Tillerson, Rex
promoted to primary, note outlier:
see 2
capt 118
see climate lawsuits
==
extraction: rex: "we're in the depletion business"
===
Former Mobil Oil VP's Scathing Open Letter to ExxonMobil CEO Who Is Suing to Stop Fracking Water Tank Near His $5 Million Texas Mansion
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 2/28/2014,
As we discussed during Tuesday's Green News Report, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, the most profitable corporation in the history of civilization, doesn't mind fracking --- nor the health concerns and property devaluation that come with it --- near your house.
But now he's suing to stop it near his house...or, rather, suing to stop the construction of a 15-story water tower, to be used for fracking, near his $5 million, 83-acre mansion and ranch in Bartonville, Texas.
It will "create a constant and unbearable nuisance to those that live next to it," the lawsuit contends, charging that water used for fracking will lead to "traffic with heavy trucks" that, Tillerson's attorney says, "devalues his property."
"Poor" fellow. Hope he wins the suit.
But, if not, as former Mobil Oil Corporation Executive Vice President Louis W. Allstadt points out in a scathing open letter to Tillerson sent on Tuesday, he can always afford to move away...unlike most of the less fortunate victims of fracking around the nation.
After more than 30 years at Mobil (and six months at ExxonMobil under Tillerson, after the two companies merged), Allstadt went on to become a foe of fracking and a vocal proponent of climate change action.
"No one should have to live near well pads, compression stations, incessant heavy truck traffic, or fracking water towers, nor should they have their water or air contaminated," Alstadt writes in his letter to Tillerson, who is otherwise a champion of fracking when its not in his own backyard. "You and I love the places where we live, but in the end, if they are ruined by fracking or frack water tanks, we can afford to pack up and go someplace else. However, many people can't afford to move away when they can no longer drink the water or breathe the air because they are too close to one of your well pads or compressor stations."
Read Alstadt's full letter to Tillerson below. Oh, and thank you for speaking up, Mr. Alstadt...
Open Letter to Rex Tillerson,
Chairman, ExxonMobil
From Lou Allstadt
Dear Rex,
We have never met, but I worked for your company for six months immediately after the ExxonMobil merger, the implementation of which I coordinated from the Mobil side. That was after thirty years with Mobil Oil Corporation, where just prior to the merger I had been an Executive Vice President and Operating Officer for Exploration and Producing in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. I now live in upstate New York.
For the past five years, I have been actively trying to keep your company and the rest of the industry from fracking here. I understand from several press articles that you have fracking issues of your own, with a fracking water tower and truck traffic possibly detracting from your view and the value of your home.
In response to the prospect of fracking ruining our communities, many New York towns have passed zoning laws that prohibit heavy industry, including any activities associated with drilling for oil and gas. Those laws, along with very little prospect for economic gas production in New York, mean that we probably will not have to look at fracking water towers, let alone live next to fracking well pads. I say probably, because your industry is still fighting those zoning laws in the courts.
Ironically, your reasoning at the Bartonville, Texas town council meetings is virtually identical to the reasoning that I and many other citizens used to convince our local town councils to pass laws that prohibit the very problem you have encountered, plus all of the other infrastructure and waste disposal issues associated with fracking.
No one should have to live near well pads, compression stations, incessant heavy truck traffic, or fracking water towers, nor should they have their water or air contaminated. You and I love the places where we live, but in the end, if they are ruined by fracking or frack water tanks, we can afford to pack up and go someplace else. However, many people can’t afford to move away when they can no longer drink the water or breathe the air because they are too close to one of your well pads or compressor stations.
My efforts to prevent fracking started over water --- not the prospect of having to see a water tank from my home, but rather regulations that would allow gas wells near our sources of drinking water, in addition to well pads next to our homes, schools, hospitals and nursing homes. These issues are legitimate, but they are localized. I am now much more concerned with the greenhouse gas impacts of fossil fuels in general, and particularly the huge impact of methane emissions from natural gas production and transportation. These are global problems that local zoning cannot protect against. Only a major shift toward renewable energy sources can begin to mitigate their catastrophic climate impacts.
Before closing, I should explain why I have referred to ExxonMobil as "your company."
For several years after retiring I thought of ExxonMobil as "my company." I thought that the company’s rigor and discipline in investing in sound projects was as good as it gets, and ExxonMobil was my largest single investment. I no longer own any shares of ExxonMobil or any other fossil fuel company. I would prefer to be an early investor in alternative energy for the 21st century rather than hanging on to dwindling prospects for investments in 19th and 20th century fossil fuels.
It is time that ExxonMobil started shifting away from oil and gas, and toward alternatives --- both for environmental reasons and to protect the long-term viability of the company. Many large energy producers and consumers, including ExxonMobil, are building a carbon fee into their long-term planning assumptions. Actively supporting the phase-in of a carbon fee would be one way to move the company into the 21st century. Recognizing that methane emissions disqualify natural gas as a "bridge fuel" is another.
Good luck with that fracking water tank. I hope you don’t have to move, and also that you will help a lot of other people stay in the homes they love.
Regards,
Lou Allstadt
https://bradblog.com/?p=10519
===
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/rex-tillerson-has-been-misleading-public-about-dangers-fracking-years
...
. It worked. With help from sympathetic (and largely conservative) media outlets and a barrage of propaganda from industry front groups like “Energy in Depth,” the industry was able to brand the victims as liars and charlatans. “Their water was always like that” became a meme—a “sciencey” explanation that let the industry off the hook and blamed the victims. Each new case got the same treatment, and with oil industry PR money behind it, much of the nation believed it.
Central to the oil industry’s branding of fracking as a clean source of energy is the claim that “there’s never been one case of water pollution from fracking.”Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exon (and now Secretary of State) looked straight into the camera and proclaimed in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2013 that after “a million data points,” there had “never been a verifiable case of fracking polluting drinking water.” The claim was patently false. At that point we knew aquifers had been polluted in Dimock Pa, Pavilion Wyoming and Parker Country Texas. Texas, Colorado, Wyoming resulting in dozens of water wells being polluted. Testing in all three cases pointed to gas extraction.
2015 tillerson:
https://insideclimatenews.org/carbon-copy/05112015/exxon-ceo-addresses-allegations-it-mislead-public-about-climate-science
The top executive at ExxonMobil Corp. spoke out Wednesday for the first time to deny charges that the company had misled the public for years about its early understanding of the risks of climate change.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," said Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's chairman, president and chief executive officer.
At issue is how Exxon [NYSE:XOM] handled early warnings about the risks of the greenhouse effect that its own researchers presented to the company's top management starting nearly 40 years ago, as described in recent reporting by InsideClimate News and others.
Tillerson said the company does not want the matter to become a "distraction" as talks on a global climate treaty are about to conclude.
"They're dealing with a period of time that happened decades ago," he said. "I'm not sure how helpful it would be for me to talk about it, particularly as we're leading up to somevery 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."
ICN's eight-month investigation assembled details of Exxon's early understanding of the emerging science of climate change, casting a new light on the company's subsequent campaign to postpone aggressive climate policies by sowing public doubt about the science. A separate investigation by a team from the Los Angeles Times and the Columbia Journalism School reached similar conclusions.
After reading those news articles, which were based largely on internal Exxon documents from the 1970s and 1980s, several members of Congress, as well as all three Democratic candidates for president, asked the Justice Department to investigate.
Members of Congress have also asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into the matter. So have climate leaders such as former vice president Al Gore, scholars including Naomi Oreskes of Harvard and Robert Brulle of Drexel University, and the heads of 40 prominent environmental and social justice advocacy groups.
Tillerson went to a friendly venue, Fox Business News, to lay out his response. He called the charges "pretty unfounded, you know without any substance at all."
ICN's series on Exxon's early research into global warming showed that the company was at the forefront of climate change research as early as 1978, long before the general public was aware of the looming crisis. Its cutting-edge research helped confirm the emerging consensus that burning fossil fuels would warm the climate, posing significant risks to the company and eventually to civilization. Exxon later pivoted to the forefront of climate denial, manufacturing public doubt about the need for urgent action.
Tillerson did not dispute that Exxon had led the early science, just as ICN described.
"We were spending a lot of time trying to understand this issue in the early days," he said. "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, and 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."
Tillerson did not go into Exxon's well-documented history of support for a network of lobbyists, advocates and faux experts who have been accused by mainstream scientists of a running a long campaign of misinformation.
Nor did he address whether Exxon had adequately disclosed the material risks of climate change to its own business in regulatory filings during the time when its scientists were discussing those risks in detail with top management.
Outlining Exxon's view of the future of energy, he made no mention of the climate implications of continued reliance on fossil fuels.
"I do think that we are have been blessed with an enormous resource opportunity in this country," he said, "and the industry has seized that opportunity with this energy transformation that has occurred over the last roughly five years. You know we've moved from an era of energy scarcity where we were more concerned about sourcing our supply from countries around the world, some of which we knew were going to be unstable from time to time. Now we've moved to an era of energy abundance.And I think the forward-looking people will be looking at how do we take this era of energy abundance now and secure our energy future from an energy security standpoint for decades to come because the resource is enormous."
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/12/climate-exxon-mobil-new-york-court/
...THE NEW YORK State Supreme Court building is a granite-faced behemoth with wide steps, towering columns, and an ornate rotunda. It is a place where critical legal battles have been fought for nearly a century. Yet, as proceedings began in a modest second-floor courtroom on a gray, unseasonably warm afternoon late last month, the storied building somehow felt outmatched by the gravity of the matter at hand.
Two legal teams were crammed shoulder to shoulder around wooden tables. Spectators and curious out-of-state attorneys filled the benches behind them. Reporters hunched over their laptops. A tattooed court officer strolled the periphery of the room looking for rule-breakers. If you squinted, it could be any of the many high-profile trials that come through New York City and not — as many hope it will be — a historic test of whether the industry responsible for setting humanity on a path to immolation can be held to account before it’s too late.
“The failure of the international community to strongly grapple with climate change and the rollbacks under the Trump administration are leaving advocates of strong climate action desperate for whatever tools they can use.”
The case was the People of the State of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corp., which concluded last week. It is part of a wave of litigation directed at the titans of the fossil fuel industry making its way through courts across the country. “It’s only the second climate-change case ever to go to trial in the United States,”
rex
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08112019/exxon-trial-closing-arguments-climate-investor-fraud-new-york-ostrager
==
==
booktv 1119
Rachel Maddow, "Blowout"MSNBC's Rachel Maddow argued that the gas and oil industry are weakening…:{
}::{:{rachel bktv 11/19}::{
}:putin solve for pattern; nat gas makes $ but also divides/disrupts; Fitrash deal as middleman (not needed) 800m$ in one year 2007 [but can be siphoned and directed to diff purposes; gazprom itlself loses some $;:{
}:2006 Putin back Party of regions Manafort; ~ Orange Yulia Tymo; she undid sweetheart deal, got rid of middleman firtsh 2009; she was arrested under anti-corruption by prosecutor [appt by Yut, charged by parl?]:{
}:Firtash gets new deal 4 bill$ profit one year?! w/ help of US PR firm?:{
}:Yanu 180 on camp pledge to get closer to EU, putin offers 15 bill$ ukr, ppl don'r fall for it; 9/21/12 small # ppl grows fast Maidan revo 100k ppl; pots for armor; Cops harass, putin thinks cold will drive them home but no, embarass sochi olympics; 2/18/18? slingshots; KIa; ring of fire as defense; snipers, machine guns: we will give our lives to be free, not slaves; yano called off force (lost nerve?) and fled to east (regions safehouse?) :{
}:Biden had made mult visits, said wd protect ukr vs russia; said russia "withering" clinging to past, could not cope w/ new changing world; [150m ppl, biggerst geo, gdp less than s korea or italy; :{
}:Rudy says firtash a pal, client...resource curse: decline democ, follow $; FF corps make "ownm weather"; saudi: bettee to discover water; OPEC devil's excrement":{
}:Activ meas 2016 a wild pitch; why take huge risk (HC a russia hawk; she could easily find out] :{
}:putin desperate to get rid of sanction b.c petrostate; he and rex made deal for 1/4 billion$ (#1 in industry if not history):{
}:Rex hd no clue he wd be offered SoS (never met trump, thot they wanted advice on energy)}:
==
no lnx
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/books/review/blowout-rachel-maddow.html
Rachel Maddow Takes On the Oil Industry
By Fareed Zakaria
Oct. 30, 2019
BLOWOUT
Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
By Rachel Maddow
For those who have watched Rachel Maddow’s television show, the opening scene of her book will feel familiar in its eye for a compelling anecdote. She tells the 2003 story of a small new business in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that is about to be inaugurated by a head of state, in fact, “one of the most powerful men on the planet.” We’re intrigued. It turns out the business is a gas station. What’s going on? Four paragraphs later, we learn that the mystery man is Vladimir Putin, who is publicizing one of a string of American gas stations acquired by the Russian oil giant Lukoil. Having piqued your interest, Maddow now broadens her narrative and explains why this anecdote is an apt illustration of the book’s larger point — the centrality and influence of the oil and gas industry.
“Blowout” is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. While she is clearly animated by a concern about climate change, Maddow mostly describes the political consequences of an industry that has empowered some of the strangest people in the United States and the most unsavory ones abroad. It is “essentially a big casino,” she writes, “that can produce both power and triumphant great gobs of cash, often with little regard for merit.”
How much cash? Maddow tells the incredible, depressing story of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the long-serving dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a country that saw its oil revenues grow from $2.1 million in 1993 to a staggering $3.9 billion in 2007. Despite these billions pouring into state coffers, an NGO observed in 2009, “77 percent of the population lives in poverty, 35 percent die before the age of 40 and 57 percent lack access to safe water.”
But life at that time is good for Teodoro, who owns a $100 million house in Paris, a $30 million beach house in Malibu, a $7 million vacation home in South Africa, one of the world’s largest yachts and dozens of racecars. When his drivers take one of Teodoro’s many girlfriends shopping, they are given a shoe box filled with up to $80,000 in cash for a single outing. His bill for one spree at an auction house in 2010, Maddow notes, would have paid the entire annual wages of 3,300 of his countrymen, since three-quarters of them live on $2 a day. (Teodoro does now face international investigations and pressure on various fronts.)
While there are many colorful tales about villains, scoundrels and adventurers, the through-line of this book is the story of the rise of Vladimir Putin. The most important geopolitical consequence of the oil and gas boom of the last 20 years has been Russia’s development into a full-blown petrostate, Putin’s consolidation of power and his determination to use this capacity to protect himself and disrupt the West.
Maddow carefully takes us through the manner in which Putin asserted greater and greater control over Russia’s vast oil and gas resources. The key move was the takeover of what was then Russia’s largest oil company, Yukos, run by a brilliant entrepreneur, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. By 2003, Khodorkovsky had built Yukos into a $36 billion company, providing an estimated 5 percent of the total tax revenues of the Russian government, and was planning to acquire a competitor, Sibneft, which would make the conglomerate the world’s fourth largest oil producer.
:{
}:
This was not to be. By the end of 2003, Khodorkovsky had been jailed for tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement. The Russian government charged that Yukos owed $27.5 billion in taxes and penalties. In 2004, the company was sold in an auction that lasted six minutes. The winning bid — at the firesale price of $9.3 billion — was from an unknown company with an initial capitalization of $300. That company quickly sold Yukos to the state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, at cost. Putin now controlled some of Russia’s largest and most productive oil assets.
As oil prices rose, so did Putin’s ambitions,which reached a symbolic height with his decision to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, a Russian resort town with little snow and lousy facilities. No matter, that seemed part of the plan, because what ensued was an orgy of construction and corruption. In a detailed, thorough analysis of the project, the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov concluded that the Sochi Olympics had cost more than the previous 21 Winter Olympics combined, because Putin’s favored builders had lined their pockets with $25-$30 billion. A year later, Nemtsov was dead, assassinated just outside the Kremlin’s walls.
One of the book’s themes is the degree to which Western capitalists — bankers and oilmen — abetted Putin’s rise to power, cheered on his capture of resources and partnered with him no matter what he was doing to Russia’s democratic and capitalist experiment. Chief among them wasExxon’s C.E.O. Rex Tillerson (later the secretary of state), who was so cooperative that in 2013 Putin awarded him the Order of Friendship, one of the country’s highest honors bestowed on a foreigner. And Tillerson was a fast friend indeed. Maddow quotes from a 2016 conversation in which Tillerson explained that after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, he visited Russia and was surprised by his interactions with Putin and his aides. “The first question they asked me was … ‘Are you O.K.?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, I’m fine. Why do you ask?’ They said, ‘Well, we just wondered whether your government was coming after you because you’ve been doing business with us.’” Tillerson marveled that “they were more worried about me.” What amazing concern and consideration! For him, Putin’s aggression seemed far less noteworthy than his empathy.
