Slashdot Mirror
Exxon CEO: Warming Happening, But Fears Overblown
Freshly Exhumed writes "In a speech Wednesday, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said. Tillerson blamed a public that is "illiterate" in science and math, a "lazy" press, and advocacy groups that "manufacture fear" for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations."
Apparently we're past denial and anger, and are now in the middle of bargaining.
This is going to get rough. Before we get to acceptance, we have depression to go through first.
Ahem, sorry. I meant Fr1st!!!!
I'm sure they'll do the same thing the Creationists did with Evolution; admit to some very small degree that the theory is correct, but insist that theory only explains minor phenomena.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
MAN MADE global warming is another hoax by the "earth first" marxist who still want their socialist utopia where
there is one world government. Sorry...until you can explain "man made global warming" before the industrial revolution, you
are talking to the wall.
Tillerson blamed a public that is "illiterate" in science and math, a "lazy" press Yes, the public is about as smart as a rock. But that doesn't mean you need to spin it. Desertification of wide swaths of land as well as the acidification of the oceans will be pretty hard to deal with.
He may be right, but I'll bet he wonders why people hate oil companies universally with comments like this. It doesn't even sound like he tried to spin it, sounds like he was drunk.
And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain Not a concern for Exxon, he means.
Of course it's not a concern for Exxon, when you have the US military, NATO and the UN as your personal mercenaries. Once again, sounds like he's drunk. How else could that be interpreted.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hard sciences" and "rock solid". Yes there are hard physical principles used in the IPCC report, but when applied to a chaotic system such as the climate, I believe their findings more "spongy". In my view Climate Science is science in slow motion. From a public policy point of view it is a tough nut to crack. We know the benefits of cheap plentiful energy, but the future risks have a large amount of uncertainty attached to them. If I were the CEO of Exxon I would argue this point, which in a way he has.
The atmosphere is a chaotic system, but the climate configuration, is a general property of it. And it's perfectly possible to study the general properties of a chaotic system with good precision. You can predict the general properties of a quantity of water boiling in a pan, even if reliably predicting the trajectory of bubbles is out of reach.
There's nothing like $HOME
If the same people who believe that creationism is a drop in replacement for science were also the ones objecting to unobstructed consumption, manufacture and/or sale of oil/gas products, and the global warming theory
However its generally, but not always the more scientificly aware people who come out against fossil fuel usage as a whole, and global warming. There has really yet to be a good scientific study against global warming other than soley industry funded research.(like a bunch of scared CEOs desperately trying to keep stock prices from tanking in a panic)
<quote>have you stopped driving your car yet</quote>
This argument is a fallicy, our society is set up around automobile usage, and it'd be difficult if not impossible in most places to continue your life without an automobile. A better argument would be why aren't people buying more efficeint cars. Many are, but I still see a steady parade of people communiting to office buildings in SUVs. The worst part, is since they consume more fuel, they increase demand driving prices up.
We should all remember who spent the most money in making the false arguements that climate scientists were only doing this for the money, that there was no truth to manmade global climate change. They should suffer the consequences of their lies and propaganda that kept us from doing something to reverse it when we still could. Look at the Arctic now as an example. Less summer ice, cloud cover diminished, its becoming a disaster, all because a few rich guys want to make more money.
Tillerson cleverly attacks the weakest part of research about climate change: the prospective part, about its consequences.
In general, the short term projections that were included in the 'concensus' report by the IPCC show that the scientists underestimated the effects of global warming, so far.
Tillerson is combining PR and salesmanship. He acknowledged the objection, and then he minimized it. After which he went on to taught the strengths of his company and it's position and even called to question the intelligence of it's detractors. It was really quite masterful, in a pathological sense, since, if you view his assertions in light of the fact that climate change, if severe enough, could challenge humanity's ability to produce enough agricultural output to support the current population, require the re-engineering of all of our coastal facilities and population centers worldwide, and require the relocation of millions of refugees who exist at subsistence level to begin with.
Tillerson, on the other hand, is in the enviable of position of being able to outsource his move, off-shore his assets and afford to have staff make all the arrangements.
