President-elect Donald Trump has been revealing his proposed leadership team for the new Administration set to take office next month.\u00a0 According to media reports, it appears that his nominee for Secretary of State will be the head of oil-giant ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson.\u00a0 Of course, we do not know if in fact Mr. Tillerson will be the nominee, but the leaks of his nomination will undoubtedly trigger controversy.<\/p>\n
Being the head of one of the world\u2019s largest and most profitable corporations offers possible advantages in the Department of State.\u00a0 Despite no experience in diplomacy, Mr. Tillerson has traveled widely and likely has an extensive network of global contacts, including those at the highest levels of foreign governments. In addition, having run a behemoth corporation, managing the Department of State with its far-flung global activities should be something Mr. Tillerson is familiar with.<\/p>\n
Like any other wealthy corporate executive, however, there will be appropriate questions raised that should force Mr. Tillerson to explain how he plans to address the inevitable conflicts of interest arising from his personal financial investments, as well as the corporate interests of ExxonMobil.<\/p>\n
But the Tillerson nomination raises a unique question: How does he explain the decades of ExxonMobil\u2019s strategies of attacking global efforts to combat climate change \u2013 changes in the earth\u2019s climate that are largely the result of the burning of greenhouse gases?<\/p>\n
In recent media reports, it has been revealed that Exxon\u2019s scientists had been sounding the alarm within the company over the heating up of the planet and that oil and gas were key ingredients of that warming.\u00a0 Those scientists were at the cutting edge of research and had discovered the connections between the burning of coal, oil and gas and global warming.<\/p>\n
Those scientists were clamoring for action \u2013 not only for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of the company as well.\u00a0 They claimed, correctly, that as the planet heated up there would be more regulatory actions to reduce the use of fossil fuels.\u00a0 Those individuals wanted Exxon to get ahead of the policy curve.<\/p>\n
Exxon\u2019s reaction was to essentially shut down their science and double down of the use of fossil fuels \u2013 all the while hammering away that there was no such thing.<\/p>\n
The company hired legions of advocates to muddy the waters and attack those who were advocating for actions to minimize the damage from climate change.\u00a0 They even funded \u201cfront groups\u201d to make their case so that the public would be deceived into thinking that these groups were truly independent.<\/p>\n
And it worked, decades later there is little evidence that the United States will seriously address the issue, despite the overwhelming evidence that the world is on a soon-to-be irreversible trajectory toward runaway global warming.<\/p>\n
If that happens, tens of millions of people \u2013 most of whom live in societies that have played virtually no role in the warming of the planet \u2013 will face misery, disease, and incredible hardship.<\/p>\n
Mr. Tillerson has worked at ExxonMobil for over 4 decades, during the time of the company\u2019s<\/em> internal, and world\u2019s<\/em> external, debates over climate change.\u00a0 While he may not have been the architect of ExxonMobil\u2019s strategies, he has defended them, often aggressively.<\/p>\n If he is the nominee of the new President, he will have questions to answer: How he will handle his conflicts of interest, his relations with other nations\u2019 leaders, and how does he justify his company\u2019s use of its enormous wealth to essentially snuff out an effort to avert a global disaster? A disaster that for decades Exxon\u2019s scientists had predicted would come \u2013 climate changes that would profoundly, and disastrously, affect the planet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President-elect Donald Trump has been revealing his proposed leadership team for the new Administration set to take office next month.\u00a0 According to media reports, it appears that his nominee for Secretary of State will be the head of oil-giant ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson.\u00a0 Of course, we do not know if in fact Mr. Tillerson will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1791,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions\/1791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}