Ukraine features prominently in Maddow’s account because it has become the central struggle between Putin and the West, and America in particular.She describes how Putin was outraged by American support for theouster of the corrupt and pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, which happened in the midst of his triumphant Sochi Olympics. Putin was already deeply hostile toward the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton in particular, for having given verbal support to pro—democracy protests in Moscow. For Putin, Western efforts at regime change could only be countered by his own attacks on Western democracies....
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/new-york-brings-new-fraud-case-against-exxon-lying-about-climate-change-and-ex
After a three-year probe and amid mounting demands that the fossil fuel industry be held accountable for driving the climate crisis, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood on Wednesday filed suitagainst ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil and gas company, for defrauding investors by downplaying the financial threat of regulations crafted to mitigate human-caused global warming.
"Big oil may finally face some consequences for its role in wrecking the climate," declared 350.org co-founded Bill McKibben. "The New York Attorney General is standing up for investors who may have been swindled, and indirectly for the seven billion of us who will suffer from Exxon's lies."
Wow wow wow. Big oil may actually face some consequences. This is huge news https://t.co/MGhDjBPt8D
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 24, 2018
"Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon—which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions. Yet as our investigation found, Exxon often did no such thing," Underwood said in a statement.
New York investigators, she said, concluded that "Exxon built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations."
The complaint (pdf) details years of troubling actions by Exxon's leaders—including former CEO Rex Tillerson, who spent more than 40 years at the company prior to his short-lived tenure as the President Donald Trump's first secretary of state.
The fraud alleged in today’s suit reached the highest levels of Exxon management, including former Chairman & CEO Rex Tillerson.
The law is clear: corporations must tell investors the truth. My office will hold accountable those who don’t.
— NY AG Underwood (@NewYorkStateAG) October 24, 2018
The state's probe, launched by Underwood's predecessor Eric Schneiderman, came to light in 2015 after the *Los Angeles Times*and *InsideClimate News* reported that the company had "conducted cutting-edge climate research decades ago and then, without revealing all that it had learned, worked at the forefront of climate denial."
Since those reports, Exxon has been named in multiple climate liability lawsuits brought by city, county, and state officials across the country as advocacy groups and the public have increasingly pressured politicians to hold oil and gas companies accountable for contributing to the climate crisis and lying about the devastating long-term impacts of dirty energy.
Exxon's "colossal climate denial operation"—which was also detailed in a Harvard study published last year—"significantly impacted how the climate change debate played out in business, science, and politics," noted Naomi Ages of Greenpeace USA.
And as Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, observed, "Climate change deception is central to Exxon's business model." The company pocketed immense profits while it "bankrolled a 30-year, multi-million denial campaign, manufacturing doubt about climate science when it knew there was none."
While Exxon continues to make money from oil and gas production, coastal communities are facing the mounting financial and environmental costs of the climate crisis. Wiles, like many others who support the ongoing litigation against fossil fuel firms, said Wednesday that Exxon "needs to pay investors they misled and the cities and states now facing massive climate expenses."
In addition to making the companies pay for the consequences of their products, climate campaigners are demanding a worldwide transition to renewable energy. Referencing the recent IPCC report that stated the international community must take rapid action to prevent climate catastrophe, Ages pointed out: "The stakes have never been higher in capping carbon emissions."
Leaked Draft Shows How U.S. Weakened Climate Change Wording in the Arctic Declaration
The U.S.-edited draft, obtained by InsideClimate News, shows how the Trump administration targeted climate actions. It's a strategy we could see in future meetings.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18052017/arctic-council-climate-change-rex-tillerson-donald-trump
The day before the Arctic Council met for its biannual ministerial last week, the United States requested six changes to the intergovernmental declaration that was to be issued—each of which weakened the language on climate change.
The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental body representing all eight Arcticstates, does not make policy, but the diplomatic work accomplished there is intended to trickle back to the countries and result in changes. An important part of that is the declaration issued at the end of each two-year chairmanship, which is signed by top officials from each country, to acknowledge the scientific and diplomatic work that was accomplished and to state the council's goals going forward.
The last-minute move by the United States to weaken the document can be seen as a test case for what we can expect at larger, more consequential meetings of international organizations dealing with global warming issues and policy as President Donald Trump rolls back U.S. climate policies and backslides on international commitments.
At last week's meeting, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson brought the United States' chairmanship to an end and passed the torch to Finland. When the declaration was released, it was applauded by some for its inclusion of language about the Paris climate agreement and climate change.
"There was a great deal of debate as to whether or not climate would even be addressed in the declaration," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said at a public event on Wednesday. "It is significant to note that not only was it addressed, it was acknowledged in the Fairbanks declaration that climate change is happening, that we're seeing impacts in the Arctic at twice the rate as in other places, and it is attributable to emissions."
Whit Sheard of the Circumpolar Conservation Union, an observer to the council, said he was relieved to see the final text. "I thought it was pretty impressive," he said.
But those in the negotiations know how much more aggressive it could have been.
"Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the people who read the declaration will not have the benefit of hindsight and will think it's pretty good and we agree with that," said Jim Gamble, who represents the Aleut International Association, a permanent participant on the council. "There's an effort to move the climate agreement and sustainable development goals forward. But for those of us who are involved in the whole negotiation, we know at various times there was stronger language."
Behind the scenes, it had been a mad dash to get the declaration finalized.
The group of negotiators—which includes representatives from each of the Arctic countries and from six indigenous groups that are permanent participants on the council—had planned to meet for an hour on May 10 to finalize grammar and other trivial changes.
But on May 9, the negotiators received a new version of the declaration from the United States that asked for six changes—all downplaying climate risks, the need for the Paris treaty or ambitious renewable energy goals. Negotiators spent a long morning huddled around a table, working line-by-line through the document projected on a screen. The other nations challenged the U.S. on every point, often joined by the indigenous groups.
Because the negotiation process is closed to the public—and even to the groups with observer status at the Arctic Council—draft versions of the declaration are confidential. InsideClimate News obtained a copy of the May 9 version, with track-change suggestions by the State Department's acting assistant secretary, Judith Garber. ICN spoke with multiple sources who were part of the negotiations. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidentiality of the talks.
The Changes
The Arctic Council is a consensus body, and its declarations are hammered out over a series of negotiations. As the outgoing chair country, the United States under President Obama wrote the first draft.
The Fairbanks Declaration was the result of three negotiations—in Juneau in mid-March, in New York in April, and on May 10, the day before the ministerial.
After the meeting in New York, the general consensus was that the document was largely finalized—until the changes from the United States arrived on May 9.
It was like the United States "just dropped a bomb on a multilateral forum at the last minute," said one council delegate. "I don't think any of us were mentally prepared that we were now going to be in a make it or break it situation."
The first change that the United States proposed fell near the end of the preamble and had to do with the great elephant in the room at any climate-related talks the U.S. is now involved in: the Paris climate agreement. Trump's policies would all but ensure the U.S. would miss its Paris pledges, and the president's advisers have been caught up in an internal struggle over whether to leave the treaty or simply backslide on the country's commitments.
The version of the declaration that the countries had previously agreed on noted the entry into force of the Paris Agreement "for the parties to that Agreement" and encouraged its implementation. The U.S. objected to that language, and the final version reflects a softer approach....
5/17 AN
Over in the State Department, Rex Tillerson, who worked for 40 years at Exxon, the oil company that dangerously misled the world on climate change, recently signed an international declaration recognizing climate change, despite the many powerful climate change deniers in the White House.
==
at what point did exxxon promise to stop funding deniers/ still did it? rex?
==
http://www.alternet.org/environment/rex-tillerson-has-been-misleading-public-about-dangers-fracking-years
...
. It worked. With help from sympathetic (and largely conservative) media outlets and a barrage of propaganda from industry front groups like “Energy in Depth,” the industry was able to brand the victims as liars and charlatans. “Their water was always like that” became a meme—a “sciencey” explanation that let the industry off the hook and blamed the victims. Each new case got the same treatment, and with oil industry PR money behind it, much of the nation believed it.
Central to the oil industry’s branding of fracking as a clean source of energy is the claim that “there’s never been one case of water pollution from fracking.” Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exon (and now Secretary of State) looked straight into the camera and proclaimed in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2013 that after “a million data points,” there had “never been a verifiable case of fracking polluting drinking water.” The claim was patently false. At that point we knew aquifers had been polluted in Dimock Pa, Pavilion Wyoming and Parker Country Texas. Texas, Colorado, Wyoming resulting in dozens of water wells being polluted. Testing in all three cases pointed to gas extraction.
In fact, there are documented cases of fracking contaminating drinking water as early as the 1980s. An EPA report from 1987 showed that “fracturing the Kaiser gas well on Mr. James Parson’s property, fractures were created allowing migration of fracture fluid from the gas well to Mr. Parson’s water well.” Industry itself admitted that fracking polluted the well. During the 1990s when modern fracking technologies were being pioneered in Texas, widespread instances of pollution were acknowledged by Texas regulators.
But with enough people in positions of power and influence repeating it, the claim that there had never been a single case of fracking polluting drinking water became a “fact.” Media figures, oil industry officials, politicians, state regulators and gas and oil PR teams repeated the same story line: Fracking has been around for seventy years and there’s never been one documented case of pollution.
There were numerous problems with this story. First, modern slick-water fracking combined with horizontal drilling is a relatively new technology. Comparing the “stimulation” of old vertical wells to modern fracks with pressures up to 15,000 PSI and hundreds of chemicals is like comparing a 1960s rotary phone to today's iPhone.
Also left out of the not-one-case story is a clever sleight of hand with the definition of fracking. The oil industry defines “fracking” as only what happens in the horizontal section of pipe thousands of feet underground. According to this reasoning, the only way fracking can pollute drinking water is by migrating through thousands of feet of solid rock. Pollution from the vertical part of the well—where most leaks occur—or surface activity is not in this technical definition pollution from fracking.
Of course, most people understand fracking as the whole process of transporting equipment and chemicals to the site, drilling the well, extracting the gas and transporting it to market. Oil industry PR people are perfectly willing to use this confusion to their advantage. They can cite scientific papers claiming that “there has never been a case of fracking polluting drinking water,” and let the public believe they are referring to the common-sense definition of fracking as the entire industrial process.
Industry leaders like Tillerson know all this, of course. But they just keep repeating the same misleading claim. If enough “experts,” authority figures and media personalities keep repeating it, the big lie becomes a fact in people’s minds. And once it’s embedded, these everyone-knows-it facts are very difficult to dislodge.
An important part of the oil industry drive to control perceptions of fracking is demonizing its critics. Victims are portrayed as greedy fraudsters. Environmentalists are portrayed as hysterical, hypocritical busy bodies inventing scandals about a clean energy technology they should be celebrating. Filmmakers like Josh Fox, whose film “Gasland” shined a spotlight on cases of pollution associated with fracking, were subjected to withering character assassination campaigns.
The IPAA, the oldest petroleum industry association in the nation, funded a film a film to discredit “Gasland” called “Truthland.” It was a shiny spin piece that painted any case of water contamination as naturally occurring. The best known of these fracking-denial films is “FrackNation” by Phelim McAleer. McAleer has made a career out of making films depicting environments as hypocritical elitists and pollution victims as frauds and liars. A darling of conservative news outlets, McAleer has been one of the most effective proponents of fracking-has-never-contaminated-drinking-water meme. Other media figures like Alex Epstein and Ezra Levant have cashed in by writing Ann Coulter-style books popularizing oil industry talking points. Levant is famous in Canada for his shouting-head attacks on oil industry critics.
IPAA also fired up their own PR “news” outlet, Energy In Depth. In a memo announcing the new media group, IPAA stated the group’s goal; “EnergyInDepth.org: a state of the art online resource center to combat new environmental regulations,”. The venture was funded by major gas and oil interests including; BP, Anadarko, Marathon, EnCana, Chevron, Talisman, Shell, Halliburton and Schlumberger and Energy in Depth remains one of the main purveyors of the gas industry’s talking points regarding water, fracking and pollution.
When a reporter or member of the public asks if fracking pollutes drinking water, they’re likely asking if any part of the entire process contaminates drinking water. That’s logical since the entire process will be used as the nation moves forward with the planned fracked gas revolution. When the question is answered with a resounding, seemingly convincing ‘NO’, the reporter or citizen thinks no water has ever been contaminated by any part of the fracking process.
While industry has gotten away with this ruse for a decade, hundreds of cases of water contamination have become known. After a long fight, The Scranton Times got Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to count the number of letters it sent to residents confirming incidence of water contamination during their fracked gas boom. That number was 243. The Associated Press found at least four states had recorded water contamination also. One troubling fact keeps us from knowing how many cases have actually occurred. When a homeowner settles their case with the operator, they are required to sign a silence agreement that disallows them from sharing any facts about their case. Not only do we know hundreds of cases of water contamination related to the fracking boom have occurred, as it is today, we can never know how many cases there really have been.
===
ecowatch
Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey: What's Exxon Got to Do With It?
By Andy Rowell
Washington, DC is still reeling Wednesday with the news that Donald Trump sacked FBI director James Comey.
Ostensibly, the White House is saying that Comey's firing is all about his botched investigation into Clinton's emails. But everyone knows that is not the truth.
As Politico reported, behind the sacking is an "an enraged Trump, fuming about Russia." Two Trump advisors told Politico that Trump was angry about the ongoing investigation by the FBI into links between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
The Trump line that the FBI Russian investigation has nothing to do with it is being ridiculed in the papers this morning.
As David Leonhardt stated bluntly in the New York Times, "The president of the United States is lying again … First, it's important to remember just how often Trump lies. Virtually whenever he finds it more convenient to tell a falsehood than to tell a truth, he chooses the falsehood."
So why fire Comey? A blistering editorial in the paper argued, "The president of the United States, who is no more above the law than any other citizen, has now decisively crippled the FBI's ability to carry out an investigation of him and his associates."
The paper added, "By firing the FBI director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country's history."
The investigation could have had "potentially ruinous consequences for the administration." So Trump fired the man who could have been about to impeach him.
The timing is certainly interesting. As the Hill pointed out too, many people are questioning the timing of Comey's dismissal.
There may be other factors at play worth mentioning. Who is Trump meeting today in the White House? The president only has one publicly scheduled item later today and that is a meeting with Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia.
As the British Independent newspaper noted, "It will be impossible to separate the meeting from the unfolding political drama in Washington."
Before Lavrov meets Trump, he will hold a meeting with ex-Exxon boss and now Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.
On the agenda are Ukraine, Syria and "bilateral issues," according to the State Department. It is the highest level meeting between Trump and the Russians since he took office.
Also co-incidentally or not, tomorrow Lavrov and Tillerson will travel to Alaska to attend the 10th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Fairbanks.
The Arctic Council is an international forum that promotes cooperation among Arctic states and includes Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S. Under President Obama's administration, the U.S. position focussed on climate change.
Working together on the Arctic is ideal to help thaw U.S.-Russian relations, according to some.
Indeed, according to the Council, the meeting "will convene to review and approve work completed under the two-year U.S. Chairmanship to improve sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic."
But those two years have passed. Obama may have championed environmental protection, but Trump does not. Obama wanted to preserve the Arctic. Trump does not. As the U.S. hands over the baton of responsibility at the Council to Finland, the old order is no more.
Trump wants better ties with Russia. In turn, Russia wants Exxon to help explore for oil. There is no doubt Exxon wants Russian oil. Exxon's old boss is now central to the Trump Administration. And by removing Comey at such a crucial time, Tillerson and Lavrov can work on some smoke-filled backroom deals, without the threat of the FBI looking at U.S.-Russian relations.
Of course, much of this is speculation and analysis of an unfolding political situation. The Arctic meeting may not have been on Trump's mind, but Russia certainly was. And we all need to keep a watching brief on this fast-moving story, because no one knows where it will end.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07032017/exxonmobil-climate-change-research-rex-tillerson-ny-attorney-general-pwc
A high-stakes legal battle between ExxonMobil and the New York attorney general's office is roiling around documents held by the company's auditors. Those documents, usually dry disclosures that hold little public interest, could afford a candid—and perhaps damaging—glimpse into Exxon's private calculations of the business risks posed by climate change.
As part of a financial fraud investigation, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed Exxon auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers last August for climate risk assessments by Exxon.
Investors and the public rely on those disclosures to assess the impact climate change could have on the company's profitability. If they are incomplete or misleading, the public could be misled about investment decisions.
Schneiderman could unearth anything from a smoking-gun email to revealing discussions related to Exxon's posture on climate change. They could show a conflict between the company and PwC over whether Exxon was adequately calculating its financial risks.
The documents have the potential to be some of the most unvarnished records exposing Exxon's assessment—and perhaps reluctance to fully gauge—the risk that climate change posed to its business.
Exxon says the records it provided PwC for review are privileged—much like the communications between lawyers and their clients—and should be kept from the eyes of investigators.
