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Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson: 'What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?'
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.
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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/wealthy bastard 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.
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