ExxonMobil has polluted the Mystic River while failing to plan for the potentially severe impacts of climate change at its Boston-area fuel storage terminal, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by an environmental advocacy group.
Boston-based CLF alleged the company had ignored an "imminent" threat posed by rising sea levels. A storm surge from even a modest hurricane or other significant storm could leave much of the Everett, Massachusetts, facility underwater and result in more devastating pollution to the Mystic River and a smaller tributary, the lawsuit said.
CLF offered flood maps drawn by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support its warning.
"ExxonMobil is aware of these risks, yet has failed to design and implement protective measures to fortify the Everett Terminal as required under federal law," the suit stated.
"For more than three decades, ExxonMobil has devoted its resources to deceiving the public about climate science while using its knowledge about climate change to advance its business operations," said CLF president Bradley Campbell, in a statement announcing the suit.
dohboi wrote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/26/in-a-loss-for-exxonmobil-ny-supreme-court-orders-oil-giant-to-produce-climate-documents/?utm_term=.b2375781b707&wpisrc=al_alert-hse
Loss to Exxon--Court Demands Documents about when they knew about GW
dohboi wrote:Plant, the name of the game is delegitimize. Each individual step toward delegitmization seems inconsequenctial. But the combined force can lead to sudden, dramatic change.
Exxon Mobil Corp., which is under state and federal investigation for how it accounts for the value of its oil and gas wells, said Friday that it may be forced to recognize that as much as 4.6 billion barrels of its reserves are no longer profitable to produce.
The disclosure came as the oil producer reported a 38% decline in quarterly profit.
The vast majority of Exxon’s holdings under scrutiny are in Canada’s oil sands, an area that has been devastated by low prices and environmental concerns as countries around the world seek to reduce high-emitting forms of energy. The company also said it plans to examine its assets to determine whether their value should be written down.
About 3.6 Bbbl of reserves in the Canadian oil sands and the equivalent of another 1.0 Bboe in other North American fields may be written down if the average energy prices seen during the first nine months of 2016 persist, Exxon said in the statement.
kuidaskassikaeb wrote:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/the-rockefeller-family-fund-vs-exxon/
This is a pretty good summary of the case against EXXON mobile, by the other grand children of the Rockefeller.
Basically EXXON scientists knew in the 1980s quite well and with little doubt that global warming was real and a danger to humanity. After a short period of actually investing in science In the hot summer of 1988 they decided to start funding denialist organizations, and play all our conservative friends here for fools.
Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth.
While geoengineering received little favour under Obama, high-level officials within the Trump administration have been long-time advocates for planetary-scale manipulation of Earth systems.
David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering.
He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature.
Geoengineers argue that such methods would be an inexpensive way to reduce global warming, but scientists have warned it could have catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s weather systems.
Scientific modelling has shown that stratospheric spraying could drastically curtail rainfall throughout Asia, Africa and South America, causing severe droughts and threatening food supply for billions of people.
“Clearly parts of the Trump administration are very willing to open the door to reckless schemes like David Keith’s, and may well have quietly given the nod to open-air experiments,” said Silvia Riberio, with technology watchdog ETC Group. “Worryingly, geoengineering may emerge as this administration’s preferred approach to global warming. In their view, building a big beautiful wall of sulphate in the sky could be a perfect excuse to allow uncontrolled fossil fuel extraction. We need to be focussing on radical emissions cuts, not dangerous and unjust technofixes.”
A White House report on climate change research submitted to Congress in January called for the first time ever for research into geoengineering.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also appeared to support geoengineering, describing climate change as an “engineering problem.” ExxonMobil’s funding of the climate denial industry is under investigation by attorney generals in the United States, but it’s less well known that ExxonMobil scientists under Tillerson’s reign as CEO were leading developers of geo-engineering technologies like carbon dioxide removal.
Asked about solutions to climate change at an ExxonMobil shareholder meeting in 2015, Tillerson said that a “plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions.”
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