A Manhattan judge ruled in Schneiderman's favor last year, saying the Texas accountant-client privilege law Exxon is invoking to block the subpoena carries no weight in New York. The judge ordered PwC to hand over the records.
Exxon disagreed and rushed to appeal that ruling. A hearing is scheduled for March 21.
Schneiderman opened his financial fraud investigation of Exxon in November 2015 with a subpoena to the energy giant for decades of records related to its history of climate change understanding.
Exxon turned over more than 1.2 million pages of records, then refused to cooperate. At the same time, the company went to court in Texas to block the investigation.
Nine months later, the attorney general followed with a subpoena to PwC seeking documents related to the auditors' work for Exxon. Records sought include documents about accounting and reporting of oil and gas reserves, evaluation of assets for potential impairment charges or write-downs, energy price projections and the cost-benefit analyses of complying fully with regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions....
http://www.ecowatch.com/tillerson-wayne-tracker-emails-2326376213.html
New York State judge on Wednesday ordered ExxonMobil to turn over a year's worth of emails it now admits it lost from an alias account used by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when he was CEO of the company—a "bombshell" revelation, according to a lawyer for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who's investigating the oil giant's climate cover-up.
Schneiderman's office discovered Tillerson's 2008-2015 use of the email alias "Wayne Tracker" to discuss climate change and other matters as part of its ongoing probe.
Exxon previously blamed the email loss on a technical glitch.
"Exxon has failed to produce management documents from critical time periods when Exxon is known to have been formulating and publicizing key policies and related representations regarding the company's resilience to the impacts of climate change and climate change regulations," Schneiderman said in a letter to the court, according to Bloomberg.
Justice Barry Ostrager of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan "ordered ExxonMobil Corp. to work with New York's attorney general to recover lost emails" and gave the company until the end of the month to produce the documents, Reuters reported.
Ostrager also "ordered Exxon to deliver sworn statements and records from its staffers responsible for monitoring the 'Wayne Tracker' emails, so state investigators could determine how they were lost," the New York Post wrote.
Greenpeace USA said the order was "a step in the right direction."
"Exxon has withheld information from the public for long enough. It's time for the oil company to come clean in the courts about what it knew about climate change and what it withheld from the public and shareholders," said Greenpeace USA climate liability campaigner Naomi Ages.
"Justice Barry Ostrager took a step in the right direction by asking Exxon to be transparent with Attorney General Schneiderman," she continued. "This country needs more attorneys general who, on behalf of the people, are ready to face off with one of the biggest polluters in the world."
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
Rex Tillerson used an email address registered under the name "Wayne Tracker" to discuss climate policies while CEO of ExxonMobil, according to a letter sent by the New York attorney general's office to a New York Supreme Court justice Monday.
In the letter, lawyers for AG Eric Schneiderman's office allege that Exxon did not disclose the existence of this false address in court documents and failed to provide correspondence from the account in its reply to the AG's subpoena investigating the company's public and private climate policies.
Exxon executives responded that the "Wayne.Tracker@exxonmobil.com" address, in use between 2008 and 2015, was "put in place for secure and expedited communications between select senior company officials and the former chairman for a broad range of business-related topics."
For a deeper dive:
The Hill, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, InsideClimate News
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http://www.ecowatch.com/climate-lawsuit-rex-tillerson-2322025689.html
tracker email foia
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14032017/rex-tillerson-exxonmobil-climate-change-scandal-eric-schneiderman-wayne-tracker
While he was chief executive of ExxonMobil, current secretary of state Rex Tillerson used an alias email account for eight years to discuss climate change and the risks it posed to the company's business, according to investigators for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
Those investigators say the company concealed the shadow emails despite a 2015 subpoena for Tillerson's communications issued as part of a sweeping investigation of the oil giant in connection with possible financial fraud.
Schneiderman's office disclosed the existence of the email account assigned to Tillerson on Monday in a letter to Judge Barry Ostrager, which accused Exxon of failing to turn over all relevant documents required by the subpoena.
Tillerson, whose middle name is Wayne, used an email address on the Exxon system under the pseudonym "Wayne Tracker" from at least 2008 through 2015, investigators say. The company has turned over a handful of the emails, but New York authorities believe a much larger trove exists.
"Mr. Tillerson used this secondary email address to send and receive materials regarding important matters, including those concerning to the risk-management issues related to climate change that are the focus of OAG's [office of the attorney general] investigation," according to the letter.
"[N]either Exxon nor its counsel have ever disclosed that this separate email account was a vehicle for Mr. Tillerson's relevant communications at Exxon, and no documents appear to have been collected from this email account."
The accusation comes amid heated and drawn-out court battles between Exxon and Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who are both investigating whether the company misled investors for years about the possible impact of climate change on its business.
Investigators became suspicious in the last several days that Exxon wasn't telling them everything when they came across a reference to the Wayne Tracker email account buried in 60 of the 415,000 documents Exxon has turned over.
Investigators also say 34 other email accounts assigned to top Exxon executives, board members, or their assistants also exist but have not been turned over, according to the letter.
The Tillerson emails as well as those from the other Exxon executives are relevant, Schneiderman's investigators say, because they have made multiple representations of potentially false or misleading statements to investors and the public.
"As the investigation has progressed, documents Exxon has produced from other custodians have confirmed the close involvement of these key management individuals in the company's development and implementation (or lack thereof) of its claimed risk-management policies," according to the letter signed by John Oleske, senior enforcement counsel for Schneiderman.
"This has only increased OAG's need for complete and transparent disclosure of relevant documents reflecting the role of these top managers, as OAG determines which witnesses to seek testimony from as the investigation proceeds to its next logical phase."
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Press corps blasts Tillerson for cherry-picking reporters
State Department invites right-wing outlet on trip to Asia, snubbing the regular pool.
By HADAS GOLD 03/15/17 07:09 PM EDT Updated 03/15/17 10:30 PM EDT
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The Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite the rules for media coverage reached a furious peak on Wednesday as veteran State Department reporters expressed outrage over Secretary Rex Tillerson’s decision to take only a reporter from a conservative website on his first trip to Asia.
“The State Department is the beacon of press freedom around the world. The message now to China in particular when he gets to Beijing is that press freedom doesn’t matter,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who is following Tillerson’s trip and broadcasting from Tokyo, said in a recent appearance on air. "Up until now, secretaries of state have made it a key demand that our press corps gets into meetings … that there be access for the media … A key component of foreign policy is being undercut by this.”
Tillerson’s move caught most of the media off guard, in part because he has more to gain than lose by courting the diplomatic press corps, which has enjoyed generally good relations with all secretaries of state going back to the Reagan administration. Indeed, of all the branches of the Washington press corps, the State Department's is widely considered the most staid and serious, the type who actually care about policy versus palace intrigue.
But those same reporters are now furious, frustrated and, in some cases, disgusted by what’s been deemed a violation of tradition and a public trust, with Tillerson’s decision to bring only Erin McPike of Independent Journal Review, a conservative news outlet which made its name with lighthearted videos featuring politicians and viral stories.
McPike has been with IJR for only a few weeks and doesn’t even cover the State Department: She’s its White House reporter and is often in the briefings. McPike won’t be acting as a pool reporter for the rest of the diplomatic press corps, meaning she won’t be sharing information about the trip with other reporters, which is what would normally happen if there were limited space for reporters and only a few were chosen.
"Is this really the message they want to send to the public, as well as other nations? Really? They must, on some level, realize that no one is fooled by the explanations,” said CNN’s senior diplomatic correspondent, Michelle Kosinski.
Mitchell and Kosinski are just two of many reporters who have strongly protested the decision, which also drew the ire of many Washington bureau chiefs and the State Department Correspondents’ Association....
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How Rex Tillerson's Aggressive Stance Towards China Helps Exxon and Russian Oil Firms
Steve Horn / DeSmogBlog
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022017/climate-change-lawsuit-donald-trump-children
A lawsuit filed by 21 kids challenging the federal government to slow climate change wasupdated on Thursday to list President Donald Trumpas a defendant, replacing former President Barack Obama.
In the lawsuit, originally filed in September 2015, the young plaintiffs have accused the federal government of violating their constitutional rights by knowing about the dangerous climate impacts of burning fossil fuels and supporting the development of fossil fuel production anyway.
The federal government under the Obama administration, along with fossil fuel companies, requested dismissal of the case, but a federal district court judge in Oregon ruled last fall that the case could proceed. Now, Juliana v. United States could go to trial as early as this year, possibly proving to be a check against the Trump administration's pro-fossil fuel agenda.
"I am hopeful that our case will reverse or prevent all damage our current president may inflict," Aji Piper, 16-year-old plaintiff from Seattle, said in a statement. "I hope that our trial may shed light upon the issue of climate change, and educate the American populace on the difference between real and 'alternative' facts."
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
In the coming weeks, notice of deposition is expected to be given to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, according to Julia Olson, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs and executive director of the advocacy group Our Children's Trust. A judge ruled last month that the plaintiffs could depose Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil Corp., if he was confirmed. Tillerson was subsequently confirmed
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http://www.newsweek.com/putin-tillerson-trump-exxonmobil-russia-secretary-state-washington-moscow-531590
Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, personifies two major concerns about the incoming Trump administration: conflicts of interest and ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.As the long-serving CEO of U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil, Tillerson has a close personal relationship with Putin, according to the latter’s business associates in Russia, who asked for anonymity because they still live in the country.
“Probably closer than any other American,” says one senior Western banker who has worked in the country for nearly 20 years and has met Tillerson frequently. “There’s no other private U.S. citizen,” says a veteran oil industry financier, “that could get Putin on the phone.” Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week Related: Trump’s business ties are already jeopardizing U.S. interests
Both men, the Western banker notes, are pragmatists. “The main job of any oil major executive is to book new [oil] capacity, and Tillerson has to get that done in Russia, and in Iraq, regardless of political differences,” he says. “And Putin knows that the main business of Russia is natural resources, and he needs Western know-how to get the oil out of the ground.”Exxon has been doing business in Russia for more than 20 years—but with Tillerson at the helm, the company’s Russian operations have expanded massively. The Texas-born oil man has spent much of his 40-year career at Exxon managing the Russia account. In his book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, journalist Steve Coll writes that Tillerson was selected to succeed Lee Raymond as CEO in 2006 because of his relationships with top members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.Those friendships seem to have paid off. In 2011, Tillerson flew to Putin’s villa in Sochi to broker a $723 million agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to huge untapped resources under the Arctic, in partnership with the Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft. In exchange, Rosneft invested in Exxon Mobil’s operations overseas.
Tillerson negotiated the deal with Igor Sechin, a former KGB officer who worked with Putin in the mayor’s office in St. Petersburg in the 1990sand who has risen to become one of the Kremlin’s most powerful courtiers. Putin has “received Tillerson several times for business discussions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement Tuesday, and in September 2012 Putin approved the Order of Friendship medal that he personally presented to the 64-year-old oil executive for his services to business. In 2014, Sechin told Rosneft shareholders that he would like to “ride the roads in the United States on motorcycles with Tillerson.”The Kremlin’s close relationship with Tillerson is not simply a cordial byproduct of a lucrative business deal—it is the very basis of Exxon’s business in Russia. “Anything to do with natural resources requires the personal approval of Putin and, to a lesser extent, Sechin,” says Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, who was the biggest foreign portfolio investor in Russia before being expelled in 2006 for exposing a massive tax scam by Russian officials. “They wouldn’t approve it unless they get something from it, strategically or economically.”
Other Western oil majors have run into major problems with the Russian state. In 2006, Royal Dutch Shell was effectively forced to sell a majority stake in the Sakhalin-2 exploration project to the state-owned gas company Gazprom, while in 2008 BP was pressured into dumping its assets after Moscow revoked its British CEO’s visa and the Federal Security Service mounted a series of raids on TNK-BP’s offices. BP was pushed out of the partnership, which was eventually bought by Rosneft in 2013.But Exxon has never has such problems—largely thanks to its government connections. The company learned an early lesson on respecting Kremlin power in 2002. Tillerson’s predecessor began negotiations with dissident oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky to buy a major stake in Yukos-Sibneft—at that time the last major privately owned Russian oil company. The talks quickly broke off when Khodorkovsky was arrested and jailed for tax evasion and his company broken up and swallowed by Rosneft. Tillerson understood that when it comes to Russia’s oil, the Kremlin is the only possible partner.“Exxon is too big to bully,” says a senior Russian lawyer who worked for TNK-BP in the 2000s (he requested anonymity because he still works in the Russian energy sector). “And Rosneft needs Exxon’s technical expertise because it’s running out of easy-to-reach oil.”
For instance, Exxon’s Yastreb-1 state-of-the-art drilling rig, located off the northeast coast of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, is one of the largest in the world, standing 160 feet tall. And the company’s Z-12 well at the Chayvo oil field set a new world record for extended-reach drilling, boring an 11,680-meter-deep well.By allowing Rosneft to invest in major Exxon projects abroad, the two companies have become deeply intertwined with each other, which “amounts to a kind of mutual insurance policy,” says the TNK-BP lawyer. “Rosneft is protected from raids from inside the Russian elite by its foreign investments, while Exxon is protected against…the kind of disasters that befell BP and Shell.”
U.S. and European Union sanctions imposed on Russia in early 2014 in the wake of the country’s annexation of Crimea were a major blow to Exxon—and Tillman was vocal in opposing them. The company had to suspend nine out of 10 joint oil exploration projects in the wake of sanctions—and in November 2014, Exxon applied unsuccessfully to the State Department for an exception to be made for the Pobeda drilling project on Sakhalin, which struck oil just two weeks before Exxon was forced to pull out. According to a February 2015 Exxon Mobil filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company lost up to $1 billion from sanctions.
In a gesture of solidarity with Russia, Tillerson attended the 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—in defiance of sanctions and an unofficial U.S. business boycott of the Kremlin-sponsored investors’ jamboree. According to the forum’s website, Sechin—who has been targeted with personal travel and financial sanctions by Washington for his role in Russia’s intervention in Ukraine—was also in attendance. Tillerson’s position on sanctions may lead to some rocky confirmation hearings. What might make them more heated:
The hearing will likely coincide with a congressional investigation into Russia’s role in the hacking attacks against Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee.
Related: Why Putin feared a Clinton presidency
Tillerson’s open friendship with Putin insiders have riled many congressional Republicans. Senator John McCain has called his Russian ties a “matter of concern.” Europeans, nervous about Russia’s aggressive stance in Syria and regular saber rattling on the eastern fringes of NATO, will also be concerned. Tillerson’s “vocal comments on withdrawing sanctions are clearly at odds with the global view about Russia,” says Browder. “Russia invaded a foreign country. Sanctions imposed in response to that shouldn’t be lifted unless Russia agrees to comply with the [cease-fire] Minsk Agreement.”Both Exxon and Tillerson—whose declared stake in company stock stands at $218 million, with a pension pot totaling a further $70 million, stand to gain massively from the end of sanctions and the resumption of business as usual with Russia.According to Coll’s book, Exxon Mobil sees itself as “an independent, transnational corporate sovereign in the world, a power independent of the American government.” Tillerson, both in attempting to gain exemptions from sanctions against Russia in 2014 and with deals signed directly with the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq in 2011, has gone against State Department policy in the name of his duty to shareholders. Many fear that his years-old friendship, both personal and professional, with top members of the Putin regime will bring profound changes to U.S. foreign policy.
Vladimir Putin and Rex Tillerson at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on April 16, 2012.
“You can’t have strong views one day to another and change them according to your job,” says Browder. “Putin has made his wish list very clear—he wants sanctions lifted, for NATO to remove its forces from areas bordering Russia, the repeal of the Magnitsky Act [sanctioning corrupt Russian officials] and compensation for the economic losses Russia has suffered from sanctions. I imagine at least some of those requests will be very acceptable to the new administration.”Read more from Newsweek.com:- How Vladimir Putin is using Donald Trump to advance his goals
- Did Russia help Trump win the 2016 election? The CIA thinks so
- Donald Trump’s Russia dilemma
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/19/rex-tillerson-exxonmobil-saudi-arabia
During his Secretary of State confirmation hearing, recently retired ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson came under questioning by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about his stance on Saudi Arabia's awful human rights record, a country which contains the biggest oil reserves on the planet and is a long-time ally of the U.S.
While Tillerson offered mild criticism of Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, LGBQT people, and others, several Senators found his response far from full-throated and said as much. A DeSmog investigation shows that Exxon has long been involved in Saudi Arabia's oil and gas industry. Not only did the company, through its predecessor Standard Oil, help launch the industry there and co-owned the country's first major export pipeline, but to this day it maintains deep business ties with Saudi Arabia and the industry in a variety of sectors, both there and in the U.S.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/19/will-rex-tillerson-come-clean-about-what-exxonknew-company-ordered
1/19/2017: Our Children's Trust, a legal NGO helping represent the youth case, posted that Rex Tillerson's deposition is being delayed while the case's lawyers meet to resolve a dispute.
