No to ExxonMobils Tillerson for Secretary of State
Pam McVety, My View 11:07 a.m. EST December 8, 2016
History and past actions dont seem to matter to President-elect Donald Trump, but they matter to most of us. Investigative reporters, NGOs and more than a dozen Attorneys General believe that ExxonMobil Corporation may have obstructed and delayed action to address climate change for decades. Now Donald Trump is considering rewarding its CEO, Rex Tillerson, by appointing him Secretary of State.
The Dec. 8 New York Review of Books article The Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) vs. Exxon, by David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, explains why ExxonMobil has not been a good corporate citizen when it comes to climate change, based on findings from a RFF funded investigation by a team of independent reporters from the Columbia School of Journalism to determine what Exxon really knew about climate science and when.
The findings of the reporters were published in the Los Angeles Times in the fall of 2015. They found that Exxons own scientists warned the company repeatedly as early as the 1970s and into the 1980s about the seriousness of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels caused it. Knowing this, Exxon had a choice: It could join the growing scientific consensus that action was needed to curb carbon emissions or it could fight it. It chose to fight although Exxon denies this.
A quote from the article: For decades it published frequent advertorials on the editorial page of The New York Times, questioning the reality of climate change or its human cause, or arguing that predictions about global warming were too unreliable to justify efforts to prevent it.
More:
http://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2016/12/08/mcvety-exxonmobils-tillerson-secretary-state/95139802/
I'm very proud to say that I know Ms McVety!