"And by humanity, I mean me."
Exxon Mobil continues to look like a
finishing school for psychopaths:
The CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp. says there’s no quick replacement for oil, and sharply cutting oil’s use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would make it harder to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.
“What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” CEO Rex Tillerson said at the oil giant’s annual meeting Wednesday.
Oh, he's a card, that one. Raise your hand if you think Exxon Mobil's corporate board gives a crap about lifting people two billion people out of poverty. Put your damn hand down, Joe Barton. Now raise your hand if you think Exxon Mobil would gladly help flood two billion people out of their homes for the next 10,000 years if it meant a 10-cent boost to next quarter's earnings report.
Really, I don't expect the CEO of Exxon Mobil to grasp the finer points of how catastrophic climate change would be bad for people. For poor people, especially. Nor do I think the CEO of Exxon particularly understands that "saving the planet" is not really the point here, as the planet will be just fine even if we light the whole atmosphere on fire and call it done. We humans, however, might experience some difficulties. Exxon Mobil has been one of the prime financiers of climate denial—it's no exaggeration to say they're heavily invested in keeping themselves stupid.
When you pay a man a very fat check to be conspicuously stupid on certain things, he's going to be stupid. He's going to be devoted to it, in fact, if that's what it takes. That would be the whole reason why the Republican/libertarian/wealthybastard notion of letting the companies involved dictate what's going to happen to the planet is … insincere, at best. We (as in, the rest of the planet) know there's a problem. We can objectively measure it, and we therefore we objectively know the problem is getting worse. We know that fixing the problem relies on a reduction of the kind of energy Exxon Mobil is currently devoted to digging up and an expansion of certain kinds of energy that Exxon Mobil is not very good at. They could get good at it, mind you, but Rex Tillerson doesn't get paid to innovate, he gets paid to shovel money down investor gullets as fast and efficiently as he can—as in this week or next week, not 10 years from now.
There was always a strong possibility that companies like Exxon could and would use their vast profits to invest in future dominant forms of energy, but at this point I'm not sure there's any among them that could pull it off even if they wanted to. Call it a national corporate stagnation, blame it on the new obsession with quarterly profits over long-term investments, whatever—the number of vary large American companies able to effectively innovate anything other than a new font for the company logo is becoming vanishingly small. It looks increasingly like the energy giant of the coming decades will be a company nobody's yet heard of, a new Apple of solar or the like—and like the computer wars of the last decades, the primary response from the big boys, the companies not used to having to compete with anyone, is to legislate, ignore or bluster their way through the problem.
When it comes to really lifting people out of poverty—say, by providing energy access to distant places that can't currently get it—or just not wrecking the arable regions of entire nations, I'm perfectly happy if global progress comes at the expense of people like Rex Tillerson. Really, that would be the most satisfying outcome. First we have to coax the government out of his pocket, though.