Former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, is set to be deposed today by lawyers for a group of 21 young plaintiffs, aged 9 to 20, who filed a lawsuit claiming the U.S. government failed to protect their rights to life, liberty, and property by not taking action to halt global warming.
The deposition comes just one day before Trump is to be inaugurated as U.S. president — and a little more than a week after a Massachusetts judge ruled that Exxon must hand over more than 40 years of its internal research on climate change, denying the oil giant’s request for a protective order that would have blocked Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's subpoenas.
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https://business-humanrights.org/en/exxonmobil-lawsuit-re-aceh?page=2
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-indonesia-idUSTRE7676I120110708
WORLD NEWS | Fri Jul 8, 2011 | 5:01pm EDT
Indonesia torture case vs Exxon Mobil revived
By Jonathan Stempel | NEW YORK
Indonesian villagers who accused Exxon Mobil Corp's security forces of murder, torture and other atrocities have regained their right to sue the giant oil company in the United States.
A federal appeals court said on Friday that companies are not immune from liability under a 1789 U.S. law known as the Alien Tort Statute for "heinous conduct" allegedly committed by its agents in violation of human rights norms.
The 15 villagers contended in their lawsuit that family members were killed and that others were "beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked, and subjected to other forms of brutality and cruelty" amounting to torture in Indonesia's Aceh province between 1999 and 2001, a period of civil unrest.
A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said Exxon Mobil should be forced to defend against such charges.
Given that laws in civilized nations hold corporations responsible for lesser wrongs, "it would create a bizarre anomaly to immunize corporations from liability for the conduct of their agents in lawsuits brought for shockingly egregious violations of universally recognized principles of international law," Judge Judith Rogers wrote for a 2-1 majority.
Friday's decision reversed part of a ruling by the federal district court in Washington, D.C.
It is also at odds with a landmark ruling last September by the federal appeals court in New York, raising the prospect that the U.S. Supreme Court could try to resolve the dispute.
"The ruling basically says that corporations are not above the law," said Jennifer Green, a University of Minnesota law professor and director of that school's human rights litigation clinic, who submitted a brief on the plaintiffs' behalf. "When corporations have knowledge that they are aiding and abetting human rights abuses, they can be held liable in a U.S. court."
Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, said it is reviewing Friday's decision, calling the plaintiffs' claims "baseless." Indonesia's government has also opposed the lawsuit.
"NOT ABOVE THE LAW"
The villagers sought to hold Exxon Mobil responsible for having retained soldiers from Indonesia's military as guards for a natural gas facility in Aceh, despite knowing of past human rights abuses by Indonesia's army and that the contract would lead to human rights violations against Aceh villagers.
In its ruling, the D.C. Circuit also upheld the district court dismissal of claims under a different law, the Torture Victim Protection Act.
It returned the case to that court, where a jury could decide liability and any compensatory or punitive damages.
"We have fought these baseless claims for many years," Exxon Mobil spokesman Patrick McGinn said in a statement.
"While conducting its business in Indonesia, ExxonMobil has worked for generations to improve the quality of life in Aceh through employment of local workers, provision of health services and extensive community investment. The company strongly condemns human rights violations in any form."
Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the decision makes clear that corporations would be "as liable as anyone else" for violating international human rights norms.
DISSENT
Friday's decision puts the D.C. Circuit in agreement with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
It also put both courts at odds with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said companies are not liable in U.S. courts for violating international human rights law.
That case was brought against Royal Dutch ShellPlc by the families of seven Nigerians executed by a former military government. They accused Shell of helping Nigerian authorities violently suppress protests against its oil exploration and development in the 1990s. [ID:nN04244684]
The 2nd Circuit decision applies in New York, Connecticut and Vermont.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh dissented from Friday's decision, saying it would be "quite odd" for a U.S. court to allow Alien Tort Statute claims against a corporation based on customary international law, when no international tribunals would.
He also said the ruling could harm U.S.-Indonesian relations, and perhaps damage the war on terrorism.
Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush. Rogers and Judge David Tatel, who comprised the majority, were appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Exxon shares closed up 6 cents at $82.42 on the New York Stock Exchange.
The case is John Doe VIII et al v. Exxon Mobil Corp et al, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 09-7125.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; additional reporting by Anna Driver in Houston and James Vicini in Washington, D.C.; editing by Tim Dobbyn, Andre Grenon and Matthew Lewis)
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/trumps-pick-secretary-state-rex-tillerson-linked-human-rights-abuses-indonesia
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This week, Congress will consider whether to confirm President-elect Donald Trump's appointment for secretary of state. Trump's choice, former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson,has come under fire for his close relationship with Russia's Vladimir Putin and his lack of government experience. As Tillerson seeks to become America's top diplomat, another aspect of his past should come under scrutiny: his former company's troubling ties to allegations of torture and other grave human rights abuses in Indonesia.
Until recently, Exxon Mobil worked extensively in Indonesia's Aceh Province, home to one of the globe's largest natural gas fields. A company executive once said that for a time, Exxon Mobil's operations in the region were "the jewel in the company's crown." Back in the 1970s, Mobil Corp.—which in 1999 merged with Exxon Corp.—obtained exclusive rights to extract gas from the area and began a joint venture with the Indonesian government to process it. The company soon started employing Indonesian soldiers to protect its operations there. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, amid a war between the Indonesian military and armed separatists in the region, some of the soldiers working for the company allegedly detained, tortured, and even killed local Indonesian people who lived and worked nearby, according to a lawsuit first filed in the United States in 2001. Another lawsuit was filed on behalf of more Indonesians in 2007 and consolidated with the first.
According to the lawsuits, one plaintiff was allegedly shot in the knee by an Exxon Mobil security official while riding his bike home from a local plantation, where he worked as a laborer. When another plaintiff tried to intervene, a security official stomped on his head. A third plaintiff said security officials shocked him in the genitals with electricity and brought him to a pit filled with human heads. Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth of International Rights Advocates, says he's met dozens of people in Aceh with similar complaints. In response to my questions about the case, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil told me the company "categorically denies any complicity in any human rights abuses committed by Indonesian soldiers during an Indonesian civil war."
The Indonesian plaintiffs say top Exxon Mobil executives in Texas knew or should have known about the alleged abuse but kept the soldiers on board for security anyway. During the first few years of abuse outlined in the complaints, Rex Tillerson was executive vice president of Exxon Mobil Development Company, a subsidiary that develops Exxon Mobil's exploration and production projects around the world. He became senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp. in 2001 and its president a few years later. Exxon Mobil says Tillerson had no responsibility for operations in Aceh "during the relevant time period." Collingsworth says there's no evidence to suggest he was making decisions related to the retention of Indonesian soldiers as security.
But it's hard to believe Tillerson wouldn't have had some idea of what was happening in Aceh. The abuse was covered by news organizations—including the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal—as early as the 1990s. "There wasn't a single person in Aceh who didn't know that massacres were taking place," a former top government official in Aceh told BusinessWeek in a 1998 investigation. In 2001, Time magazine wrote that in Aceh, "people literally line up to tell stories of abuse and murders committed by troops they call Exxon's army." Marco Simons, a legal director for the advocacy group EarthRights International who filed a brief in support of the Indonesians in 2010, says it's troubling that some of the problems in Aceh happened while Tillerson was among the company's top executives: "Either he knew about it and condoned it or he didn't have sufficient control over his operations to know about what was going on."
After the first lawsuit was filed in 2001, the abuse allegedly continued for a few years, until a brutal tsunami devastated Aceh and essentially ended the ongoing war between the separatists and Indonesia's military. Exxon Mobil continued to employ the soldiers after that. In 2005, Exxon Mobil's shareholders asked the company to report back to them about security arrangements with Indonesia's military, but the company's directors objected.
In 2006, Tillerson took the reins as Exxon Mobil's CEO. The company continued employing Indonesian soldiers in Aceh, according to the 2007 complaint. "Defendants have refused demands to investigate, improve, or cease its security forces' abusive actions," the plaintiffs charged. Years earlier, Tillerson and other Exxon Mobil executives had met with officials in Indonesia; some, like former CEO Lucio Noto and former executive vice president Harry Longwell, had discussed the security problems in Aceh, but it's not clear whether Tillerson broached this subject during his meetings. In 2015, Exxon Mobil sold its Aceh assets to Indonesia's state oil company.
The litigation between Exxon Mobil and the Indonesian plaintiffs has now dragged on for about 16 years. A judge ruled in 2015 that the case could continue to move forward, stating that "the Court accepts as true for purposes of this motion" the assertion that "Exxon exercised substantial control over the activities of these soldiers." Collingsworth says his clients are still waiting for justice. "Some part of that is Rex Tillerson," he says. "He [was] the CEO. He could say, 'These people got hurt, the war's over, why don't we help them?'"
Collingsworth worries a State Department under Tillerson could intervene to side with big companies like Exxon Mobil in future human rights abuse cases. There's some precedent for this: In 2002, the State Department under President George W. Bush warned a court in the United States that allowing the Indonesians to pursue their lawsuit against Exxon Mobil could have a "potentially serious adverse impact" on US government interests. Now, Collingsworth said, the State Department has the power to determine whether his plaintiffs and witnesses can get visas to travel to the United States for trial—he adds that a trial date is imminent. More generally, he adds, the State Department can play a role in promoting rule of law in countries abroad. But if Tillerson, "the most prominent of all CEOs of the biggest oil company," is appointed, he says, it'll send a message to people around the globe: "The world is open for business—environment and human rights be damned."
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shareholder:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012017/exxon-shareholders-climate-change-rex-tillerson
Once again this year, dissident ExxonMobil stockholders have filed several resolutions with the company asking it to be more forthright in addressing the climate crisis.
Submitted months before Exxon's annual meeting in May, by a twist of fate it also helps set the stage for Wednesday, when Rex Tillerson, Exxon's former chief executive and Donald Trump's pick to become secretary of state, appears at a Senate confirmation hearing.
At the hearing, Tillerson's critics are likely to connect the dots between his stance on climate change as the head of the oil giant and how he would approach the problem as the nation's top diplomat, in light of the global climate treaty that Trump has opposed.
And that may mean Tillerson finds himself facing questions about the treaty's goals that shareholders have pressed him about before.
Most of the seven shareholder resolutions filed under Exxon's deadline in recent days resemble those the company vehemently opposed in recent years under Tillerson's leadership.
They ask Exxon to add a board member with environmental expertise; disclose funding of lobbyists and organizations dedicated to influencing climate policy; and to explain in detail how the company might align its business with a low-carbon economy.
Exxon is expected to oppose those resolutions, as it has consistently for more than two decades.
Dismissing one resolution last year, Tillerson told shareholders that confronting climate change had to be balanced against other objectives, like providing energy to the world's poor.It's an argument he has made repeatedly, and can be expected to be repeated in a new setting this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"It is a judgment of balance between future climatic events which could prove to be catastrophic but are unknown ... and the more immediate needs of humanity today," Tillerson told shareholders last year.
Over the years, the dissident shareholders have carefully built a troika of recommendations that are meant to box in the company and make it acknowledge the conflicts between business-as-usual and the Paris agreement's goals.
One resolution, offered last year and refiled in essentially the same form by New York State's pension fund managers, calls for Exxon to prepare a stress test of how the company would perform if emissions were limited to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, a key Paris goal.
A second resolution, filed by Arjuna Capital, a company focused on sustainable investments on behalf of it clients, asks for a report summarizing how the company will adjust. "A transition toward a low carbon economy is occurring and trends to reduce global demand for carbon-based energy are accelerating," it asserts. "A failure to plan for this transition may place investor capital at substantial risk."
A third, also from Arjuna, asks the company to return capital to shareholders instead of investing in development of high-cost oil reserves that may never be exploited because of reduced demand for fossil fuels.
"In a perfect world we would see a scenario where the company admits the problem, communicates its options and then implement those options in transitioning its business models," said Natasha Lamb, Arjuna's director of equity research and shareholder engagement.
At the shareholder meeting last year in Dallas, the open floor debate was dominated by arguments over the climate resolutions. Tillerson took the lead in urging votes against the resolutions.
Exxon's opposition to the shareholder resolutions has put it in a position of dancing around the Paris treaty's goal of keeping global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and striving to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Any warmer, scientists say, and the risks are intolerable.
However challenging the targets, there is a clear scientific consensus that achieving them means reducing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero over the coming decades. But Exxon shies away from that conclusion.
"Even among members of the global scientific community, including leading climate change researchers and nonpartisan think tanks, there exists significant disagreement over how to define or reach a 2 degree target," said a letter from an Exxon attorney to the Securities and Exchange Commission spelling out the company's opposition to one resolution.
That attitude, some climate advocates worry, colors the worldview of the man nominated to represent the country's climate policy.
"The key difference between his role as Exxon CEO and role of Secretary of State needs to be focused on what is the best interest of the United States and its people not just on the economic interests of a global energy company," argued Shanna Cleveland, a senior manager at Ceres, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable investing.
Under Tillerson, Exxon continued to be one of the most obstructionist oil companies worldwide when considering climate change mitigation, said Richard Ferlauto, a member of the governing board of 50/50 Climate Project, a nonprofit focused on increasing the climate awareness of publicly traded corporations.
Opposition to shareholder climate resolutions exemplifies that resistance, said Ferlauto, who served four years as deputy director for the SEC's office of Investor Education and Advocacy....
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http://www.ecowatch.com/tillerson-confirmation-hearing-2189183752.html
...The coy retort left environmentalists unimpressed.
"Tillerson is still lying about what Exxon knew about climate change," said 350.org executive director May Boeve, whose group organized a 200-strong anti-Tillerson protest outside the hearing on Wednesday. "Asked directly about the company's climate cover-up, Tillerson demurred and denied. We need a secretary of state who acknowledges that the climate crisis requires bold action, not an oil industry CEO who is dedicated to spreading misinformation."
Added Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law: "The universe of subjects Rex Tillerson knows, admits to knowing, or is permitted to speak to is vanishingly small for someone who would be the U.S. voice to the world. Listening to his hearing, it would be easier to conclude Tillerson is under criminal investigation than under consideration for secretary of state."...
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https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/12/trumps_war_on_science_exxon_ceo
...
RROLL MUFFETT: I’ll say that when the news first came out, I assumed it was a grim practical joke. As it became more real, our response is that it is irresponsible, and it’s unconscionable. It poses a threat not only to the planet, but to human rights. To put—to put the CEO of Exxon in charge of our negotiations on climate change, our negotiations on oil, on energy, on human rights, with countries around the world where this company has interests, where it has a track record of abuses, is patently irresponsible.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what is your personal involvement here? Why was—why were you subpoenaed?
CARROLL MUFFETT: You would have to ask Exxon that. Our best guess is that Exxon subpoenaed me because of the work that my organization, the Center for International Environmental Law, has done to expose Exxon’s history of climate research and its history of climate denial. Our research, published last summer, demonstrated that Exxon and its oil industry allies were actually doing climate research as early as 1957 and that they had been warned by no later than 1968 that fossil fuels were directly linked to climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what do you have to do?
CARROLL MUFFETT: We have filed objections to the subpoena, noting that the subpoena is nothing more than a fishing expedition, that I’m not a party to the case, and that if you look at the subpoena that Exxon has filed, it’s clear that it goes far beyond any issues in the case and is a clear effort to intimidate and suppress those who have criticized the company.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s interesting, because at the same time—and I want to ask Erich Pica this question, of Friends of the Earth—you have this questionnaire, Donald Trump’s transition team circulating a 74-part questionnaire at the Department of Energy that requests the names of employees who have attended climate talks over the last five years. From these subpoenas to a kind of—well, would you call it an enemies list?
ERICH PICA: Absolutely. I mean, this dates back to the red-baiting and McCarthyism. This is like—you know, the head of the transition team, Myron Ebell, who is head of the energy and climate transition team, he’s with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He’s been a funded ExxonMobil climate denier, and now he’s using that position to go out and find the climate change enemies list in the Department of Energy—and who knows how far it’s going to go into the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA? All these agencies that have something to do with climate change, you see both the appointees, the proposed appointees, as well as the transition team trying to undermine the trust, undermine the capacity of these civil servants, who are doing really good work on behalf of the American people, undermining their capacity to address what is scientifically proven and what they were doing on behalf of the Obama administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s back up, and let me get your reaction, Erich Pica, to the possible nomination. Donald Trump is not denying that he is his first pick but hasn’t actually made that choice yet, maybe kind of floating this to see how people respond to Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson being nominated as secretary of state.
