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EXXON
CEO - DARREN WOODS
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IT
KILLS THEM GETTING IT OUT -
Drilling and pumping oil is a messy occupation playing with
carcinogenic fluids, that traditionally makes millionaires of
those prospectors. Hence the name "Black Gold" and
"Texas Tea." Years ago oil prospecting was
respectable, today those investing in oil are deemed by many
to be climate criminals - because it kills us when we burn it.
THE GUARDIAN - 28 OCTOBER 2021 - EXXON CEO ACCUSED OF LYING TO CONGRESSIONAL PANEL
The chief executive of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, was accused of lying to Congress on Thursday after he denied that the company covered up its own research about oil’s contribution to the climate crisis.
For the first time, Woods and the heads of three other major petroleum companies were questioned under oath at a congressional hearing into the industry’s long campaign to discredit and deny the evidence that burning fossil fuels drove global heating. When pressed to make specific pledges or to stop lobbying against climate initiatives, all four executives declined.
The chair of the House oversight committee, Representative Carolyn Maloney, pressed Woods about statements by his predecessor, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond, who in the 1990s said the scientific evidence for climate change was “inconclusive” and that “the case for global warming is far from air tight”. In 2002, Exxon ran advertisements in the New York Times calling climate science “unsettled”.
Malone put it to Woods that Exxon’s own scientists had repeatedly warned the company about the threat from burning fossil fuels as far back as the 1970s.
“There is a clear conflict between what Exxon CEO told the public and what Exxon scientists were warning privately for years,” she said.
Woods denied that Raymond or Exxon misled anyone.
“I do not agree that there was an inconsistency,” he said.
Maloney said the response reminded her of “another hearing that we had with the tobacco industry”.
“They said they did not believe that nicotine was addictive. Well, it came out that they lied. Tobacco nicotine was very addictive. And now I’m hearing from you that the science that was reported publicly, where your executives were denying climate change, we know that your scientists internally were saying that it’s a reality,” she said.
HEARING
ON CLIMATE & FOSSEL FUELS - Getting to the bottom of it.
This reminds us of Erin
Brockovich and PG&E, telling the townsfolk at Hinkley
in California that chromium in their water was good for them.
“So I was hoping that you would not be like the tobacco industry was and lie about this.”
The heads of the American operations of the other oil companies –
Shell, Chevron and
BP – also denied they misrepresented climate science or deceived the public.
They each said that they recognised global heating was a reality and a major challenge. But the executives did not accept that their companies had failed to take it seriously or that they were undermining attempts to cut greenhouse gases by funding trade groups pouring millions of dollars into lobbying Congress against tighter environmental laws.
“We accept the scientific consensus,” said Michael Wirth, the CEO of Chevron. “Climate change is real. Any suggestion that Chevron is engaged in disinformation and to mislead the public on these complex issues is simply wrong.”
But Maloney accused the oil companies of continuing the cover-up, including by hiding documents. She said she would take the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to force the firms to reveal what they knew.
“We need to get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign and with these subpoenas we will,” she said.
COAL
&
OIL - Fossil fuel burning has
created deserts out of previously arable farmland. The
suffering in human terms is a tragic consequence of policies
steered by big business, disregarding the duty of care such
companies and executive controlling minds owe to their fellow
man.
The oil and gas industry, which spent about $100m on political lobbying last year, was strongly backed by a number of Republicans on the committee who sought to distract by denouncing Joe Biden’s energy policies.
Republicans called their own witness, Neal Crabtree, who said he lost his job as a welder within three hours of Biden being sworn in as president because the Keystone pipeline was cancelled. Crabtree was used to portray Biden as colluding with China and Russia against America’s oil industry.
The highest-ranking Republican on the committee, Representative James Comer, questioned the legitimacy of the investigation. He said the committee would be better off spending its time investigating the White House’s handling of inflation, illegal immigration and the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In a hearing meant to focus on climate misinformation, several Republican members openly questioned the urgency of the climate crisis. Representative Clay Higgins called the hearing “a threat from within” because the American way of life was built on oil.
