, a bright emerald green one with black and yellow stripes that’s a kind of sweat bee. There are similar research projects in other parts of the country, including at big farms out in California. But relying on wild bees isn’t necessarily simple. Different kinds live in different regions and pollinate different things. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all science. Diana Cox-Foster is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

DIANA COX-FOSTER: It’s not like you can just plug in a wild bee and expect them to be healthy.

SAMUEL: Still, relying on the wild bees is working for apple farmer Joe Dickey. This is his first year he hasn’t used honeybees.

DICKEY: It’s as good a crop as I’ve ever had. And I think maybe that’s due to not as much frost, plus the pollination, you know. But I’m real pleased with my crop this year.

SAMUEL: The scientists say this research isn’t about replacing honeybees. It’s about helping the insects out, having a backup plan and supporting the wildlife that’s been here all along. For NPR News, I’m Molly Samuel in McCaysville, Ga.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.