ERICH PICA: I would say I agree with Carroll. At first I thought it was a joke. And then, you know, in thinking about it, Rex Tillerson should be indicted for corporate fraud and for lying to the American public, lying to the world, lying to their shareholders. And so, he should be strung up, and the company should be strung up, in the court of law for fraud. And instead, he’s being rewarded by President-elect Trump with perhaps one of the most important Cabinet picks in the U.S. government, the State Department, the head of the State Department. So it is kind of this interesting and weird Bizarro world that we’re now living in underneath—underneath Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, we’re reaching you at your home in Vermont. Has the snowstorm hit yet?
BILL McKIBBEN: No, just a little snowstorm this morning. It is beautiful, I must say.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about your thoughts when you heard that the Exxon CEO might be named secretary of state—or nominated? It will go—have to go to Congress.
BILL McKIBBEN: Yes, it will. And I think that there will be some opposition, actually, in Congress and across the aisle, perhaps, because not only has Mr. Tillerson been actively engaged in trying to slow progress on climate change, he also—and the reporting on this is emerging kind of even as we speak—he and his company are deeply embedded in the Russian oil business and is going to—I mean, conflict of interest doesn’t begin to cover the questions that are being raised by good reporters this morning.
I will say, I was perhaps a little less surprised than Erich and Carroll by all of this.I think that what’s going on is that the Trump administration has decided to drop all pretense. They are fully engaged in full-on climate denial, and they are fully clients of the fossil fuel industry.You know, for a very long time, the fossil fuel industry has wielded undue power in our political affairs, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. You’ll recall that it was Dick Cheney, who had been helping run Halliburton, the oil service company, that dominated the George W. Bush administration. But in this case, they have literally decided to cut out the middleman. And now, the world’s biggest fossil fuel company and, in many of the most recent years, the most profitable company on Earth, the biggest company the world has ever seen, is just basically going to be in charge of things.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it reminded me, back in 1953 and 1954, what happened when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was a white-collar lawyer representing United Fruit. First, in 1953, the U.S.—and this is all documented now—overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, on behalf of Anglo-Iranian Oil, the precursor to BP, and, the next year, moved in on Guatemala. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit at his corporate law firm and, on behalf of United Fruit, overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala. Your thoughts, Bill McKibben?
BILL McKIBBEN: I think that it’s a perfectly good analogy. But the only difference and the only thing that makes it grimmer here is that the damage that we’re talking about is going to be permanent. We’re at an absolute critical moment in dealing with climate change. The world had begun to get a tiny—not enormous, but a tiny bit of momentum going in the right direction. And clearly, the goal of the Trump administration is to stomp on that momentum. The president said—president-elect said yesterday that no one can really know whether climate change is real or not. That, of course, is absurd. Every climatologist knows that it’s real, and, increasingly, billions of people around the Earth know that it’s real, because they’re feeling its effects. But the most important player in the international scene on this question is now going to, at the very least, take itself out of the game and, more likely, try hard to obstruct real progress. This damage won’t last for decades; this damage will last for geologic time.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to turn to a clip of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson during an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012. He said fears about climate change are overblown.
REX TILLERSON: And clearly, there’s going to be an impact. So I’m not—not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It will have a warming impact. We believe those consequences are manageable. They do require us to begin to exert or spend more policy effort on adaptation. What do you want to do if? If we think the future has sea level rising four inches, six inches, where are the impacted areas, and what do you want to do to adapt to that? And as human beings, as a—as a species, that’s why we’re all still here. We have spent our entire existence adapting. OK? So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around, we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.
AMY GOODMAN: Carroll Muffett, your response?
CARROLL MUFFETT: It’s emblematic of the industry’s response for decades: delay, deny, deny, delay, and, ultimately, when the problem becomes intractable, say that we can adapt, and it will be someone else’s responsibility. I think the challenge is when you look at what adaptation means for millions of people living in coastal regions, living in river deltas that face unpredictable flooding, that face drought, that face starvation. I think that it is—I think it’s emblematic of a company and an individual who sees every problem as an engineering problem rather than as a social problem, an economic problem and a problem of human rights.
AMY GOODMAN: Erich Pica, let’s look at the appointments so far. You have Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, one of the major foes of the Environmental Protection Agency; Jeff Sessions, attorney general. We haven’t talked as much about President-elect Trump’s choice to head the Department of Interior, Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Can you talk about her and then this overall picture of his planned Cabinet that we know so far?
ERICH PICA: Yeah, I mean, he—his Cabinet nominees are the worst when it comes to understanding climate change and perpetuating climate denialism. Here we haveCathy McMorris Rodgers, who has a lifetime record with the League of Conservation Voters of 4 percent. She has voted or led to fight President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. She has wanted to auction off public lands to the highest bidder for the extraction of oil and gas and timber. She has supported Cliven Bundy, you know, the—and his group that took over Oregon in an armed revolt. She was one of 15 members of Congress that actually supported the takeover of the Oregon park. And so, McMorris Rodgers, she is aligned with some of the most radical anti-environmental, anti-climate movements here in the United States. And she is now going to—she’s been nominated to now run the Department of the Interior, which is responsible for managing 500 million acres of U.S. public lands. And so, Friends of the Earth and 350, many of us have said, you know, we have to keep fossil fuels in the ground, which means that the federal government cannot lease any more oil, coal and natural gas. And now we have an Interior Department official who not only doesn’t believe in climate change but wants to sell off those public lands to the highest bidder or the lowest bidder—I think she doesn’t really care; she just wants to sell them off—for the express purpose of extracting as fast as possible.
And this is a trend that we’ve seen with Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, the former attorney general—the current attorney general of Oklahoma, who has opposed each of the major rules that President Obama has tried to put in place to regulate climate change, provide for safer water and for public health. And now he’s going to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, if he’s not opposed.
You look at Sessions for the U.S. attorney general,and he has actually tried to squash the investigation that’s been spurred into ExxonMobil’s—you know, how they’ve treated corporate shareholders and whether or not they lied to them.And so, we can see Sessions gutting not only the Environmental Crimes Division at the Department of Justice, but also the Civil Rights Division. And what he has put in place is a series of appointees that will do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry to suppress the right to vote, to suppress people’s speech and to then give these fossil fuel polluters a free ride when it comes to their responsibility to both pay for climate damages as well as to cut their own production of fossil fuels.
AMY GOODMAN: The League of Conservation Voters, as you said, gave Cathy McMorris Rodgers a zero in its most recent ratings. Here, she is speaking out in 2015 in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline.
REP. CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS: We stand here very proud to have just voted for the 11th time in the House of Representatives to approve the Keystone pipeline project. We voted to approve more than 40,000 American jobs. We voted for energy innovation, energy independence. We voted to say yes to American energy.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Republican Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state. Bill McKibben, your response?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, look, Erich’s right: This is all of a piece, and the piece is that the fossil fuel industry is now going to be dominant in Washington, unless we can stop these people from being confirmed. And even if we can, they will find some others, the Trump administration, of the same vein. What I think we need to say over and over and over again is the era of any pretense is over. These guys now own, lock, stock and barrel, the policy that they’re putting forward. As the planet goes south, everyone will start to realize exactly who and why it’s happening. And in that sense, and in that sense only, there’s something useful about all of this. The era of any pretense that we’re working hard to both deal with climate change and help the oil industry and whatever, that’s over. Now we’re doing one thing: Federal policy is going to be all about helping the fossil fuel industry. And the results of that will be squarely on the people who are doing this. We will do everything that we can to slow them down in that process, but we will also continue, day after day, to point out what it is precisely that’s going on, because they’re breaking the planet. And as it breaks, we’re going to have to react in a truly powerful way going forward.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. Bill McKibben is speaking to us from his home in Vermont. Carroll Muffett is president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, personally subpoenaed by Exxon in a case in Texas seeking to stop an investigation into Exxon’s activities, led by the Massachusetts attorney general. And Erich Pica will be leaving us, president of Friends of the Earth U.S.A., and we’ll be joined by Joe Romm. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/12/do_exxons_climate_denial_trail_of
At the Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state nominee and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, he refused to answer questions about the oil giant’s long history of denying the science of climate change, telling Senators that scientific literature on climate change is "inconclusive."During the hearing, human rights concerns were also raised repeatedly. Tillerson refused to label Saudi Arabia a human rights violator, and avoided condemning Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte over thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out under Duterte’s so-called "war on drugs." We are joined from San Francisco by oil and energy journalist Antonia Juhasz.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to the Senate committee hearing for secretary of state nominee and former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. On Wednesday, Tillerson refused to answer questions about the oil giant’s long history of denying the science of climate change, telling senators that scientific literature on climate change is, quote, "inconclusive." Exposés by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times have revealed Exxon knew that fossil fuels cause global warming as early as the 1970s, but hid that information from the public and instead poured millions of dollars into PR efforts aimed at sowing doubt over the science of climate change. Tillerson was asked about these reports by Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine.
SEN. TIM KAINE: Are these conclusions about ExxonMobil’s history of promoting and funding climate science denial, despite its internal awareness of the reality of climate change, during your tenure with the company true or false?
REX TILLERSON: Senator, since I’m no longer with ExxonMobil, I’m in no position to speak on their behalf. The question would have to be put to them.
SEN. TIM KAINE: And let me ask you: Do you lack the knowledge to answer my question, or are you refusing to answer my question?
REX TILLERSON: A little of both.
SEN. TIM KAINE: Um, I have a hard time believing you lack the knowledge to answer my question.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: This comes as a Massachusetts court has ruled that ExxonMobil must comply with state Attorney General Maura Healey’s "Exxon Knew" investigation, halting the company’s efforts to quash the inquiry into what the company knew about the science of global warming. As he testified Wednesday, Tillerson was repeatedly interrupted by protesters from Greenpeace opposed to naming an oil company executive as secretary of state. Outside, about 200 people rallied holding signs reading "#EXXONKNEW."
AMY GOODMAN: During the hearing, human rights concerns were also raised repeatedly. Tillerson refused to label Saudi Arabia a human rights violator, avoided condemning Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte over thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out under his so-called war on drugs. Tillerson said he would advise President Trump to veto any attempt to end the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and said China should be barred from artificial islands it’s built in the South China Sea. Tillerson broke with Trump over the President-elect’s comment that it would not be a bad thing for South Korea and Japan to build their own nuclear weapons. This is Rex Tillerson under questioning from Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey.
REX TILLERSON: Senator, I don’t think anyone advocates for more nuclear weapons on the planet.
SEN. ED MARKEY: Donald Trump said it would not be a bad thing. Do you agree with that or disagree that?
REX TILLERSON: I do not agree.
AMY GOODMAN: Rex Tillerson also denied knowledge of ExxonMobil’s efforts to prevent U.S. sanctions against Russia, testifying he never personally lobbied against sanctions. That prompted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, Republican Bob Corker, to respond, quote, "I think you called me at the time."
For more, we’re joined from San Francisco by oil and energy journalist Antonia Juhasz. Her cover story for In These Times is headlined "Rex Tillerson Could Be America’s Most Dangerous Secretary of State." In it, she argues Tillerson spent his entire adult life working for a company that’s left a trail of carnage, from human rights abuses to the destruction of the environment, in its ruthless pursuit of oil, according to Antonia Juhasz.
Antonia, welcome back to Democracy Now! You were tweeting the whole day of the hearing. You watched it. Talk about what was most significant.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, thanks for having me, Amy and Nermeen.
I would say the biggest takeaway from this hearing is that there is no separating Rex Tillerson from ExxonMobil. And I think he made that very clear in the hearings. He took the position again and again and again, when being asked about questions around human rights, equality, ethics—he took the position of the corporation over and over and over again. In one very telling exchange, he was asked—you know, ExxonMobil has done business over the years with basically every of the most brutal dictators in the world. And he was asked, you know, "Is there a country you wouldn’t work in, you wouldn’t work with, because of issues around human rights and other abuses?" And he said, "Well, it depends on the contract structure and the rule of law." And then he was pressed again: "But what about human rights? What about other issues?" And basically he said, you know, "No."
And there’s a very telling quote from 2008 by a vice president of ExxonMobil, so this is when Rex Tillerson was CEO. And his vice president said, "In the pursuit of alternative energy, it should not in any way harm or distract from the pursuit of oil and natural gas." And I think you could replace "alternative energy" with just about any phrase to understand Rex Tillerson and to understand ExxonMobil. Oil and natural gas are paramount, and I think that is how we could understand what his position would be as secretary of state.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it was very interesting to see Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, going after Tillerson, particularly around Russia and sanctions. Did Tillerson lie when he said he didn’t, and he didn’t know of his company—although Bob Menendez of New Jersey held up the lobbying disclosure forms—didn’t lobby against sanctions?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, he certainly misspoke. So, I think what he was thinking—and again, this is the CEO speaking. So, we had the lobbying disclosure forms—
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip, so that it’s not me characterizing him.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: ExxonMobil and Rex Tillerson have met continually—
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia—Antonia—
ANTONIA JUHASZ: —on the issue of sanctions. And this question wasn’t just about Russia. It was also about Iran. It was also about other countries, which ExxonMobil would like to see the sanctions removed from. And so, the lobbying disclosure forms say, "We lobbied about a particular bill." It never says which direction did you argue. So, as is always the case with ExxonMobil, it will fight. It will fight. It will litigate. It will litigate. It will litigate. It will litigate. It will run you into the ground. And I think that’s what he thought he could get away with. But, of course, there also is a much broader record of what the objectives of ExxonMobil have been in these areas. So, in Iran, for example, where ExxonMobil has most certainly lobbied to have sanctions lifted, ExxonMobil, and Mobil, before it, for decades has led a group called—led a group called USA Engage, which entire purpose was to get sanctions lifted, first on Iran. Mobil ran advertisements in U.S. newspapers encouraging the lifting of Iranian sanctions. And that’s a position that ExxonMobil has carried on for decades—
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Rex Tillerson—
ANTONIA JUHASZ: —including under Tillerson—
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, Rex Tillerson—
ANTONIA JUHASZ: —working in countries in which there were—there are sanctions. So, ExxonMobil, under Tillerson, worked with Iran, Sudan, Syria, while the U.S. had sanctions against those countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Rex Tillerson denied he even knew what USA Engage was. But during the hearing, he denied—just to go back to him in his own words—or, to his knowledge, he himself or ExxonMobil lobbied against imposing sanctions on Russia.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Right. I think, again, that’s—
REX TILLERSON: I never lobbied against the sanctions. To my knowledge, ExxonMobil never lobbied against the sanctions. ExxonMobil participated in understanding how the sanctions were going to be constructed, and was asked and provided information regarding how those might impact American business interests.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could go on, Antonia, from there, his denial that he or ExxonMobil lobbied around—against sanctions with Russia? And then, you’re talking about these other countries.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, so, in Russia—again, I think what he’s trying to get away with is, "Prove what I said in the room." Yes, we have it documented that Rex Tillerson met with President Obama on Russia sanctions. That’s documented. And I think what he was trying to get away with, which he couldn’t, was, "Well, so, prove what I actually said in the room," which, of course, we can’t. We don’t have documentation of that. And that’s just him, you know, using ExxonMobil, the way he always has, which is to fight, you know, to the bitter, bitter end. They’re always referred to as a scorched earth company when you talk to communities and lawyers who have to go against them. But what we know is that Rex Tillerson has also said publicly that he doesn’t agree with sanctions.
We also know that in Russia, because of Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil now has the largest holdings it has anywhere in the world, and these are five times larger than its second-largest holdings, which are in the United States. And that’s because Rex Tillerson made deals with Russia for 10 joint ventures with Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, to gain these huge holdings in Russia, a large chunk of which are in the Russian Arctic. And that deal—the deal was finalized in 2003. But then, in 2014, President Obama put in place sanctions against Russia, and that means that a large chunk of that oil is now no longer available to ExxonMobil.
And Rex Tillerson, yes, as of 11 days ago, retired as the CEO of ExxonMobil. But this is a man who spent literally his entire adult life at ExxonMobil. He was recruited straight out of UT Austin. He is working at a company that is referred to by its employees as "Mother Exxon." I believe he’s deeply, deeply tied to this company. And I believe that he is not happy about the fact that he left ExxonMobil in worse shape than when he came on. And one of the biggest deals that he accomplished as CEO was this huge Russia deal. But Exxon can’t enjoy its Russia deal while the sanctions are in place.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, human rights issues were repeatedly raised during Tillerson’s confirmation hearing Wednesday. In this clip, Senator Marco Rubio questions Tillerson on the so-called war on drugs in the Philippines.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office last June, the Los Angeles Times reports that roughly over 6,200 people have been killed in the Philippines by police and vigilantes in alleged drug raids. In your view, is this the right way to conduct an anti-drug campaign?
REX TILLERSON: Senator, the U.S.—America and the people of the Philippines have a long-standing friendship, and I think it’s important that we keep that in perspective in engaging with the government of the Philippines, that that long-standing friendship, and they have been an ally, and we need to ensure that they stay an ally.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: That’s correct, Mr. Tillerson, but my question is about the 6,200 people that have been killed in these alleged drug raids. Do you believe that that is an appropriate way to conduct that operation? Or do you believe that it is something that’s conducive to human rights violations that we should be concerned about and condemning?
