After his company and industry spent decades funding groups that denied the reality of climate change or the role of humanity in driving it, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is now questioning whether there’s anything humanity can do anything about it.
“With respect to our ability to influence it, I think that’s still an open question,” said Tillerson, who left the colossal fossil to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, during a talk to an industry conference Tuesday. “Our belief in the ability to influence it is based upon some very, very complicated climate models that have very wide outcomes.”
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The remarks “stand in stark contrast to the scientific consensus that cutting emissions can help slow humanity’s contribution to global warming,” Bloomberg reports. Even though Tillerson acknowledged the climate threat shortly after taking the helm of Exxon in 2006, he’s been a steady obstacle to action.
“While leading the Western Hemisphere’s biggest oil company, Tillerson was an opponent of climate-friendly shareholder resolutions and carbon cap-and-trade systems,” the news agency states. “He also was a leading proponent of fracking and relished public debates with activists over the technical nuances of the United Nations climate research.”
If the several billionaires in the Fossil Fuel Industry (that Tillerson ‘represents’) their thousands of lobbyists and their ‘bought politicians’ would just get out of our way, we’d get the job done licketey-split!