Another Republican member said Maloney owed the oil executives an apology for intruding on their right to free speech by pressing them to make a commitment that their firms will “no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change”.
None of the executives would make a direct commitment.
It's
difficult to tell the truth when it is going to hurt you in
the wallet, and you are in love with money.
Maloney showed the hearing a video secretly recorded by Greenpeace earlier this year of an Exxon lobbyist describing the oil giant’s backing for a carbon tax as a public relations ploy intended to stall more serious measures to combat the climate crisis.
“How did Exxon respond?” asked Maloney. “Did they come clean about this shocking conduct? No. Mr Woods called Mr McCoy’s comments inaccurate and then they fired him. And they are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were.”
While the oil executives largely maintained a united front, Representative Ro Khanna, a leading critic of the petroleum industry on the committee, drew out testimony that showed the European companies, Shell and BP, were working to cut production while the US firms, Exxon and Chevron, intended to increase drilling in the coming years.
Wirth said that that Chevron would raise oil production while cutting carbon emissions.
The hearing also questioned the leaders of two powerful lobby groups accused of acting as front organisations for big oil, the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce.
Khanna noted that API was heavily funded by oil company money as it resisted the expansion of infrastructure for electric vehicles and opposed a
methane fee backed by Biden, including flooding Facebook with advertisements in recent months.
Khanna challenged each of the oil executives in turn to resign from API over its position on
electric vehicles or to tell it to stop its opposition to a methane fee. All of them declined to do so.
By Chris McGreal
GERIATRIC
UNDERTAKER
- Companies that pay politicians to lobby for them, to in
effect manufacture fake
news, to
continue with fossil fuels and impede the introduction of electric
vehicles and green
hydrogen, should be prosecuted for human rights
violations. Hannibal
Lecter would be pleased to have this old friend for
dinner. He represents the opposite side of the coin to green
growth, coins being what he is
about. We await to hear from Mr Woods, as to justifying his
position - and rest assured, that in the interest of fair and
balanced reporting, we will publish any mitigation he might
care to offer.
THE RINGLEADER -
Darren Woods is the Chairman of the board and CEO of Exxon
ExxonMobil is publicly known as one of the first
oil companies to become aware of climate
change, more than 40 years ago. Still, Exxon spent millions of dollars spreading
climate denial while simultaneously contributing the fourth largest amount of
carbon
dioxide emissions of any investor-owned company in the world.
Hence,
Exxon are climate
Nazis, but their controlling mind is not quite the
equivalent of Adolf
Hitler, when looking at the broader picture. Because, it
was the world's policy
makers that allowed him and Exxon
to practice their black art. And
it was the electorate that misguidedly, voted for kleptocratic
agendas, mostly without realizing that the calming rhetoric
was nothing less than a deception.
Woods, who has been with the company since 1992, makes more than $20m a year. And though he expressed support for the
2015 Paris agreement to substantially reduce global
pollution, leaked documents showed his plan for the company to increase its emissions by 17% through 2025.
So, deliberately adding to climate warming, forest
fires and arctic ice melting. If that is not climate
Nazism, we don't know what is, on a par with Scott
Morrison's coal buring ambitions for Australians.
Branding the country UN outcasts.
Earlier this year, Exxon lobbyists were captured on video revealing the company’s efforts to obstruct climate legislation in Congress. Woods later tried to distance himself and the company from the lobbyists, saying they “in no way represent” Exxon’s position.
G20
abusers will say they had no choice. They needed to keep
burning coal, gas
and oil for their economies - just like the camp guards at the
many concentration camps, they were forced into business as
usual - in the case of the camp guards, they argued they were
just following orders. But that is not true. We all have
choices. There are clean alternatives, such as solar
and wind
power. There is no need to keep building coal
fired electricity
generating stations, and no need to drive carcinogenic petrol
or diesel vehicles that contribute
to lung
cancer. We have hydrogen
fuel
cells, electrolyzers
and zero
emission electric
vehicles.