REX TILLERSON: Senator, if confirmed, again, it’s an area that I’d want to understand in greater detail in terms of the facts on the ground. I’m not disputing anything you’re saying, because I know you have access to information that I do not have.
SEN. MARCO RUBIO: This one in the Los Angeles Times.
REX TILLERSON: Well, again, I’m not going to rely on solely what I read in the newspapers. I will go to the facts on the ground. I’m sure there’s—I’m sure there’s good credible information available through our various government agencies.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Tillerson talking about the so-called war on drugs, in which thousands have been killed. Now, in your piece, Antonia, you talk about Exxon’s role in Aceh, Indonesia. Could you explain what Exxon is being accused of there?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. Human rights was a big theme throughout the hearing, brought up by many, many senators. And, you know, as someone who’s spent a—you know, I’ve written three books about the oil industry. I’ve spent a lot of time studying ExxonMobil. To hear Rex Tillerson continually talk—and in that clip he didn’t, but he did mention, you know, the way that he—the ways that he would uphold human rights—was deeply disturbing, for one reason being this case that I highlight in my report, which is one of the more renowned because of the level of abuse, international human rights cases involving an oil company. And this is a case in which the complaint is actually now just getting ready to go before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. They’re awaiting a trial date any day now. And this involves severe human rights abuses in Indonesia by security forces employed by ExxonMobil. And the complaint specifically names Rex Tillerson.
And what the charges are, they involve charges from 2000 to 2004 that ExxonMobil essentially, in the words of the complaint, privatized the Indonesian military to act as its own security force for its natural gas operations there. Aceh was in the midst of an independence movement. It was a violent and hectic independence movement. And ExxonMobil used a renowned-for-its-human-rights-abuse-record military to be its private security force. And in one of the cases, for example, John Doe number two—and they’re all John Does, because they’re all afraid for their lives—the person alleges that he was kidnapped by ExxonMobil’s private security forces. He was held for three months. He was severely tortured. He was shown a pile of human heads and warned that this is what was going to happen to him. He was eventually released, and then his home was burned down. But this is a case that involves charges of murder, sexual assault, you know, sort of the most horrific things you can imagine. And the case alleges that the decisions were being made to use this military force at the highest levels of ExxonMobil, in the executive level, at the—you know, not just in the subsidiary in Indonesia, but in corporate headquarters in the United States, and that the decision—even when it was known by executives that the Indonesian force was using these extreme human rights abuses, the decision was made to continue using that force and actually to intensify the use of that force.
And named in the complaint is Rex Tillerson in his role then as president of ExxonMobil, as someone who had met with Indonesian authorities. So this is a case that he, you know, I would imagine, at a minimum, is certainly aware of, and very important. You know, what ExxonMobil argues is not that the human rights abuses did not occur, but rather that it is not liable for them. And ExxonMobil stayed in Indonesia. You know, the only—the only thing that ended this conflict was the tsunami at the end of—in December 2004 that essentially wiped out Aceh. The ExxonMobil facility survived the tsunami. And so, ExxonMobil never chose to stop operating because of everything that was going on around it. It stayed. It stayed. It stayed. It stayed. And that is an example of choices made all around the world, whereExxonMobil has partnered with and propped up—right now in Angola, in Equatorial Guinea—worked with, propped up dictators, governments that are incredibly abusive to their people, so that they could get their oil. And that has been and continues to be the model that ExxonMobil follows.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia, we want to thank you for being with us. Antonia Juhasz, oil and energy journalist, author of Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill as well as The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It. We’ll link to your piece, "Rex Tillerson Could Be America’s Most Dangerous Secretary of State."
==
...The ruling is not just a huge win for Healy, it also raises significant questions over the country's next presumptive secretary of state. On the same day of the court's decision, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson faced off with the U.S. Senate over his nomination as Donald Trump's top foreign affairs adviser.
At one point during the rocky all-day hearing, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia asked Tillerson, "Are these conclusions about ExxonMobil's history of promoting and funding climate science denial, despite its internal awareness of the reality of climate change during your tenure with the company, true or false?"
Tillerson, despite working for half of his 42 years at Exxon as an executive, said he could not answer the question since he no longer worked for the company.
Kaine, however, pressed on. "I'm not asking you on behalf of ExxonMobil. You have resigned from ExxonMobil. I'm asking you whether those allegations about ExxonMobil's knowledge of climate science and decision to fund and promote a view contrary to its awareness of its science, whether the allegations are true or false."
Tillerson again did not answer.
"Do you lack the knowledge to answer my question, or are you refusing to do so?" Kaine asked.
Tillerson finally responded, "A little of both."
...
http://www.ecowatch.com/exxon-climate-research-2190240911.html
==
- Michele Kelemen, “Rex Tillerson Cuts Ties With Exxon Mobil In Advance Of Confirmation Hearings,” NPR, Jan. 4, 2017.
- McKenzie Funk, “Did Exxon Lie About Global Warming?” Rolling Stone, June 30, 2016.
- Justin Gillis and Clifford Krauss, “Exxon Mobil Investigated for Possible Climate Change Lies by New York Attorney General,” The New York Times, Nov. 5, 2015.
- Lee Wasserman, “What Rex Tillerson's Exxon Mobil track record tells us,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 3, 2017.
- Matt Egan, Julia Horowitz and Chris Isidore, “Behind the deep ties between Exxon's Rex Tillerson and Russia,” CNN Money, Dec. 11, 2016.
==
http://www.ecowatch.com/senate-tillerson-pruitt-2178383086.html
==
Trump Picked Exxon CEO To Serve As Secretary Of State
Trump Named Rex Tillerson As His Pick For Secretary Of State. On December 13, President-elect Donald Trump announced Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state. *The Washington Post*, [12/13/16]
Tillerson Became Exxon’s President In 2004, Was Appointed Chairman And CEO In 2006. Rex Tillerson worked in various capacities for Exxon dating back to 1975. In 2004, Tillerson was elected president of the corporation and a member of the board of directors. He became chairman and CEO of Exxon on January 1, 2006. ExxonMobil.com, accessed [12/16/16]
Several Media Reports Portrayed Tillerson As A Climate Change Advocate
Reports Uncritically Described Tillerson As Accepting Of Climate Science And/Or Supportive Of A Carbon Tax. Shortly before and after Trump selected Tillerson as his nominee for secretary of state, several major TV and print outlets uncritically reported that Tillerson accepts climate science and/or supports a carbon tax:
CBS Evening News: In a December 13 report, anchor Scott Pelley said of Tillerson: “The lifelong oil man has no government experience, but he did convince Exxon to acknowledge climate change.” CBS Evening News, [12/13/16]
NBC Nightly News: In a December 10 segment discussing Tillerson, correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported, “During his time at the world’s largest public energy company, Tillerson acknowledged the science behind climate change, supporting a carbon tax, while also expressing support for the Paris Climate Agreement.”:{ She later added that environmentalists and Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are “asking questions” about Tillerson, but she didn’t explain what those questions were. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*NBC Nightly News*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[12/10/16:{]}:
Bloomberg News: Bloomberg News reported that Tillerson “breaks with Trump's climate-change denials," adding: ”The oil executive has characterized global warming as ‘a serious risk’ and supports a carbon tax as the best way to curb industry emissions, something Trump has said he opposes.” Bloomberg.com, [12/13/16]
Tillerson Has Misinformed About The Science Of Climate Change
Harvard And MIT Researchers Documented That Tillerson Repeatedly Pushed “Climate Science Misinformation.” As Slate’s Josh Voorhes recently noted, researchers at Harvard and MIT provided extensive documentation showing that Tillerson’s remarks about climate change frequently “raise doubt about the science when there isn’t any.” Indeed, in a document calling on the American Geophysical Union to no longer accept sponsorship from Exxon, the Harvard and MIT researchers demonstrated thatTillerson falsely claimed in 2013 that the temperature record “really hadn’t changed” over the previous decade, and that he made at least five inaccurate remarks in recent years wrongly “seeking to sow doubt about the reliability of climate models.” As The Guardian’s:{Dana Nuccitelli explained in 2015, global climate models have been “even more accurate than previously thought.” Slate, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[12/14/16:{; “Ending ExxonMobil Sponsorship Of The American Geophysical Union,” }:March 2016:{; }:The Guardian,7/31/15:{]}:
InsideClimate News: Tillerson “Sometimes Backslides” When It Comes To Accepting The Reality Of Climate Change. InsideClimate News reported that, although he does not espouse the overt science denial of his predecessor at Exxon, Tillerson “sometimes backslides when speaking off the cuff.” The article cited a 2015 speech in which Tillerson baselessly suggested that climate models could turn out to be “lousy”:
While Rex Tillerson, the current chairman, doesn't echo [previous Exxon CEO] Lee Raymond's science denial in his formal speeches, he sometimes backslides when speaking off the cuff.
At Exxon's annual meeting in 2015, Tillerson said it would be best to wait for more solid science before acting on climate change. "What if everything we do, it turns out our models are lousy, and we don't get the effects we predict?" he asked. InsideClimate News, [10/22/15]
Tillerson Downplayed Consequences Of Climate Change, Saying It’s Simply An “Engineering Problem” And Sea Level Rise Will Be “Manageable.” In a 2012 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson described climate models as “not particularly good” and claimed that the amount of warming caused by increased CO2 emissions is “ very hard for anyone to predict.” He also said that he believed the consequences of climate change would be “manageable” and that it is simply an “engineering problem.” As The Washington Post’s:{Chris Mooney explained, TIllerson’s contention that sea level rise will be “manageable” is “something that very much remains to be seen,” and there are “reasons to worry Tillerson may be downplaying the magnitude of the problem” of climate change. Council on Foreign Relations, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[6/27/12:{; }:The:{ }:Washington Post,:{ }:12/14/16:{]}:
Exxon Continued To Fund Climate Science Denial Under Tillerson, Despite Pledge To Stop
Exxon Pledged To Discontinue Funding For Groups Promoting Climate Denial In 2008. In 2007, facing pressure from shareholders, Exxon issued the following statement in its corporate citizenship report: "In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner." *The Guardian*, [5/28/08; Exxon Mobil 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report via SocialFunds.com, accessed 12/16/16]
But Exxon Has Continued To Fund Climate Denial Groups. In July 2016, DeSmog Blog reported that Exxon’s most recent financial disclosures show that the company “continues to support organisations that claim greenhouse gases are not causing climate change, or that cuts to emissions are a waste of time and money”:
Organisations including the American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Black Chamber of Commerce — all organisations with a record of misinformation on climate science — all received grants in 2015 from ExxonMobil. The 2015 tally brings the total amount of known Exxon funding to denial groups north of $33 million since 1998. DeSmog Blog, [7/8/16]
Drexel Professor’s Research Suggests Exxon May Also “Reroute” Funding For Climate Denial Organizations Through Dark Money Groups. In October 2015, InsideClimate News reported that a group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to Exxon “questioning Exxon's contributions to Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, which provide a conduit between well-heeled contributors and various conservative public policy organizations, including many at the forefront of climate science denial.” InsideClimate News further noted that the senators cited research from Robert Brulle of Drexel University, who provided evidence that Exxon may have engaged in an effort to “simply reroute its support” of climate denial organizations:
Brulle is a leading sociologist who has been published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature on the climate denial movement.
In material supplementing one of his studies, Brulle documented Exxon donations directly to climate denial groups such as the Heartland Institute, up until about 2008. At about the time Exxon scaled back its giving to those groups,Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund stepped up their donations to them. InsideClimate News, [10/29/15]
The Guardian:“ExxonMobil Gave Millions To Climate-Denying Lawmakers Despite Pledge.” In July 2015, The Guardianreported that Exxon’s financial and tax records show that since it pledged to stop funding climate science denial in 2007, “the oil company has given $1.87m to Republicans in Congress who deny climate change.” [The Guardian,7/15/15]
Exxon Gave $131,000 To Contrarian Climate Researcher Willie Soon In 2007 And 2008. According to InsideClimate News, Exxon gave Willie Soon, a former Harvard-Smithsonian Center researcher and climate contrarian, “more than $131,000 in 2007 and 2008 for research that resulted in papers questioning whether climate change was dangerous for polar bears and whether the Arctic was warming.” As The New York Times:{ reported, in his correspondence with corporate funders, Soon “described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.” InsideClimate News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[4/5/16:{; }:The New York Times:{, }:2/21/15:{]}:
Study Shows Groups Funded By Exxon More Likely To Include Climate Denial In Messaging. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS:{) found that "organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue." It focused on organizations funded by Exxon and the Koch family foundations, noting that those two funders had been previously "identified as especially influential," and that funding from these groups "signals entry into a powerful network of influence." According to the PNAS study, many of these groups' climate change positions were likely influenced by Exxon's funding; specifically, the study found that not only were these groups "more likely to have written and disseminated contrarian texts," but also that "corporate funding influences the actual language and thematic content of polarizing discourse." The study detailed the "thematic content" touted by these organizations, which include many industry front groups, and found that fossil fuel-funded organizations more often discussed "temperature trends," "energy production," "the positive benefits of CO2," and "climate change being a long-term cycle" than organizations that did not receive industry funding. :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Media Matters*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[11/24/15:{]}:
Exxon And Tillerson Have Been Inconsistent In Their Support For A Carbon Tax
Tillerson First Expressed Exxon’s Support for Carbon Tax In 2009, As Democratic Congress And Obama Administration Were Moving Toward Cap-And-Trade System. In January 2009, The Wall Street Journalreported: “The chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp. for the first time called on Congress to enact a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions in order to fight global warming. In a speech in Washington, Rex Tillerson said that a tax was a ‘more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach’ to curtailing greenhouse gases than other plans popular in Congress and with the incoming Obama administration.” The article quoted Daniel Weiss, then a fellow at the Center for American Progress, saying of Exxon’s move, "Calling for a carbon tax could be a ploy because few observers believe such a tax is politically feasible in our Congress." *The Wall Street Journal,*[1/9/09]
InsideClimate News: Tillerson Has “Waffled” On Whether He Supports A Carbon Tax. As InsideClimate News recently noted, Tillerson has said “a price on carbon, increasingly embraced by other major economies, might make sense for the United States. But at shareholder meetings and in other venues, Tillerson has waffled. ‘As to our advocacy around a carbon tax—I would not support putting a carbon tax in place today,’ he said in 2013.” InsideClimate News, [12/12/16]
InsideClimate News Detailed Evidence That Exxon Hasn’t Put Its “Political Muscle” Behind Enacting A Carbon Tax. A December 2015 article by InsideClimate News reported that “Exxon never put its political muscle behind a carbon tax,” despite offering the idea vocal support. The article noted that Exxon “has not stepped up campaign contributions to lawmakers” that support a carbon tax, “mounted any advertising campaigns in favor of the idea, or funded organizations that push for such laws at the federal or state level.” InsideClimate News also noted that Exxon “refused to sign on to a letter from other international oil giants, including Royal Dutch Shell and BP, that strongly urged the Paris climate negotiators to push for a global price on carbon.” The article also pointed out that Exxon hadn’t “lobbied for carbon tax bills in Congress,” but The Wall Street Journalreported several months later that top Exxon officials “have been more vocal about their support for a carbon tax and have met with Capitol Hill offices about related legislation, according to the company’s recent lobby disclosure forms.” However, the Journalarticle further noted that Exxon “arguably faces more pressure than other firms to show concern about climate change” because of state attorneys general investigations into whether Exxon misled shareholders on climate change, and added: “Congress has made it clear it is unlikely to consider a carbon tax soon, especially under Republican control.” InsideClimate News, [12/21/15; The Wall Street Journal, 6/30/16]
Huff. Post: Exxon Refused To Comment On Anti-Carbon Tax Resolution In Congress. In an article headlined “Exxon Supports A Carbon Tax Except When There Is A Vote On A Carbon Tax,” The Huffington Post noted that, despite its pro-carbon tax rhetoric, Exxon refused to comment when the House of Representatives was set to vote on a non-binding resolution that railed against a carbon tax earlier this year. The Guardianadded that “the American Petroleum Institute, which is a key lobbying group of the oil industry, including ExxonMobil, publicly supported the anti-carbon tax resolution.” The Huffington Post, [6/9/16; The Guardian, 6/13/16]
Environmental Groups Have Strongly Criticized Selection Of Tillerson
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune: “Tillerson's nomination cements the fact that clean air, clean water, and our climate are public enemy number one in Trump's America. … ExxonMobil not only deliberately concealed its knowledge of climate change for decades but is responsible for one of the costliest environmental disasters in history. … At a time when the climate crisis is deepening, both the United States and the world deserve much better than having one of the planet's top fossil fuel tycoons run U.S. foreign policy. We urge Senators, who are elected to represent and protect the American people, to stand up for families across the country and the world and oppose this nomination." EcoWatch, [12/13/16]
Union of Concerned Scientists President Ken Kimmel: “The secretary of state must also be a champion for action on climate change, building on last year’s agreement by nearly 200 countries in Paris that offers our last, best hope for averting truly devastating climate impacts. U.S. leadership on climate change has greatly increased our standing in the world. In sharp contrast, Mr. Tillerson has spent 40 years at Exxon, a company whose current business model hinges on the failure of this historic international effort. He has disparaged and downplayed the science on climate change, and his company is even currently under investigation for defrauding the public and shareholders for decades about the dangers of climate change caused by fossil fuels.” Union of Concerned Scientists, [12/10/16]
League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski: “As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson has consistently opposed policies to take action on climate, and he can now threaten the global efforts to meet this challenge. Tillerson simply cannot be trusted to look out for people instead of his companies’ profits.” LCV.org, [12/10/16]
Greenpeace Executive Director Annie Leonard: “[Tillerson’s nomination] is an affront to global progress and will place the US economy, our security, and our standing in the world in the same failing predicament Exxon is in right now. The global community continues to send a strong, collective message that it is ditching fossil fuels for clean energy. Rex Tillerson hid climate science so he could cash in on disaster, instead of transitioning his company to a position of true leadership. This appointment is a desperate grab for power by a failing industry that is perfectly fine bringing the American people down with it.” EcoWatch, [12/13/16]
Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp: “As Republican and Democratic presidents alike have long understood, climate change is a defining foreign policy challenge of our time. Addressing it effectively in concert with countries around the globe will be a central responsibility of the next Secretary of State. If that job goes to the chief executive of the world’s largest shareholder-owned oil-and-gas company, he will need to demonstrate substantially different priorities than those he followed as CEO.” EDF.org, [12/13/16]
350.org: “This is unfathomable. We can’t let Trump put the world’s largest oil company in charge of our international climate policy. Tillerson may be a friend of Putin’s, but he’s no friend of the planet. ExxonMobil is still a leading funder of climate denial and is pursuing a business plan that will destroy our future. Tillerson deserves a federal investigation, not federal office. We’ll be pressuring Senators to turn the confirmation process into a hearing on ExxonMobil’s history of climate deception. If Exxon is found guilty of working with other oil companies to deceive the public and their shareholders about the threat of climate change, they could be on the hook for fraud and racketeering charges. It would be the largest corporate scandal in history and could not only stop Tillerson’s appointment, but take down the entire company.” 350.org, [12/10/16]
State Attorneys General Are Investigating Whether Exxon Fraudulently Deceived Shareholders And Public About Climate Change
State Attorneys General Are Investigating Whether Exxon Deceived Shareholders And The Public About Climate Change To Protect Its Profits. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched a probe into whether Exxon committed fraud by deceiving its shareholders and the public about climate change, after news accounts by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times found that Exxon officials knew about the science of climate change decades ago but continued to fund climate denial groups. California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey have since followed suit and also launched investigations of Exxon that are ongoing. *Media Matters*, [10/21/16]
==
One other factor has to be added into this witch’s brew: magical thinking. Like so many leaders of recent times, he seems to equate mastery over oil in particular, and fossil fuels in general, with mastery over the world. In this, he shares a common outlook with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on harnessing Russia’s oil and gas reserves in order to restore the country’s global power, and with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, said to be Trump’s top choice for Secretary of State and a long-term business partner of the Putin regime. For these and other politicians and tycoons -- and, of course, we’re talking almost exclusively about men here -- the possession of giant oil reserves is thought to bestow a kind of manly vigor. Think of it as the national equivalent of Viagra.
