Exxon: The World Is Filled With Hillbillies

For me, I remain hopeful. I’m still inspired by the pope’s encyclical of this year, in which he encourages Catholics, actually encourages everybody, to care for the place we live and encourages us to steer away from practices that make the earth a warmer world.

And at the same time it is maddening, as I’ve been mulling over the news that came out this month of Exxon’s duplicity. While employing its own scientists, who informed the multinational company as far back as the 1970s that the effects of man-made global warming were going to affect the company’s operations in the arctic, Exxon was paying front groups and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute to run their PR campaigns to encourage people to doubt the science of global warming.

Paying scientists to investigate global warming and paying lawyers and PR executives to deny the existence of global warming. The mind is boggled.

The news investigation of Exxon is solid, coming from a yearlong collaboration between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times. Their work includes interviews with dozens of experts, including former Exxon employees, and reviewing Exxon related documents, many of them internal memoranda of Exxon, archived at the University of Texas and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. A similar investigation by Inside Climate News reached the same conclusions.

Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben in an op-ed for The Guardian used the words “treachery” and “sheer, profound, unparalleled evil” to describe Exxon’s decision. He said, “[T]his company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse. In its greed Exxon helped—more than any other institution—to kill our planet.”

I cannot disagree at all with what McKibben has said.

Democrats in the House (no GOP folks) have called on the Department of Justice to investigate the actions of Exxon as to whether the actions of Exxon are illegal. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has called for the same.

There are also the usual folks you might expect who defend Exxon or who try to obfuscate the truth of the matter. There is this from Forbes, written by James Taylor, who has been employed by the Heartland Institute, as he repeats the trope of uncertainty of climate change. Reading this piece, the most glaring questions that Taylor, a lawyer and not a scientist, never addresses are: If Exxon had been truly skeptical about the research of global warming, why did they continue to fund it? If Exxon had that much doubt about their own scientists conclusions about global warming, why did they plan for its eventuality?

A subject repeated again and again in this blog is the absolute disregard that the coal companies have for the land and people of Appalachia Mountaintop removal has spread poverty, disease, and ecological destruction all across Appalachia. They do not care about the people who live in those hills. And the folks there have put up with the abuse, raising little protest when it comes to the ways of King Coal

And so here we have Exxon treating the whole world as though it were some impoverished holler in West Virginia. In the course of their pursuit of profit Exxon has said that it does not care about the coastal cities infringed upon by rising seas. They don’t care about greater storms bringing floods and destruction. They do not care about the water shortages exacerbated by longer and drier droughts. They do not care about the coral reefs dying from the oceans being 30 percent more acidic than they were 100 years ago. Exxon cared about dollars and the whole rest of the world is filled with ignorant hillbillies.

So far we have proven Exxon right. Except for Sanders and a few others, I hear no outcry. I don’t sense that folks are upset. I’ve heard of no boycotts. Maybe the whole world is a bunch of hillbillies.