Elizabeth Kolbert On The Non-Denier Denier And Exxon's Decades Of Climate Lies
This question came to mind this week, when Donald Trump nominated the chairman of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, to be the next Secretary of State. Several news outlets gave Tillerson credit for at least acknowledging that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, a fact that was already considered established science in the Victorian era. The Washington Post noted that Tillerson’s position—that climate change is not a “hoax” invented by the Chinese—is more nuanced than that of many other of Trump’s appointees, and “in the context of how Trump’s administration is shaping up on energy and environmental policy, could almost be called moderate.” The Times editorial board went so far as to praise Tillerson for having “reversed ExxonMobil’s long history of funding right-wing groups that denied the threat of global warming,” and suggested that he might “convince Mr. Trump not to pull out of” the Paris climate accord. All of which goes to show that Tillerson is smart enough to have positioned himself, and repositioned his company, so that there’s now at least confusion about where he stands. But you have to be pretty desperate—and at this point many people are—to take this as cause for optimism.
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The M.I.T and Harvard team assembled the report in support of a letter, signed by more than a hundred and fifty researchers, urging the American Geophysical Union to reject ExxonMobil’s sponsorship for its annual fall meeting. The governing board of the A.G.U., one of the country’s preëminent scientific associations, rejected this request; however, the issue became moot when ExxonMobil, perhaps fearing negative publicity, declined to offer its sponsorship for the meeting. (The A.G.U.’s fall meeting is under way, in San Francisco.)
Meanwhile, climate change continues apace—indeed, at an ever-faster pace. The day after Trump nominated Tillerson, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual report on the state of the Arctic. The report, which reads like a checklist for the apocalypse, observes that the Arctic ice cap is melting, the Greenland ice sheet is shrinking, snow cover is declining, and permafrost is thawing. The thawing permafrost is, in turn, releasing methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In other words, as one scientist put it, the “Arctic is unraveling.”
The world can obviously ill afford to waste the next four years debating whether the world is warming. Equally obviously, this is exactly what the Trump Administration is intent on doing. In this context, the nomination of Rex Tillerson, a non-denier denier, should be seen for what it is: not a cause for hope but yet another reason to be terrified.
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/rex-tillersons-state-of-denial
