Bill McKibben at The Nation writes— Exxon Mobil has used climate science to prepare for its future while simultaneously discrediting it:
Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth- and 16th-largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil-fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now—entirely legally—is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.
Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: We could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter-century of pointless climate debate. [...]
So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientistmpointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that, but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.
But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spentlavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.
Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full-steam-ahead in developing a fossil-fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. “It is highly unlikely,” he said, “that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.” Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong—as wrong as a man could be. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Resistance continues in Libya, Bahrain. Violence and fatalities spread:
Unconfirmed reports on social media, via telephone and by email say that protesters over the past two days in several cities in Libya have clashed with armed security forces as well as "greens," civilian enforcers of the mishmash ideology contained in dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi's "Green Book," a windy treatise on social, political and economic issues. Witnesses say that hospitals are filled with wounded protesters and that in the cities of al-Bayda and Benghazi in eastern Libya at least 14 dissidents have been killed.
In Tripoli today, a few hundred anti-government demonstrators appeared in the Green Square downtown while anti-government protesters gathered on streets in several parts of the city. There were reports via social media and texting, all of them unconfirmed, of minor clashes.
In Benghazi Tuesday night, after an arrest of an opposition leader brought 2000 people into the streets, security forces responded, witnesses said, with tear gas, water cannon and bullets. Protesters threw stones at police, trashed some government offices and burned several vehicles. Unverified reports say the regime flew troops to Benghazi Wednesday night and has planted snipers on rooftops in key locations.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up the latest polls and horse race news. Listener comments on evangelicals & liberal Christians, blogging & activism, and MI’s misguided targeting of UI fraud. White people are killing themselves rather than face poverty.
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