MSNBC Saturday cited two sources close to President-Elect Donald Trump’s transition team saying that Exxon-Mobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson will be named secretary of State next week. Tillerson has been at the helm of Exxon for a decade and has worked 40 years for the oil giant. In a surprising turn of events, he was noted Friday as being the leading candidate for the post.
An official announcement is not expected until next week. Which means that Trump, who has seemingly interviewed half the multimillionaires in America for the post, could still change his mind. But it seems that, unlike his discussions with Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani for the post, Trump is not out to humiliate Tillerson.
Exxon—the world’s second largest corporation with $246.2 billion in revenues and $34 billion in profit in 2015—has widespread international interests. It drills for oil and gas in 50 nations on six continents. That could add to the incoming administration’s much-noted conflicts of interest.
As The Wall Street Journal and others have reported, like Trump himself and other members of his campaign and transition teams, Tillerson has close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. In 2011, he negotiated a deal with Putin that experts believe could ultimately be worth half a trillion dollars. The following year, Putin awarded Tillerson Russia’s Order of Friendship decoration. In 2014, Exxon discovered oil in the Russian Arctic.
Unlike several of Trump’s choices for high-level slots in the new administration, Tillerson isn’t quite a flat-out climate science denier even though an analysis by Carbon Brief in 2011 found that 9 of the 10 top deniers had financial arrangements with Exxon. In 2012, Tillerson said: "Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions." But then he added: "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say 'We just have to stop this,' I do not accept." And, in 2013, at the company’s annual meeting:
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.
All that is rather far from the message being put forth in the Paris climate agreement completed last year, something Tillerson would have to deal with as secretary of State, assuming his boss doesn’t carry out his threat to withdraw from the agreement or renegotiate it.
Tillerson’s views on what U.S. relations with Iran, China, the Middle East and elsewhere should be are not publicly unknown.
