Cid - "Since Exxon knew that the burning of fossil fuels leads to dangerous climate change as early as the 1970's (per internal Exxon memos and presentations), then they also knew that what they had already found couldn't be extracted and sold, lest it be burned and do irreparable harm through dangerous climate change."
Stop, take a breath and think about what you just said. First, and most important, if XOM had disclosed whatever their analysis may or may not have revealed...so what? It had no legal requirement to stop doing their thing.
At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.
“In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.
It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.
A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.
“Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed,” Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.
So they knew. Yet:
Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.
Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse in the Senate, and Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier in the House, have called on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil for possibly perpetrating fraud, and if warranted, launch a RICO investigation of the company (and other fossil fuel companies) similar to the tobacco industry lawsuit it launched, and won, more than a decade ago. In addition, four House members including Ted Lieu have also called on the SEC to investigate Exxon for fraud, perhaps under the Sarbanes-Oxley law.
The Sarbanes-Oxley law makes corporate executives personally and criminally liable for fraudulent statements on annual and quarterly reports that go out under their signature. The value of corporate assets — including, in the case of the carbon industry, its oil, gas and coal reserves — is part of every annual statement. If a corporation knows, for example, that climate change will inevitably “strand” (render valueless) a large percentages of those assets, and yet misdeclares and knowingly overvalues those assets … well, that sounds like investor fraud to me.
Once a Sarbanes-Oxley investigate starts, especially in the roiling climate of a RICO investigation, you may see not just price chaos, but CEO chaos as well — by which I mean the chaos of CEOs mounting their corporate jets for Switzerland, family and numbered bank accounts in hand.
It was surely no accident that on the same day that President Obama said "no" to the hugely controversial Keystone Pipeline, and just weeks before the COP 21 Climate Summit, he said: "yes" to nuclear energy. I was honored to be one of 177 invitees to the nuclear summit at the White House this month.
Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline ends a seven-year saga with a declaration that the project is "not in the national interest and would undercut US global leadership in the fight against climate change". The White House said the rejection was key to bolster credibility as the US urges other nations to confront climate change. In the final weeks building up to COP21 in Paris, the rejection sends a diplomatic message as the Obama Administration works towards a global climate agreement.
In opening the White House Nuclear Summit, Dr. John Holdren, assistant to President Obama on science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said: "President Obama considers addressing the global climate change challenge to be a top priority."
Political leadership of this kind is critical, given that average global temperatures have already risen by 1C since the industrial revolution. Paris is supposed to ensure that warming doesn't exceed 2C, even though the existing pledges made so far will amount to between 3C to 4C of warming by 2100, depending on your level of optimism or pessimism. Beyond that 2C threshold, scientists say severe and irreversible changes are likely. Whatever you think about arbitrary thresholds: going beyond 2C looks nothing short of disaster on an epic, heart-breaking scale.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
dohboi wrote:Well, I guess we're just destined to fry one way or the other, so might as well be a micro-wave as much as a crock pot.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
ROCKMAN wrote:Lore - Nothing Cid said contradicts a single point that I made. But I appreciate how difficult it is for you and Cid to accept that both of you are members of the group DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the vast majority of GHG produced from fossil fuels. And doing so with full knowledge of the damage you're contributing to. XOM may or may not have known or acknowledged the extent of the problem. But both you and Cid clearly do. And yet both of you continue your contribution to the problem.
A federal court has ruled that the Enbridge Alberta Clipper (Line 67) cross-border tar sands pipeline expansion project,permitted covertly and behind closed doors by the Obama Administration, got its greenlight in a legal manner.
...
But first the basics: President Barack Obama and the State Department gave Enbridge its initial Alberta Clipper permit in August 2009, during congressional recess. In November 2012, Enbridge requested an expansion of that pipeline from its initial 450,000 barrels per day capacity to 880,000 barrels per day.
Seeing TransCanada‘s sordid experience with Keystone XL in action, Enbridge decided that a year into the expansion permitting project, it would do what environmental groups have coined a “switcheroo.”
That is, they dreamt up the idea to add pump stations on each side of the border to two different pipelines (in name only, but part of the same pipeline system) — Line 3 and Alberta Clipper, respectively — and avoid having to go through the conventional State Department presidential permit process for border-crossing projects.
Lore wrote:Keith_McClary wrote:Where have you been? That's exactly what these agreements are all about. Trade in goods is only a small part of them (most tariffs are already low anyway).Lore wrote:As far as I know we're still trading in oil with Canada. This is about building a pipeline on U.S. soil. We have trade agreements with many countries, but that doesn't give them the right to plunk a factory down here because of them.
The only NAFTA leg they have to stand on would be to file a lawsuit against the government for damages on the basis that they weren't treated as fair and equitably as our own U.S. companies as per the agreement. Good luck with that one after seven years.
Keith_McClary wrote:Lore wrote:Keith_McClary wrote:Where have you been? That's exactly what these agreements are all about. Trade in goods is only a small part of them (most tariffs are already low anyway).Lore wrote:As far as I know we're still trading in oil with Canada. This is about building a pipeline on U.S. soil. We have trade agreements with many countries, but that doesn't give them the right to plunk a factory down here because of them.
The only NAFTA leg they have to stand on would be to file a lawsuit against the government for damages on the basis that they weren't treated as fair and equitably as our own U.S. companies as per the agreement. Good luck with that one after seven years.
TransCanada to launch NAFTA claim over Keystone rejection
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