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Did you get your Valentine gift from Exxon Mobil?
The day before this annual celebration of romantic fantasy, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson flitted out like a pink cupid to shoot a little arrow of corporate love at the world’s environmental heart. For the first time ever, an Exxon chief conceded that, yes, there is this thing called global warming going on. Hear it in Tillerson’s own words: “The risks to society and ecosystems from climate change could prove to be significant.”
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This is not exactly news to the world’s top climate-change scientists, who said in a landmark report earlier this year that global warming is unequivocally underway, is almost certainly caused by such human activities as burning oil for fuel, and should be blunted by prompt action.
Tillerson’s arrow however, didn’t go nearly that far. In fact, cupid is a fantasy, and so is the notion that Big Oil really wants anyone to do anything to stop the carbon emissions causing the potentially apocalyptic damage of climate change.
Indeed, Exxon’s Rex fell back on the same, tired blah-blah-blah that the industry and its corporate-funded apologists always use. “There’s not a clear 100 percent conclusion drawn” that industrial emissions are causing the warming, he weaseled. Well, gosh, Rex, no. There’s not “a clear 100 percent conclusion” that drinking a can of crude oil will kill you – but would you do it?
The problem with global warming is that by the time we get to 100 percent certainty… it’s too late. How about a 90 percent certainty, Rex? That’s what the experts now say we’re at.
Of course, Tillerson is more interested in Exxon’s bottom line that the globe’s. In his Valentine message, he even took a nasty shot at alternative fuels, snickering that they’re just so much “moonshine.”
This is Jim Hightower saying… I’ll take moonshine any day over the monkeyshine that Exxon keeps trying to pull on us.
Sources:
“Exxon Chief Cautions Against Rapid Action to Cut Carbon Emissions,” The New York Times, February 14, 2007.