If you care about the planet, please make sure you sit down before you start reading this post about ExxonMobil.
So.
The CEO of ExxonMobil just said this in an interview: "We’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need, as a society, to start reducing emissions."
Who's the most influential voice on climate change? Who's to blame for inaction on climate change?
According to the CEO of ExxonMobil, it's environmental activists.
No, really:
"Frankly, society, and the activist—the dominant voice in this discussion—has tried to exclude the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies."
Oh, and the CEO of ExxonMobil also apparently thinks consumers are to blame for climate inaction:
"Today we have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that."
Gets better.
He thinks unnamed 'people who generate emissions' should pay for it. (Rather than, say, major transnational oil companies.)
"People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price. That’s ultimately how you solve the problem."
So, remind me again. Who knew about climate change before most of the public?
"Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue... This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation."
And just who, exactly, stood in the way reducing emissions all these years?
"ExxonMobil executives privately sought to undermine climate science even after the oil and gas giant publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuel emissions and climate change, according to previously unreported documents...
"The new revelations are based on previously unreported documents subpoenaed by New York’s attorney general as part of an investigation into the company announced in 2015. They add to a slew of documents that record a decades-long misinformation campaign waged by Exxon, which are cited in a growing number of state and municipal lawsuits against big oil."
@voracitude I think the biggest subsidy of all is the hidden one.
Burning fossil fuels leads to more frequent and severe floods, droughts, bushfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes.
The costs of rebuilding and recovering from those disasters are a cost of using fossil fuels.
If the fossil fuel companies aren't paying that cost, they're receiving a subsidy. And it's already a massive one.
Also.
I didn't include it in the post above, but apparently the CEO of ExxonMobil is also totally against subsidies...
For climate action:
"The way that the government is incentivized and trying to catalyze investments in this space is through subsidies. Driving significant investments at a scale that even gets close to moving the needle is going to cost a lot of money.
...
"But I would tell you building a business on government subsidy is not a long-term sustainable strategy—we don’t support that."
@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars I agree with him people generating emissions should pay for it. Now let's see how many tons of CO2 does Exxon produce, from drilling oil, transporting crude, refining it, transporting it onwards to its final destination...
@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars
It was said years ago, when climate change becomes undeniable, the deniers will blame the environmentalists. And that was a prediction not a joke.
@SNerd@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars Colleague of mine has always felt when the true impacts arrive, scientists will be blamed. “Why didn’t you tell us it would be this bad?”
@fluids_guru@SNerd@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars the problem is that what scientist think of as conservative, and what politicians think of as conservative does not mash in this particular scenario.
the whole institution of science has been put into a corner where it's not their job to speak up, and if individual scientists do, this can have dramatic repercussions for their career. you'd need the entirety of climate science standing behind those crazy "activists" (scientists who are speaking out)
If you found information that is false, you could have pointed it out and corrected it. Instead you just accused them of spreading disinformation - wherever in the post that might be - without elaborating further and called them vile. Which, I might add, is against the rules.
Someone would indeed have a bright future in the Republican Party, but it's not OP.
EDIT: I withdraw the above statement. I was under the impression that the commenter was accusing OP of disinformation.
It's against the rules to call the CEO of ExxonMobil a vile man?
Fuck that. I'll say it myself. Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods is a vile piece of shit and if he weren't actively destroying the planet with oil he'd be perfectly suited as a Republican politician given his aversion to truth.
And I agree! It's just that the original comment sounded like they were accusing OP of spreading misinformation, not Exxon's CEO. I will retract my earlier statement. Also, apologies to @pedrobizbikedu.
the United States military is behind the curtain. All of their equipment requires silly amounts of fuel. They are the largest producer of greenhouse gases. They won't let the oil industry implode, and they will subsidize it as necessary. since nobody controls the military industrial complex enough to revolutionize their energy strategy in the trillions scale, nobody is driving this dumpster fire.
@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars The questions I have regarding this "interview": Why wasn't he asked after these statements since when Exxon knew about climate change and how Exxon acted on these internal information? Was it an interview or a PR piece for Exxon?
@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars These companies are faced with a stark choice: either they continue down their current path of extracting fossil fuels, or they face extinction. The transition to renewable energy sources is too great a leap for them to make, given their existing profit margins and business models.
This is why nationalizing energy production is the only practical way forward.