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ExxonMobil
Defies Kochs – Warns Governments Must Intervene To Prevent Climate
Catastrophe
While many Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition to kill other Americans of the “wrong” religion, or the “wrong” sexual orientation, or “all the wrong” races, they are sleeping through the second greatest threat to their existence after the Republican Party. Of course, part and parcel of Americans’ ignorance of and opposition to four decades-old data warning that man-made carbon emissions pose the greatest economic and national security threat to Americans is the oil industry’s deceit in pursuit of profits. A significant reason Americans dismiss the impending climate catastrophe is due to being cognitively incapable of connecting historic droughts, severe storms, deadly flooding, and wildfires to climate scientists warnings about historic droughts, severe storms, deadly flooding and increasingly intense wildfires due to carbon emissions. To make matters worse, there has been a four-plus decade-long oil industry crusade to portray global warming as a nasty liberal hoax to destroy America.
Chief
among the groups that learned in the 1970s that man-made carbon
emissions would have “catastrophic”
effects on the Earth’s climate was ExxonMobil. Instead of warning
Americans, ExxonMobil took the
lead in
funding massive misinformation campaigns and attacking climate
scientists. Then the Koch brothers got serious and began issuing
monumentally-large checks for Republican science deniers and oil
industry ‘experts’ to contradict climate scientists empirical
data and research.
It
is important to reiterate that besides real independent climate
scientists’ research in the 70s, it was ExxonMobil’s own
scientists’data
and research warning the oil giant that climate change was
“anthropomorphic” (man-caused), and that without immediate
government intervention global temperatures “will
reach catastrophic levels”
and threaten the Earth’s population. Obviously, ExxonMobil, like
the Kochs a couple of decades later, concealed the 1970’s science
warning the climate is doomed; it is likely why today there are only
10 or 11 people among 300 million aware that climate scientists were
screaming about global climate catastrophe over forty years ago.
Now
though, in a break with the Koch brothers and all but a literal
handful of Republicans, ExxonMobil’s scientists warned the
Washington Post that “with
no government action, average temperatures are likely to rise by a
catastrophic 5 degrees Celsius (9-degrees
Fahrenheit)
with rises of 6, 7 (12,
13 F)
or even more quite possible.”
Climate scientists, even those denying anthropomorphic global
warming, have predicted for a couple of decades, and issued dire
warnings, that a rise in Earth’s temperature of 2 degrees Celsius
is the deadly tipping point and “game
over for the climate.”
It
is certain that the Kochs, whose own scientists’ research agrees
with climate scientists and ExxonMobil’s, and their dirt-stupid
puppets in Congress and state legislatures nearly fainted when
ExxonMobil used science to prophecy the climate’s demise. However,
it is more likely that their heads exploded and their bowels emptied
when ExxonMobil counseled what the government should initiate
immediately to save the climate and billions of human lives.
According
to the Washington Post’s “centrist”
editorial page editor seeking some means of alerting Americans to
just how “dangerously
extreme the Republican Party has become on climate change,”
Fred Hiatt wrote that
“Republicans’
ideologically based denial is dangerous and cowardly.”
Hiatt then noted that ExxonMobil is the polar opposite of an
environmental group like Greenpeace, but unlike the national GOP
leadership, congressional Republicans and presidential candidates,
“ExxonMobil
believes climate change is real, that governments should take action
to combat it, and that the most sensible action would be a
revenue-neutral tax on carbon that taxes fossil fuels like coal and
oil and returns the money to taxpayers.”
Although
ExxonMobil just advised the federal government to take action to save
the climate with a tax on carbon, the “carbon
tax”
was preemptively blocked by
Grover Norquist and Koch brother Republicans in the Senate last
March. There is no way in hell Norquist, or the Kochs, will allow
Republicans to aid in saving the climate or Americans with any kind
of tax, but particularly a tax on anything related to the GOP’s
precious “fossil
fuels;”
materials that are as sacrosanct to Republicans as their devotion to
fascist oligarchy and guns.
ExxonMobil
is the second leading oil corporation to finally admit, in public,
that climate change is real. So real, in fact, that last March Shell
Oil admitted the climate is doomed and the company is planning for a
4-degree C rise in the Earth’s temperature. Shell also acknowledged
that the 4-degree
C riseeclipses
the climate-killing 2C threshold and certain disaster. The oil giant
began planning for a “planet-wide
catastrophe replete with massive flooding, global famines, and
desertification”
in previously temperate zones. The “massive
flooding”
Shell is planning for is “sea
water as sea levels will rise between 2.5 and 3.5 feet leading to
widespread coastal flooding, animal and plant extinctions, and the
near-decimation of global agriculture.”
Shell’s
planning document, similar to ExxonMobil, did not waste time advising
any government solutions because the corporation’s leaders accept
the reality that Republicans will block any government effort to curb
carbon emissions. Shell’s internal document said what
a few Americans already know; “We
do not see government taking any steps now that are consistent with 2
degrees C threshold scenario,”
the tipping point of game over for the climate.
An
optimist may believe that after two giant oil corporations weighed
in, albeit too late, on the catastrophic temperature rise from carbon
emissions, Republicans would give attention to an existential threat
to Americans. However, despite pleas from the Vatican to address
climate change as a humanitarian issue and 200 world leaders
gathering to devise a planet-wide solution, Republicans remain
steadfast in willful denial. And it appears that no amount of
devastating weather events, droughts, wildfires, or flooding creating
economic and national security havoc will affect Republicans. Despite
mounting threats to civilization and corporate acknowledgment that
action is required immediately, Republicans have ramped up their
assault on President Obama’s efforts to address climate change.
It
is a travesty, but as Paul Krugman noted last
week, “the
awesome, terrifying reality is that we’re looking at a party that
has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very
future of civilization at risk. That’s the truth, and it needs to
be faced head-on.”
On the other side of the political spectrum, a member of the right
wing anti-science echo chamber, opinion columnist David Brooks, made
a different argument to come to the same conclusion as Krugman.
Brooks explained that
Republicans’ problem with climate change is that,
“The
G.O.P. has come to resemble a Soviet dictatorship — a vast majority
of Republican politicians can’t publicly say what they know about
the truth of climate change because they’re afraid the thought
police will knock on their door and drag them off to an AM radio
interrogation.”
That
“commie
dictatorship and thought police interrogation”
will come down from the Koch brothers and their substantial corporate
media sycophants, not oil industry giants. Still, even though
ExxonMobil and Shell Oil are predicting a planet-wide climate
catastrophe without concerted government intervention, Republicans
will continue doing the Koch’s bidding and as Paul Krugman said
last week; doom the Earth’s population.
