Bellicose actor Alec Baldwin may be an enemy of the right wing with his criticisms and impersonations of President Trump, but no group has infuriated the left more than all-caps ALEC and its far-right political dealings.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has pushed a conservative agenda within state governments for 45 years, but it’s only within the past decade or so that ALEC emerged as a polarizing political force and household name drafting legislation on topics from the environment and taxes to hot-button issues like gun rights and immigration.

Placing the spotlight on ALEC — coupled with boycott threats — led to a lot of major companies to cut their ties, including many oil and gas companies. The latest to pull out is the nation’s biggest energy juggernaut, Exxon Mobil, which said it opted to discontinue its membership when it expired at the end of June.

A sharper rift within ALEC was exposed in December when members such as the conservative Heartland Institute pushed a resolution asking the federal government to drop its stance that climate change is a threat to public health. The nation’s two largest energy companies, Exxon Mobil of Irving and Chevron of San Ramon, Calif., opposed the effort, which ultimately led to the proposal getting nixed, at least for the time being.

Within the past couple of years, both Exxon Mobil and Chevron have taken steadily stronger stances acknowledging the risks of climate change and implemented some steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from their operations.

Chevron remains in ALEC. A company spokesman, however, highlighted Chevron’s opposition to the climate change resolution last week. “Chevron recognizes and shares the concerns of government and the public about climate change and believes it would be more useful to focus on practical, cost-effective action to address climate change risks,” he said.

European oil majors that have large U.S. operations pulled out of ALEC years earlier. Royal Dutch Shell, which has its U.S. headquarters in Houston, bolted in 2015 over ALEC’s climate change denial.

Lately, as energy companies have shifted investments to cleaner-burning natural gas, energy companies are talking more about the need to cut their methane emissions. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas that traps considerably more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, helping to accelerate climate change.

Last month, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and others said they formed a new methane emissions consortium focused on reducing the release of greenhouse gas, called the Collaboratory for Advancing Methane Science, nicknamed CAMS. The announcement comes less than a week after an academic research report found that U.S. oil and gas operations are releasing far more methane into the atmosphere than the federal government estimates, hurting the case for natural gas as a bridge fuel to a carbon-free future.

In May, Exxon Mobil pledged a broader effort to reduce methane emissions by 15 percent worldwide by 2020. But that same month, Exxon Mobil’s ALEC ties were again highlighted in public.

At Exxon Mobil’s annual meeting, Ricky Brooks, a union representative who works at Exxon’s Baytown refinery, took to the microphone to argue that ALEC pushed for weaker worker safety and health standards to save businesses money. In addition to the saftey of workers, Brooks said, “Our reputation could be at stake.”

Maybe that was the last straw.

jordan.blum@chron.com

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