And when the full effects of AGW come into play, those poor people will be even worse off. Sure, the First World can probably roll with the punches, but for those in the Third World, changes in agricultural belts could spell absolute catastrophe. But hey, short term benefits and fuck the future, huh!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I suggest you read the IPCC report: most of its conclusions are at best couched in terms like "likely" (meaning >66% probability estimate by experts). The fact that they need to determine probabilities by expert judgment, rather than by statistics on observations, tells you that they don't have much data to go on. The results are not independently reproducible because most of them are retroactive interpretations of data. "Rock solid" is five sigma results obtained in multiple independent experiments.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that in order for "expert judgment" to be worth anything, you need to test and verify that your experts are actually qualified and that they are unbiased, but the IPCC report has been created by a self-selected crowd of people with an ax to grind whose qualifications are all over the place, and whose conclusions were arrived at by negotiation and not statistics.
Not to mention the crazy fantasies some environmentalists have that people would actually just *allow* rising sea levels to destroy any valuable property, or that civil engineers are just going to disappear from the earth.
We're talking about a gradual rise of a couple of feet over the span of hundreds of years, not a fsck'ing tsunami. Major hurricanes bad enough to destroy anything smaller than a skyscraper badly enough to require demolition and rebuilding happen about once per century. As those non-skyscrapers get destroyed, they'll just be rebuilt on taller pilings (or get rebuilt as skyscrapers). Either way, the surrounding terrain can be built up with fill dirt (possibly dredged and pumped from offshore, like the sand used to rebuild Miami's beaches every few years).
In the case of skyscrapers that can't be raised, they'd do what they did in places like Chicago -- turn the second floor into the first floor, turn the first floor into the basement, and spread another 8 feet of dirt around the building's base. In a city like Miami, the roads would get rebuilt a foot higher every few decades (like they have anyway... take a peek at West Road in South Beach sometime, and compare its height to the height of any adjacent building that's more than 10 years old)... gradually turning the surrounding area in poor neighborhoods into a soggy, swampy slum where water flooded front and back yards after most rainstorms. Wealthy areas would get built higher, and in the meantime they'd have more expensive actively-pumped drainage systems added to deal with the annoyance of roads that flood after every summer rainstorm.
Eventually the poor (increasingly swampy) neighborhoods would get bought up during a future real estate boom, bulldozed away, covered by a few feet of new fill dirt to raise them higher than the road again, and covered with expensive new homes. The really, really, hopelessly-poor areas would eventually get bought up and turned into limestone mines (providing cheap fill dirt for buyers in the remainder of the city), and eventually Miami would have a big urban inland lake between I-95 and roughly NW 17 Avenue, bounded by Metrorail and State Road 112 to the south, and ending a mile or two south of the county line. In cities like Washington DC (where the buildings have historical significance and can't be casually rebuilt), they'd just dam & levee the Potomac, and upgrade drainage systems from passive ditches to actively-pumped storm drains.
There are plenty of places that exist RIGHT NOW that would be submerged underwater for all or most of the year if it weren't for active drainage and civil engineering. The only thing rising sea levels would change is the need to do the same thing in areas that historically were capable of being kept dry by less aggressive means.
It's the same reason why, year after year, the NHC issues dire warnings about inland flooding from storm surge due to hurricanes in Florida that ultimately fail to pan out once you get more than a block or two inland -- they're all based on models of a natural coastline that hasn't actually existed in decades, and fail to take into consideration the existence of large-scale urban stormwater management systems.
You've got it pretty spot on. Although I think it's more like "As long as I don't have the pay the bills, why the hell should I care?". And that's the real message, humanity will adapt to the changes (barring genocidal wars) but society will pay the cost for Exxon's pollution. Anyone who doesn't like the bank bailouts should pay attention: Rex Tillerson just said "We're too big fail, the government will pay the Global Warming bills when they come due".
They're planning on having tax payers cover the costs for their actions over the next two centuries. We're talking estimated costs of around 75 trillion (2012) dollars over the next 200 years (that covers us until oil, coal, and natural gas supplies are exhausted and the post-oil climate stabilizes) to adapt to climate change.
Fanatically anti-fanatical