8/12/2019 Perform a Miracle … or Just Do Your Job

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Dear Rex,

Believe it or not, you have the capacity to perform a miracle ... that would make you a saint in the eyes of some.

Or ... you could just continue doing your job, following the conventional expectations ... what would that make you?

You have a choice as you progress through the early sexagenarian maturation process ... what will be your legacy?

Read this in your leisure time. Seriously consider joining Ban Ki-moon and the Climate Summit in September.

Dream about it, and lay awake pondering.

Sincerely yours,Doug Grandt

The climate change deniers have wonScientists continue to warn us about global warming, but mostof us have a vested interest in not wanting to think about it

Nick Cohen | The Observer | 22 March 2014 | http://bit.ly/Guard22Mar

 The Amazon rainforest is burnt to clear land for agriculture near Novo ProgressoSmoke billows as an area of the Amazon rainforest is burnt to clear land for agriculture.hotograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

The American Association for the Advancement of Science came as close as such a respectableinstitution can to screaming an alarm last week. "As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what theyshould do," it said as it began one of those sentences that you know will build to a "but". "But human-caused climate risks abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes."

In other words, the most distinguished scientists from the country with the world's pre-eminenteducational institutions were trying to shake humanity out of its complacency. Why weren't theirwarnings leading the news?

Douglas Grandt <answerthecall@me.com>

Rex Tillerson <Rex.W.Tillerson@ExxonMobil.com>

David Rosenthal <David.S.Rosenthal@exxonmobil.com>, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon <ecu@un.org>

Perform a miracle … or just do your job

 

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In one sense, the association's appeal was not new. The Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, theUS National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC and the national sciencebodies of 30 or so other countries have said that man-made climate change is on the march. A surveyof 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published in the last 20 years found that 97% saidthat humans were causing it.

When the glib talk about the "scientific debate on global warming", they either don't know or will notaccept that there is no scientific debate. The suggestion first made by Eugene F Stoermer that theplanet has moved from the Holocene, which began at the end of the last ice age, to the manmade Anthropocene, in which we now live, is everywhere gaining support. Man-made global warming and theman-made mass extinction of species define this hot, bloody and (let us hope) brief epoch in the world'shistory.

If global warming is not new, it is urgent: a subject that should never be far from our thoughts. Yet within24 hours of the American association's warning the British government's budget confirmed that it nolonger wanted to fight it.

David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints OwenPaterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as hisenvironment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart ofthis historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gasindustry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability toborrow and lend

 All of which is a long way of saying that the global warming deniers have won. And please, can I haveno emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can't call us "global warming deniers " because"denier" makes us sound like "Holocaust deniers", and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? Theevidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.

Tempting though it is to blame cowardly politicians, the abuse comes too easily. The question remains:what turned them into cowards? Rightwing billionaires in the United States and the oil companies havespent fortunes on blocking action on climate change. A part of the answer may therefore be thatconservative politicians in London, Washington and Canberra are doing their richest supporters'bidding. There's truth in the bribery hypothesis. In my own little world of journalism, I have seenrightwing hacks realise the financial potential of denial and turn from reasonable men and women intobeetle-browed conspiracy theorists.

But the right is also going along with an eruption of know-nothing populism. Just as there are leftishgreens, who will never accept that GM foods are safe, so an ever-growing element on the rightbecomes more militant as the temperature rises.

Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few yearsago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents ofscience would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", acondition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult thathad attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resignfrom their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down andsave the chosen few.

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When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair.Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the lastminute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for theirfaith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free marketeconomics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munchingliberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men andwomen how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit thatthey were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.

The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass rootslies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmadeclimate change is happening but don't want to think about it.

I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week. No editor would stop me. Butthe task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to

happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (notstop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of thepresent?

The American historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Eril M Conway quoted a researcher, who wasasked in the 1970s what his country's leaders said when he warned them that C02 levels would doublein 50 years. "They tell me to come back in 49 years," he replied.

Most of the rest of us think like the Washington politicians of the Carter era. And most of us have noright to sneer at Dorothy Martin and her cult either. We cannot admit it, but like them, we need a miracleto save us from the floods.

 

My message to you, Rex, is that I am a friend, an ally -- I want your legacy to include:cc

Re-energize with clean carbon-free fuels — for life!Re-invent ExxonMobil as an energy company, be more than an oil & gas company.

Re-direct capital investments from carbon-based infrastructure to carbon-free infrastructure.

Announce a retirement schedule for your refineries — let the end-game begin.

.

Your "leadership by example would usher in a new era...."ccPlease meet me for coffee — Let's talk about the urgency and a deadline to protect all life ...