Rex Tillerson

It must be the anti-obscenity laws that have created the ban.

During the election “debates” three dirty little words were never mentioned: “global climate change”. And now, there is a public furor over Trump’s nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State.  The furor is over whether Tillerson will be looking out for the interests of US capitalism as a whole in relation to Russia, or whether he’ll be favoring the interests of ExxonMobil.

Missing again are those same three dirty little words. The hope is that they will be gone and forgotten, but we must not forget…

We should not forget the role ExxonMobil played in funding the climate change denial industry, despite the fact that their own research had proven it to be a fact. As the New Yorker writes a year ago: “As early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming…. Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research…. Exxon responded … by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns…. The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt.”

Exxon (and later ExxonMobil) was the main funder of the climate denial cabal. And Tillerson?

The manipulation of the corporate controlled media.
Rex Tillerson and his gang at Exxon are the prime movers behind this manipulation, yet the corporate politicians – Republican and Democrat alike – have not a word to say about this.

By 1998, Tillerson had become Vice President of Ventures for Exxon and following their merger with Mobil the next year he became executive vice president of ExxonMobil Development Company. In 2004 he became president of Exxon Mobil and in 2006 it’s CEO. In other words, for all those years he had no apparent problem with Exxon’s blatantly dishonest campaign.

It’s true that in recent years ExxonMobil has backed off some of it’s funding for some of the more extreme of the climate denialist groups. But they’re still at it. They still apparently contribute to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which supports climate denialist legislation. And in 2014, they donated over $30 million to climate denialist groups. And as to Tillerson, his position, as expressed at a shareholders meeting, is: “[A]s a species, that’s why we’re all still here. We have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we will adapt to this.” In other words, no big deal.

Yet none of this ever gets mentioned. In other words, what remains the number one threat to human society – and to life on the planet in general – pales in comparison to looking out for the interests of all of US capitalism vs. their Russian rivals.