==
http://www.ecowatch.com/kennedy-exxon-trump-tillerson-2148709224.html
omfg
Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State,according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough tweeted that while Trump thought his meeting with potential nominee Mitt Romney was “great,” he’s also started considering Tillerson.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. An Exxon spokesman also declined to comment on Scarborough’s report.
Texas native Tillerson has led the United States’s largest oil company since 2006 and has worked there for more than four decades.
Trump reportedly is also considering Romney, the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee, as well as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, retired Gen. David Petraeus and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) for the top diplomatic post.
Romney's inclusion on the shortlist has sparked controversy with many from Trump's inner circle. Many close to Trump, including top aide Kellyanne Conway, have publicly blasted Romney, who was a sharp critic of Trump during the presidential campaign. Trump met with Romney on Tuesday night.
Tillerson's selection would put a spotlight on Exxon, a major corporation with a wide reach and operations in dozens of countries.
The company has numerous partnerships with Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and has lost more than $1 billion due to the sanctions the United States imposed on Russia, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news service.
Tillerson, who made $27.3 million last year, could clash with Trump on some high-profile issues.
For example, Tillerson believes in man-made climate change, which Trump has dismissed as a hoax.
Exxon supports the Paris climate agreementand wants the United States to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, both policies that Trump strenuously opposes.
The company has also been in a high-profile fight in the last year with environmentalists and some Democratic state attorneys general over its past position on climate change.
Greens say Exxon knew decades ago that fossil fuels cause climate change but tried to sow doubt publicly about it in order to fight policies that could hurt its finances.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/308363-scarborough-trump-considering-exxon-ceo-for-secretary-of-state
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8/16
carbon tax support BS
negin ucs
Recent press accounts report that ExxonMobil is now actively promoting a carbon tax.If true, that’s big news. It would mean that, after nearly 20 years of blocking action on climate change, the world’s biggest energy company has finally come to its senses.
But wait a minute. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So one might well ask: Is this anything more than a PR ploy?
Let’s take a closer look.
As I reported earlier this year, ExxonMobil has paid lip service to the idea of a carbon tax since 2009 but, all the while, has continued to fund federal lawmakers who resolutely oppose it. In March 2015, for example, the Senate voted 58 to 42 to pass a budget amendment prohibiting a carbon tax. Thirty of the 40 senators who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2010 voted in favor of the prohibition. Meanwhile, in March 2013, 156Housemembers cosponsored a nonbinding resolution stating that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to American families and businesses and is not in the best interest of the United States.” Ninety-three percent of the cosponsors were funded by — you guessed it — ExxonMobil.
OK, but that was then, and things can change, right? After all, last December, Ken Cohen, the company’s outgoing vice president of public and government affairs,blogged about ExxonMobil’s strong support for a carbon tax, noting that the company has been holding “countless private briefings with members of Congress on carbon tax policy options.”
So how have the company’s friends on Capitol Hill responded?
In June, the House passed a resolution stating “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” on a 237 to 163 vote. Eighty-five percent of the House members who voted for the resolution received ExxonMobil political donations since 2013; 82 of them are documented climate science deniers.By contrast, only 26 of the representatives who voted against the resolution — a measly 16 percent — received ExxonMobil money.
The numbers are unambiguous: When it comes to a carbon tax, there’s no escaping the fact that ExxonMobil still funds legislators who don’t favor it and, by the same token, doesn’t support many who do.
Disingenuous Origins
In his December blog post, Cohen traced ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax back to January 2009, when company CEO Rex Tillerson endorsed it in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. Cohen, however, neglected to explain the context for this pronounced break with ExxonMobil’s long-held position against any policy that would curb carbon emissions:Tillerson was trying to derail momentum on Capitol Hill for a different approach.
Back then, Congress was seriously considering instituting a cap-and-trade system, modeled after the George H. W. Bush administration’s successful plan to reduce acid rain, which would have set a cap on overall carbon emissions and established a regulated marketplace where polluters could buy and sell emissions allowances. The less carbon they emitted, the less they would pay.
The European Union had instituted such a system in 2005 and, although there were disagreements over the details, the idea of a U.S. cap-and-trade system had the support of a number of environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, and more than two dozen companies, including oil giants BP America, ConocoPhillips and Shell. Perhaps most important, the plan had the backing of President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, who then controlled both houses of Congress.
Tillerson was having none of it. “A carbon tax strikes us as a more direct, transparent and effective approach” than a cap-and-trade system, he said in that January 2009 speech. “It is the most efficient means of reflecting the cost of carbon in all economic decisions, from investments made by companies to fuel and product choices made by consumers.” Any carbon tax, he added, should be revenue-neutral, meaning it should be offset by reductions in income and corporate taxes.
But there was a major obstacle in the way of Tillerson’s preferred solution: It had no political support. When California Rep. Pete Stark proposed a carbon tax just the year before, it attracted only three cosponsors.
Tillerson, who surely knew Congress wasn’t about to pass a carbon tax, publicly conceded it faced long odds. “Right now, any talk of imposing new taxes would rattle the markets and individuals,” he told E&E News, a trade publication, the same day he spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “...But probably later this year, I think they’re going to get around to want to further investigate what their alternatives are.”
As it turned out, the House narrowly passed a cap-and-trade bill on a 219 to 212 vote in June 2009. In the Senate, however, it was a different story. The legislation never made it out of committee for a number of complicated reasons, but the fact that fossil fuel interests had plenty of friends in the upper chamber — many of them longtime recipients of ExxonMobil political donations — no doubt played a significant role. The bottom line? ExxonMobil ultimately got what it wanted by plugging a carbon tax: gridlock.
Beyond the Rhetoric
There has been some speculation about what motivated ExxonMobil to recently ramp up its pro-carbon tax rhetoric. First, with multiple investigations underway by state attorneys general of the company for misleading its shareholders and the general public about climate risks, it likely feels the need to polish its tarnished image. Second, the company knows that last December’s historic U.N. climate meeting in Paris, where 195 countries committed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, means that it will be harder to maintain the status quo. Third, if and when Congress does seriously consider a carbon tax, ExxonMobil wants to position itself to influence the debate. And finally, ExxonMobil would likely benefit more than its competitors from a carbon tax, because such a tax would favor the cleaner-burning natural gas over coal and ExxonMobil has the largest natural gas reserves of any U.S. company.
These are all plausible reasons, except for one thing: The evidence suggests that the company is still doing what it can to obstruct policies to combat climate change.
Last fall, for example, California Rep. Ted Lieu — who has not received any ExxonMobil campaign contributions — met with the company’s lobbyists in what was presumably one of the “countless private briefings” Cohen cited in his December blog. Lieu asked the lobbyists what they would do if he drafted carbon tax legislation. They replied that “they would take a look at it,” Lieu told InsideClimate News. “They didn’t say they wouldn’t support it and they didn’t say they would,” he added. “It’s clear that they are not going around championing their position. If they actually believe this internally, then they ought to do so in a much louder way than just quietly sticking it on a website.”
In the Senate, meanwhile, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Brian Schatz of Hawaii have introduced a carbon tax bill, the “American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act.” Has ExxonMobil endorsed it or lobbied on its behalf? According to Whitehouse and Schatz, no.
“Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that,” the senators said in a letter they sent to the company Tuesday. “None of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil’s management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation.”
Conversely, House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, a climate science denier, explained to Fox News host Steve Doocy in December 2012 that he told ExxonMobil lobbyists a carbon tax was a “bad idea.” “I sat down with the Exxon folks a couple of months ago,” Upton
, “and let it be known that this is not a proposal that ... is going to be coming through in the House.” Nevertheless, ExxonMobil donated more to Upton during the current election cycle than it did in either the 2012 or 2014 cycles.
Besides its political donations and lobbying, the company is still spending millions of dollars a year on think tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that dispute climate science and disparage climate policies, including a carbon tax. Just last month, ExxonMobil was a lead sponsor of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual conference, which featured Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described free-market think tank ExxonMobil has been funding since 1998. According to one conference participant, Cass “absolutely eviscerated the case for conservatives adopting a carbon tax.” Conference organizers also provided ALEC state legislator members with a sample resolution against the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to curb power plant carbon emissions.
ExxonMobil doesn’t just rely on paid surrogates, however, to spread disinformation and block government action. Company executives may sing the praises of a carbon tax, but they still find time to misrepresent climate science and question the necessity of taking any action at all.
Climate Science Denial Starts at the Top
In March 2013 — the same month 146 ExxonMobil-funded House members cosponsored a resolution against a carbon tax — Tillerson appeared on on PBS’sCharlie Rose, ostensibly to promote one. The CEO told Rose he preferred a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade system, but then he doubted whether scientists knew enough to warrant one. “The facts remain there are uncertainties around climate change, why it’s changing, [and] what the principal drivers of climate change are,” Tillerson claimed, repudiating the consensus among climate scientists worldwide. He also falsely claimed there is no scientific evidence of a link between global warming and extreme weather events.
Two years later, at ExxonMobil’s 2015 annual shareholder meeting, Tillerson again argued that climate models are not accurate enough to justify a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels. “What if everything we do,” he asked, “it turns out our models are lousy and we don’t get the effects we predict?” He recommended continuing to burn fossil fuels and adapting to whatever happens, be it sea level rise or crop failures. “Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” he said, “and those solutions will present themselves as the realities become clear.”
Contrary to Tillerson’s assertions, climate models have proven to be extremely accurate. A March 2013 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, for example, found that the models accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures over the previous 15 years to within a few hundredths of a degree. No matter. When given the chance to set the record straight at this year’s shareholder meeting in late May, Tillerson would not back down. “My view on the competencies of the models,” he said, “has really not changed.”
Perhaps the most revealing statement demonstrating the depth of ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax, however, came the day before the House resolution vote in June — the one where nearly 90 percent of the ExxonMobil-funded House members casting a ballot voted yes, a carbon tax would hurt the U.S. economy. AHuffington Post reporter contacted ExxonMobil Media Relations Manager Alan Jeffers to find out what the company had to say. Given the company’s supposedly heightened interest in persuading Congress to pass a carbon tax, one would have expected Jeffers to register the company’s opposition. Certainly he would explain why the resolution was misguided and tell House members to vote no. It was what some would call a teachable moment.
So how did Jeffers respond?
“We’re not commenting on the resolution.”
http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxonmobils-latest-campaign-stonewall-federal-climate-action
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bill mck
Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions.”
Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”
Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S., when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah and just before Hurricane Sandy.
He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”
In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend—somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton—wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.
But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon—which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.
Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.
The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.
The Never-Ending Big Dig
Even that’s not the deepest problem.
The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons—$4 million a day, every day.
As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.
But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet—an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.
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most of us in the cities on Pope Francis’ upcoming U.S. tour, the major concern is traffic congestion. For fossil fuel executives, look out.
The Pope closed out his blockbuster, 180-page encyclical on climate change in May by appealing to God to “Enlighten those who possess power and money that they may avoid the sin of indifference, that they may love the common good, advance the weak, and care for this world in which we live.”
Sound like anybody you know, Rex Tillerson? The ExxonMobil CEO is notoriously obstinate in his opposition to Pope Francis’ call for a shift from intensive fossil fuel use to alternatives like solar and wind. In fact, when a Catholic priest and shareholder activist urged investment in renewables at the company’s annual meeting this year, Tillerson openly mocked him.
Enlightening Tillerson and all the other wealthy and powerful U.S. fossil fuel executives who are just as dismissive of climate change will be a challenge of biblical proportions. A new report I’ve just co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies sheds light on just one of the major obstacles: our CEO pay system. In 2015, corporate boards are still designing compensation packages that give oil, gas and coal executives zero personal incentive to diversify their companies’ portfolios to include renewable energy sources.....
http://www.alternet.org/environment/papal-smackdown-pope-francis-v-fossil-fuel-execs
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Exxon's early research into climate change was revealed in a 2014 email from a former company scientist that was uncovered by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). It was shared as part of a broader project,The Climate Deception Dossiers [2], published Wednesday, that traces campaigns by fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, to discredit the impact of industry on the planet's warming. The company's early awareness of climate change and willingness to factor it into business decisions starkly contrasts with the path it took a decade later, when it led efforts to cloud public understanding of climate science and delay action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.
Exxon's research in 1981 was initiated to help corporate planning, according to the email by Leonard S. Bernstein, the former employee. The research apparently was instrumental in Exxon's decision not to develop a major natural gas field in Asia. The field, called Natuna, contains a vast natural gas reservoir but it also contains a sizable amount of carbon dioxide, according to Bernstein.
"If Natuna were developed and its CO2 vented to the atmosphere, it would be the largest point source of CO2 in the world and account for about 1% of projected global CO2 emissions," wrote Bernstein in an email to his son, Neil, a classics professor at Ohio University.
"In the 1980s, Exxon needed to understand the potential for concerns about climate change to lead to regulation that would affect Natuna [the gas field] and other potential projects," Bernstein wrote. "They were well ahead of the rest of industry in this awareness." Neil Bernstein shared his father's email with a colleague who then posted it to the website of the university's Institute for Applied & Professional Ethics.
