Possible Prosecution of Exxon and Possibly Falling Short

This is a great development. While the story was broken over a month ago, the headlines today tell us that Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general has launched an investigation into Exxon looking into allegations that the oil giant misled their shareholders and the public on the risks that global warming posed to the corporation’s business. Even the Wall Street Journal, which has ties to the global warming denial industry, printed the story.

            The corporate headquarters of Exxon in Irving, Texas acknowledged receiving the subpoena for internal documents, some of which go back 38 years, related to Exxon’s climate change research and business decisions.

            If Exxon actually knew of global warming and its dangers and paid off front groups to work at denying those hard facts, it may very well be the greatest wrong done to the world by a corporation. So it is a bit of an irony that the wrongdoing Exxon may wind up having to pay the piper for is that of their responsibility to their shareholders. Schneiderman is investigating Exxon under the Martin Act, a broad New York state law that allows for prosecution of companies for financial fraud, which includes the act of misleading stockholders.

            I don’t deny the importance of investors being properly informed of their financial risks when they put their money in a company like Exxon. After all, people rely on their investments to finance their children going to college or provide for a good retirement. But the people who are going to suffer the most from global warming are farmers whose lands may be hotter and drier and subject to more severe weather, coastal inhabitants who will have their beaches and bay fronts submerged under rising tides, and people who live on Pacific Islands, whose homelands may be lost to rising oceans.

            Isn’t there any law that can hold Exxon responsible for these people?

Exxon Trashes Planet and the Press Yawns

It has been almost a month since Inside Climate News and a partnership of the Los Angeles Times and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism began publishing their findings that, while Exxon’s scientists had determined decades ago that the burning fossil fuels caused global warming, the large company funded groups like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute who dealt in the business of casting doubt on the science of climate change.

This is possibly one of the greatest scandals of our time; so it is maddening to observe the lack of press coverage of this story. A Proquest search of Donald Trump, only one of the GOP presidential candidates, for the month of October brings up 2043 newspaper stories. A Proquest search of Exxon and climate change brought up 84 results.[1] That is Donald Trump receiving 2,332% more coverage than one of the world’s largest corporations knowing that they are propelling the whole planet into a climate crisis and covering it up. If you like pie charts, here’s a pie chart of the respective press coverage.

You say, OK, but that’s Donald Trump, a headline magnet. A similar search on Carly Fiorina brought up 185 results, still way more than Exxon and their cover-up. Why is there such silence from the press on this? Tell me what you think.

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[1] For the Donald Trump search, I searched on the term “Trump” and restricted the search to headlines in the last 30 days. For the Exxon search, I searched for both the term “Exxon” and “climate change” occurring anywhere in the news story.

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.

No-Fly Zone over Mayflower, Arkansas: Is the FAA Helping Exxon Mobile to Hide Its Oil Spill?

There is in place over the skies of Mayflower, Arkansas, a no-fly zone. Planes, helicopters, even zepplins are restricted from flying over the town that just experienced a large oil spill from Exxon Mobile. The flight restriction is in place “until further notice.” The no-fly zone is being administered not by the FAA, but by Exxon Mobile.

            Over at Fox News, the restrictions are depicted as being in place for safety reasons, but if past oil spills are any example, the no-fly zone is there to restrict press coverage. And this is all with FAA approval.

            It is understandable that Exxon doesn’t want the press to broadcast images of its oil spreading all over Mayflower, Arkansas. And I guess that anymore I should not be surprised that a department of the federal government would help them do it. It happens elsewhere. Statehouses are helping meatpackers and slaughterhouses to keep their operations under wraps with “Ag Gag” laws that would that make it a crime to expose animal cruelty or unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses or other agricultural productions. In Michael Shnayerson’s book on mountaintop mining in West Virginia Coal River he writes that anyone who wanted to review a copy of a mountaintop mining permit issued by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection—like a license or property title, a public document—needed to file a Freedom of Information Request.

            Exxon, BP, Massey Energy, they all want to keep their secrets. Our tax dollars should not be helping them to do so.