Instead of draining the swamp, President-elect Trump has now proposed adding huge amounts of oil to it. Over the weekend, Trump’s transition team said he plans to nominate Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, to serve as Secretary of State.
Now, you might be asking yourself what sterling qualifications Mr. Tillerson would bring to the job. After all, he has no background in diplomacy and has never served in the federal government. At first glance, he seems about as qualified to lead the State Department as Ben Carson does to serve as HUD Secretary.
In fact, Trump’s nominees for numerous cabinet posts appear hell bent on destroying the agencies they have been asked to lead. But in Tillerson’s case, it is likely he will be focused on giving succor to big oil by destroying the environment and rolling back much of the domestic and international progress his predecessors have made on fighting climate change.
First, Tillerson is likely to rip up the Paris climate accord in what would be one of the most audacious gifts ever to the oil and gas industry. It would also bring Exxon’s anti-science lobbying campaign full circle: The company helped found the now defunct Global Climate Coalition, a group of businesses opposed to regulating greenhouse gases that worked to derail ratification of the Kyoto Protcol. According to the Royal Society in London, the company has funded at least 39 organizations – to the tune of $2.9 million – that "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence.”
No wonder Mother Jones called Exxon “the Michael Jordan of climate change denial.”
Yet, you’re likely to hear a lot about Exxon’s – and Tillerson’s – concern about climate change during his Senate confirmation hearings. Following intense media attention about the company’s positions on the issue, Exxon announced in 2010 that the company would invest $100 million, over the course of decade, in the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. The project’s stated aim is to research clean energy technology.
Scientists weren’t impressed. The Union of Concerned Scientists have said that "The funding of academic research activity has provided the corporation legitimacy, while it actively funds ideological and advocacy organizations to conduct a disinformation campaign."
So, in essence, Exxon appears to have been playing a pricey PR game to convince the public of its concern about climate change . . . while the company continued to “drill, baby, drill.”
In fact, the company seems willing to go to almost any lengths to convince Americans it is committed to the environment – including conspiracy theories. Just last month, the New York Times reported that the company blamed the Rockefeller family – yes, the same family behind Standard Oil – for conspiring against it.
“The company,” the Times reported, “which has been accused of scheming to pay surrogates to deny the threat of climate change, is trying to turn the tables by calling its opponents the real conspirators.”
At the end of the day, however, Tillerson appears to be a major part of Trump’s big plan to put the oil and gas industry not just at the table – but at the head of the table – as the international community tries to address climate change.
(In the interests of full disclosure, while everyone alive [and particularly people likely to be alive or have kids or grandkids who are likely to be alive for any significant length of time] should care about climate change, my organization, Public Justice, has an intense professional interest in this subject. We have devoted a great deal of time to suing coal companies and factory farms [both enormous contributors to climate change] over water pollution issues. When we’ve been successful at forcing huge corporations to clean up their operations and comply with the Clean Water Act, they have had to internalize the costs of their operations [meaning, pay the costs of dealing with their pollution themselves, rather than just dumping waste in ways that put the costs on everyone else in America], and this has a significant impact on making renewable fuels even more competitive. So, I have an institutional stake in not seeing American diplomacy turn its back on this global problem, as well as a hope that my kids will live in a world that has not been degraded too horribly beyond the one into which I was born.)
Over the weekend, Donald Trump said “nobody really knows” if climate change is real. But as journalist Dan Rather pointed out, “Actually... People certainly do know that climate change is real - like the scientists who study it and almost every other head of state in the world. And our children, grandchildren, and future generations certainly will know. They will likely look back with utter incredulity if we fail to act.”
Now, the Senate must decide: Will an oil executive who is close pals with Vladimir Putin be put in charge of negotiating the climate accord (and countless other critical matters), or will we insist – for the good of our children, and their children, and our planet’s future – that facts trump cronyism?
The answer will be felt – and seen, and breathed – for generations to come.
Photo by Kristian Dela Cour (Flickr)