In his own words: Woods once called carbon reduction standards
“a beauty match, a beauty competition”..
ADDICTED
TO OIL - Oil and coal deposits are the
Banks of Death for cowardly administrations, who it appears,
refuse to even try to to fix the climate, for fear of the
unknown. Are they Chicken?
Meanwhile, as purveyors of fuels that create greenhouse gases,
they are contributing to the Geographical Genocide
in flooding islands and creating deserts of previously fertile
land, causing mass migration. It seems to us like Mr Woods
and/or his company Exxon, could be heading toward the International
Criminal Court. As knowing about the health risks,
desertification and rising
ocean levels, ranking him highly in terms of climate
criminality.
CANCER
KINGS - At the Paris talks in 2015 the United States
joined three petro-states -
Russia,
Saudi
Arabia, and Kuwait -
to water down the UN’s commitment to a scientific report
that examined the damaging global effects of 1.5 degrees of
Celsius.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman described Russia, Saudi
Arabia, and the
United States
as “a new axis of evil.”
In 2009 Saudi Arabia tried to argue it deserved compensation
for its oil as the world moves off fossil fuels, and while
that request was a non-starter. Copenhagen ultimately produced
a weak deal that failed to bridge old divides between
historically large polluters and relative newcomers like China
and India.
....
MOBILE
GAS CHAMBERS - The oil barons know about cancer victims dying of
lung cancer
from carcinogenic and particulate vehicle exhausts, as they reap export
dollars in return. During the Second World War, concentration
camp guards used petrol and diesel truck exhausts to gas
prisoners, before Zyklon B.
The Nazis began experimenting with poison gas for the purpose of mass murder in late 1939 with the killing of mental patients (“euthanasia”). A Nazi euphemism, “euthanasia” referred to the systematic killing of those Germans whom the Nazis deemed “unworthy of life” because of mental illness or physical disability
One of several methods used was the gas van. Such vans were first deployed in 1940 in “Euthanasia” operations. Hitler delegated the “Euthanasia” operation to Reichsleiter Philip Bouhler, Dr. Karl Brandt, and several doctors of their choice. The targets were several German population groups: the mentally ill or retarded, the chronically ill, and criminals. At first, the murders were carried out in fixed, sealed chambers, into which carbon monoxide gas was pumped from metal canisters. In addition, some were killed by lethal injections and by shooting. Gas vans were first used in 1940, when Polish mentally ill children were locked in a sealed van and killed by carbon
monoxide poisoning.
The gas van was invented and used by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the late 1930s during the Great Purge. It was later widely implemented as
an extermination method in Nazi Germany to kill those the regime deemed enemies of the Third Reich, mostly Jews.
INVENTION AND USE IN THE SOVIET UNION - The gas van was invented in the Soviet Union in 1936, by Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast which suffocated batches of prisoners with engine fumes in a camouflaged bread van while on the drive out to the mass graves at Butovo, where the prisoners were subsequently
buried. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the decisions of the NKVD troika of Moscow Oblast, and Berg
was carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when in Moscow Oblast, there came to be three troikas having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution: to strip the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, disguised from the outside as a bread van. During transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead.” Berg denied that he was
the inventor of the mobile gassing van.
COAL
& OIL COMPANIES - In seeking to extend the use of
fossil fuels, the world's oil, gas and coal companies, and the
nations that continue to develop coal generation for so-called
cheap energy, are turning the whole planet into one giant
carcinogenic gas chamber.
Benjamin
Sporton
Charles
Koch
Darren
Woods
Fiona
Wild
Marc Morano
....
LINKS
& REFERENCE
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/climate-crisis-villains-americas-dirty-dozen
https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/climate_criminals/
https://www.themarketmakernews.com/2021/10/27/the-dirty-dozen-meet-americas-top-climate-villains/
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