In the email Bernstein wrote that whatever the public stance of natural resource companies, "internally they make very careful assessments of the potential for regulation, including the scientific basis for those regulations." He added that: "Exxon NEVER denied the potential for humans to impact the climate system. It did question––legitimately, in my opinion––the validity of some of the science."
Usually energy companies vent the carbon dioxide released in drilling fields like Natuna into the air, Bernstein wrote. The email indicates that early research by Exxon into CO2's contribution to climate change apparently was one reason the company put off exploring Natuna. The difficulty and expense of disposing of the carbon dioxide has kept the Natuna project dormant since then, said Gautam Sudhakar, director of global gas at IHS, an industry consultancy.
Ten years after Exxon began its assessment of the Natuna field's potential impact on the atmosphere, the company became a driving force in industry organizations committed to derailing American participation in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, a landmark international treaty that called for developed countries such as the United States to combat global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. At the time those organizations argued that climate science was too uncertain to underpin sweeping efforts to cut emissions. Exxon also became a generous funder of conservative think tanks and scientists, such as Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Willie Soon [3], that sowed public doubt about global warming.
A scientist at Exxon for 20 years until his departure in 1989, Bernstein went to Mobil where he wrote a 1996 primer on climate science for the Global Climate Coalition, an advocacy group for the fossil fuel industry. In it he urged members to focus on scientific uncertainty rather than use arguments popular among climate deniers, such as the effect of solar activity on the climate. Exxon lobbyist and environmental adviser Arthur G. "Randy" Randol III was a key member of the 1998American Petroleum Institute-led "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan," which determined that[4]"victory will be achieved when those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."
In an email, Bernstein declined to comment.
Richard Keil, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said that Exxon's involvement in groups that sought to slow or halt action on climate change was not a reversal of course from the company's early interest in the issue. Rather, it was an acknowledgement of the uncertainty around much of the science, he said.
"A full reading of Bernstein's email reveals an important point––his assertion that, in the 1980s, we never denied the possible role of human activity as a cause for climate change, and he further makes clear that, at that point in time, there was a great deal of uncertainty and lack of understanding of climate change, even among leading scientists and experts," said Keil, adding that today, Exxon "believes the risk of climate change is clear, and warrants action."
Yet ExxonMobilhas consistently fought off shareholder resolutions [5] to do more on climate change, most recently a proposal to set company-wide standards to cut greenhouse gas emissions. In May, Exxon Chief Executive Rex Tillerson**criticized** [6] climate models and said humans will adapt to the strains of global warming.
Nancy Cole, UCS's campaign director for climate and energy, said companies such as Exxon need to take a more constructive course. "The deception simply must stop," she said. "It's time for major carbon companies to become part of the solution."
InsideClimate News
Rex Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, has called for European governments to support fracking, despite being called out as a ‘nimby’ last year.
Speaking at the World Gas Conference in Paris this week, he claimed that the large number of wells already fracked in the US and Canada have proven that the technology is safe.
However, just last year, Tillerson joined a lawsuit citing fracking’s consequences in order to stop the construction of a 160-foot water tower as it would harm the value of his $5 million home in Texas.
The claimants also stated that the water tower’s intended operations – to sell water to the local fracking firms – will create “a noise nuisance and traffic hazards”.
Tillerson eventually dropped out of the suit a few months later and, after continuing battles between his neighbours and the company building the water tower, the completion of the project was eventually given the go-ahead.
More recently, ExxonMobil faced criticism after its shareholders rejected proposals to add independent directors with climate change expertise to their boards.
From Coal to Gas
Leading European oil and gas companies have been championing calls for global price on carbon emissions this week in order to shift production away from coal to natural gas.
Over the past few years energy companies have seen a gradual shift in the mix of their energy production. Shell CEO Ben van Beurden, has said that his company has changed from “an oil-and-gas company to a gas-and-oil company.”
Shell and Total began producing more gas than oil in 2013 and 2014 respectively, and ExxonMobil’s gas output rose to about 47 percent of total production last year, up from 39 percent six years ago.
These calls come as oil and gas companies face growing pressure to take action on climate change from fossil fuel divestment campaigns and policy makers who want to bring down their nations' carbon emissions.
But Tillerson, along with Chevron, said that he only intend to support a carbon tax if real consensus emerges in the US.
Climate Change and Poverty
Tillerson has repeatedly rejected the accuracy of climate models that seek to predict the outcomes of rising temperatures, and has warned that hastily adopting carbon limits based on these models could have costly long-term consequences for shareholders. ExxonMobil is also well known for its involvement in funding climate denial think tanks.
The coal industry has also attempted to fight back against the call for more natural gas by arguing that coal production is essential in order to lift people out of poverty in developing countries.
The London-based World Coal Association (WCA) has met with officials from India to Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Malaysia to convince them of this policy and get them to support coal-fired power generation in any potential agreements made at the UN climate change conference in Paris this December.
Fracking Outlook
So, does this mean more fracking? Not necessarily. The president of the International Gas Union, Jerome Ferrier, announced at the World Gas Conference in Paris this week that there will not be a US-style shale gas revolution in Europe.
He put this down to the reluctance of European governments: there is resistance in Poland and the UK, moratoriums in Germany and Bulgaria, and a ban in France.
He told the BBC that “the future of gas does not depend on shale gas – there is enough conventional gas [to meet demand] for more than a century.”
http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/05/exxon-mobil-ceo-nimby-makes-fresh-calls-fracking-europe
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Oil companies are pretty much the last ally you'd think of when it comes to advancing big-picture solutions to climate change. These are the companies, after all, whose product is responsible for causing a significant amount of climate change in the first place—and pretty much every proposed fix for global warming necessarily involves burning less oil.
So it came as a bit of a surprise Monday when six of the leading European oil companies, including BP and Shell, unveiled a letter addressed to the United Nations climate chief calling for a price on carbon emissions (read the full letter below).
"We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element" of ongoing UN-led international climate negotiations, the letter said. This week representatives from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Bonn, Germany, to prepare for a summit in Paris this winter where they hope to produce a powerful global accord on fighting climate change. The letter called on the world's governments to create new national carbon markets where they don't currently exist (like most of the United States, for example), and to eventually link those markets internationally.
Most environmental economists and policy wonks agree that making companies pay for their carbon pollution—whether through a tax or a cap-and-trade system—is a fundamental step for any meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The basic idea is that making carbon pollution expensive will drive big polluters to clean up. Policies like this are already gathering steam across the globe, from Canada to China. (California and a few Northeast states have regional carbon markets, but a national carbon price is still a non-starter in the US Congress.) Recently, Australia demonstrated just how effective carbon pricing can be, in a counterintuitive way: Carbon emissions dropped immediately after the country implemented a carbon tax, then jumped right back up when the tax was repealed.As Bloomberg Business pointed out, the letter is "unprecedented," in that it's the first time a group of major oil companies have banded together to advocate for a serious climate change policy. It waswelcomed by the UN's top climate official, Christiana Figueres, who said that the "oil and gas industry must be a major part of the solution to climate change."
If Monday's letter is any clue, oil companies are reading the writing on the wall, and they know that one way or another, it's time to start planning for a future when carbon pollution is more expensive and tightly regulated. Well, some oil companies: Conspicuously absent from the letter are any US oil companies, like Chevron or ExxonMobil; all the signatories are European. In fact, just last week Exxon chief Rex Tillerson implicitly blasted his European peers for cozying up to the UN on climate issues, saying his company wouldn't "fake it" on climate change and that investing in renewable energy is tantamount to "losing money on purpose."
The head of French oil giant Total addressed the cross-Atlantic schism in comments to Reuters, saying that the European companies were set on throwing their weight behind carbon pricing "without necessarily waiting for an American to come on board."
Although carbon pricing "obviously adds a cost to our production and our products," the letter says, the companies would prefer consistency and predictability over the patchwork of policies that exists now. In other words, it's easier to justify and plan investments in lower-carbon projects, such as replacing coal with natural gas, when carbon prices are stable and "even-handed," the letter said. At the same time, these companies have come under increasing pressure from shareholders to address how they'll stay profitable in the future, as restrictions on carbon emissions are tightened.
To that end, a few of the signatories already have their own internal "shadow" carbon price, where investment options are calculated with a hypothetical carbon price added in, as a way of anticipating future policies.
Still, progressive-sounding statements notwithstanding, oil companies are oil companies, and the letter gives no indication that any of them have plans to replace fossil fuels as their primary product. Shell, for one, is just weeks away from a new foray into offshore drilling in the Arctic. And according to *Bloomberg*, the European companies are no better than their American counterparts in terms of their actual carbon footprint. So it remains to be seen how committed the companies will be to supporting sweeping changes to the global energy system, or if letters like this are just a clever way to stay relevant as the international climate talks forge ahead. Either way, the paradox of a corporation calling for a carbon price while still pursuing fossil fuel extraction is just more evidence that the free market won't fix climate change voluntarily—governments have to create new policies, like an international carbon price, that energy companies can't evade.
Here's the letter:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/06/guess-who-just-came-out-support-bold-fix-climate-change
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Several large banks and asset managers around the world (full disclosure: Generation Investment Management, which I co-founded with David Blood and for which I serve as chairman, is in this group) have advised their clients of the danger that carbon assets will become "stranded." A "stranded asset" is one whose price is vulnerable to a sudden decline when markets belatedly recognize the truth about their underlying value – just as the infamous "subprime mortgages" suddenly lost their value in 2007 to 2008 once investors came to grips with the fact that the borrowers had absolutely no ability to pay off their mortgages.
Shareholder activists and public campaigners have pressed carbon-dependent corporations to deal with these growing concerns. But the biggest ones are still behaving as if they arein denial. In May 2013, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson responded to those pointing out the need to stop using the Earth's atmosphere as a sewer by asking, "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?"
I don't even know where to start in responding to that statement, but here is a clue: Pope Francis said in May, "If we destroy creation, creation will destroy us. Never forget this."
Exxonmobil, Shell and many other holders of carbon-intensive assets have argued, in essence, that they simply do not believe that elected national leaders around the world will ever reach an agreement to put a price on carbon pollution. gore RS
Exxon Facing Shareholder Revolt
- Posted byBrad Ewingon May 20, 2008 at 1:02am
- View Blog
An interesting article in the Guardian this week discusses the current shareholder "revolt" at Exxon over its approach to climate change. The article, by Andrew Clark, is found below:
"A shareholder revolt at ExxonMobil led by the billionaire Rockefeller family has won the support of four significant British institutional investors who will call on Monday for a shakeup in the governance of the world's biggest oil company.
Guardian.co.uk has learned that F&C Asset Management, Morley Fund Management, the Co-Operative Insurance Society and the West Midlands Pension Fund are throwing their weight behind a resolution demanding that ExxonMobil appoints an independent chairman to stimulate debate on the company's board.
Exxon is facing a rebellion from its investors over its hardline approach to global warming. The firm has refused to follow rival oil companies in committing large-scale capital investment to environmentally friendly technology such as wind and solar power.
The Rockefeller dynasty, whose ancestor John D Rockefeller founded the original oil business at the core of ExxonMobil, have sponsored four shareholder resolutions demanding changes at Exxon. One of these calls on Exxon's chief executive Rex Tillerson, to relinquish his role as chairman in favour of an outsider to bring in an alternative point of view.
recent denialist speech:
http://grist.org/climate-energy/stand-back-im-going-to-try-science-inside-the-brain-of-exxonmobils-ceo/
That talk by ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations that Gristmill linked to earlier today is a stunning demonstration of how to sow confusion and delay. It’s worth deeper analysis. So let’s dig in!
It’s very long, so we’ll summarize some sections and zero in on a couple of key passages. You can read the whole thing here.
Paragraphs 1-6, in short: Energy prices sure go up and down a lot! But we keep finding more fossil fuels when we need to.
Next 3 paragraphs: Boy, there was a lot more natural gas in the shale here in North America than we expected.
Next 6 paragraphs: Let’s all say “energy security” rather than “energy independence,” OK? Exxon is a multinational, and I want everyone to be friends and not worry about where their oil comes from as long as it keeps coming.
Here’s where Tillerson starts to gets interesting. Let’s quote his original and then translate:
Ours is an industry that is built on technology, it’s built on science, it’s built on engineering, and because we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.
Translation: You thought those people out there sounding an alarm about climate change were scientists? Forget it. We here at Exxon, we’re the scientists. And all those people with fancy degrees and titles who have been desperately trying to teach the U.S. public about global warming? They’re illiterates! We’re the clean guys in white coats; they’re the dirty “manufacturers” of fear.
And so as these technologies emerge, we know the immediate response from certain parts of interested parties out there is going to be to manufacture fear because that’s how you slow this down. And nowhere is it more effective than in the United States. And so that’s — the pace at which these things occur oftentimes is our ability to deal with the manufactured fear, our ability as an industry, working with well-intended regulators and policymakers to address the fears.
Translation: I am a dispassionate man of reason. Forget that I run one of the richest corporations in the world. I am not an “interested party.” The interested parties are all those illiterate, fear-mongering activists who are getting filthy rich off their fabulously wealthy nonprofit activities.
It requires a lot of education, requires taking an illiterate public — illiterate in the sciences, engineering and mathematics — and trying to help them understand why we can manage these risks. And that’s a very intensive, almost one-on-one process — town by town, city council by city council, state by state. So it takes a while. And we’re not particularly aided in our efforts by the broad-based media, because it’s a lot sexier to write the fear stories than it is to write the here’s-how-you-manage-it story.
Translation: Do not think that we buy advertisements and pay lobbyists in order to influence public policy in our favor. At Exxon, we re having one-on-one conversations with our community. Sadly, journalists sometimes help out those fearmongering ignoramuses by repeating their lies. So we have to spend lots of money setting the record straight.
Now, that’s just a fact, it’s not a complaint. But it’s part of why do things take so long. Well, that’s one of the reasons it takes us a long time to get the policy solutions, because it all becomes then a political process instead of a scientific process.
Translation: If only we could leave energy policy safely in the hands of scientists. Wait, maybe that’s not the best idea.
....
Rex W. Tillerson is ExxonMobil's Chairman, CEO and President. He made $22.4 million in 2009.[1]
Ties to American Legislative Exchange Council
Exxon Mobil is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and a representative sits on the Corporate ("Private Enterprise") Board. [2]
| About ALEC |
|---|
| ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site. |
Background
In December 1999, Tillerson became Executive Vice President of ExxonMobil Development Company. [He] was named Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil Corporation in August 2001, and was elected President of the Corporation and member of the board of directors on March 1, 2004. He assumed his current position January 1, 2006. He is a member of the Executive Committee and is a former Chairman of the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group representing corporate 400 members involved in all aspects of the oil natural gas industry. He is also a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank founded during the cold war that focuses on issues related to U.S. defense policy and international security.[3][4]
Other Affilations
- Member of the National Petroleum Council, a federally chartered and privately funded advisory committee that was established by the Secretary of the Interior in 1946 at the request of President Harry S. Truman, which functions now under the U.S. Department of Energy as a Oil and Natural Gas Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Energy;[5]
- Member of the Business Roundtable, "an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with nearly $6 trillion in annual revenues and more than 13 million employees;"[6]
- Honorary Trustee of the Business Council for International Understanding, a membership organization of more than 150 multinational corporations that provides opportunities for "senior business executives to interact with heads of state/government, cabinet ministers, and senior government officials;"[7]
- Member of the Emergency Committee for American Trade, a membership organization of American "manufacturing, financial, processing, merchandising, and publishing" corporations whose "combined exports run into the tens of billions of dollars" and whose "annual worldwide sales exceed $1.5 trillion," that actively supports "legislative and other measures that facilitate U.S. trade and investment" and opposes "changes in U.S. trade and tax law that unfairly penalize their competitiveness in world markets. ECAT members support the continued expansion of the multilateral trading system to provide new opportunities for farmers, manufacturers, and service providers, and to improve compliance with agreements to protect intellectual property rights. They also encourage business people overseas to support policies that assure fairer treatment of American goods in foreign markets and to oppose restrictions on U.S. companies."[8][9]
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ Exxon Mobil CEO’s salary hits $22.4M,"Bizjournals.com." April 13, 2009.
- ↑ Private Enterprise Board, ALEC website, accessed July 7, 2011.
- ↑ "Rex Tillerson", Expert. Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS.org. Accessed July 9, 2011.
- ↑ Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Research focus," organization website, accessed May 2009.
- ↑ National Petroleum Council, "About NPC," organization website, accessed June 25, 2011
- ↑ Business Roundtable, "About Us," organization website, accessed June 25, 2011
- ↑ Business Council for International Understanding, "About BCIU," organization website, accessed June 25, 2011
- ↑ Emergency Committee for American Trade, "About ECAT," organization website, accessed June 25, 2011
- ↑ Senior Executives,"ExxonMobil"
External resources
External articles
Categories: ALEC Exposed | Water | Energy