The boss of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, has called for a carbon tax to tackle global warming, marking a volte-face by the firm once described by Greenpeace as Climate Criminal No 1.

Wow!!! Not cap-and-trade, but a real carbon tax. Damn! Beautiful!

What are they afraid of? Something must have scared them into this position
237 hrs & 18 min

wow. i’m…confused but thrilled if this is a legit about face.

Quick go check, did Greenland get the galloping glaciers? Has Antarctica shelved itself into the sea? Has the Gulf Stream quit? Did “W” get a premonition in the Lincoln Bedroom from doG? /s

I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s called making a virtue out of necessity, especially with a new Sheriff in town.

IM
ironicusmaximus.blogspot.com

Such awesome news after all the toxic bad.
Planet Earth: The Sequel
Yeah we may survive. Hope the rest of the coal and oil follow. In Poland Eupean Union backed off.
Obama should have a statement in support. Good find Kirk. Maybe the cummulative data is getting traction. Out for a Row on the bay. Have a nice day and Peace.

I will believe what Exxon says when they keep their promise to make Cordova, Alaska, “whole” as they first did in 1989. Will Exxon now admit to modern spill science and pay the original judgment of five billion dollars?

Please say NO to the bogus “Carbon Tax” or the “Cap and Trade” or whatever else the Oil/Coal/Nuke monopolies are calling it. This is just another way to delay The Solar/Hydrogen economy.

The Corporate criminals who control our energy want us to burn hydrocarbons for the next 50 years. They own all the Oil and Coal and Uranium mines. Cap and Trade is just a taxpayer subsidy for the polluters such as Exxon, Dow, and General Electric.

Of course the products of these all powerful industries have poisoned the environment. The people exposed to these dangerous chemicals will suffer for decades to come. Solar, Wind and other and other safe energy is their greatest enemy because the hydrocarbon corporate criminals can never compete, economically or environmentally.

The best solution is to stop the present subsidies we taxpayers so generously give to the Friends of Bushies. Then the true cost of our present hydrocarbon energy production could never be supported.

Interesting. Maybe Exxon bought some assets that will profit from the cap and trade arrangement. Would have been smart and God knows that they have the money

When Elmore and I took the ferry from Whitter to Cordova there was a US Forest Service Ranger on the boat to help passengers identify wildlife and answer questions. We stopped at Valdez and in her talk she said that if you dig down 6 inches anywhere around Valdez and Cordova you will find the layer of oil. They just steam cleaned it down into the soil. There wasn’t a clean up…..

I don’t know enough about the details of Obama’s cap and trade proposal to comment on this- but as far as fossil fuels go- Oil is a self correcting problem. We will be at $1,000 per barrel oil in the not too distant future and that will certainly limit it’s use..

Our problem will then be to find substitutes for fertilizer and fuels….

The fuel substitutes can be developed in time if we start now. I don’t know about fertilizers.

Coal, on the other hand, is a HUGE issue. We have a LOT of it- so the problems with it are not self correcting.

I doubt if that will happen. if I recall, they’ve been behind the wheel, self defensive to a fault, starting with lieing about the captain of the ship, and really not caring about the tribes there, the environment or the animal life.

I’ll put in a link to a YouTube authors@google.com link in which Paul Hawken (co-founder of Smith & Hawken garden stores) is interviewed about his 2006 book, “Blessed Unrest” because it’s relevant to this post.

This interview was the first time that I saw a credible public comment that even the oil execs were finally starting to realize their gig was up. That’s not where we need to be, but it’s progress. Hawken takes on big themes in this interview, and it’s well worth opening in a browser window while you work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npKaOddyrcY

Here’s hoping that authors@google asks Dr. Riki Ott in for an interview on her supberb new book,”Not One Drop” about the science implications — over a period of 20 years — of the ExxonValdez spill. FDL did a great Salon with her last month (hosted by EdwardTeller), and I’d recommend Ott’s book **highly** to any FDLers.

Here’s hoping the Guardian follows that article up with an interview of Dr. Riki Ott.

We used to say that someone ‘had blood on their hands’, but I suspect that the 21st century update of that expression will be something like, “they have oil and cancers on their hands”. That’s not to say that I never drive or use oil, but that it’s time for a paradigm shift in being more clear-eyed about the unintended consequences of our technologies, as well as the way we fail to regulate them.

Great post, Kirk. Thx.

You and I both know that is not biologically, chemically, or financially possible.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a goal worth pursuing.

Meanwhile, I think Riki Ott and quite a few others are going to ramp up taking a much tougher look at the laws enabling corporate authority. Should be an interesting year in 2009. Corporations are legal Frankensteins and things like the Wall Street meltdown, plus Paulson’s tragi-comic inability to even recognize what it means, have moved some people to rethink the role and legal enabling of ‘corporations’.

2009 could be interesting.

I don’t trust Exxon – ever. The fact they’ve decided they have to be
seen to acknowledge global warming and to call for mitigation is the
real story.

One of the most common strategic errors I see in progressives (and even enviros) is the failure to accept diverse concurrent solutions while holding out fro thier favored solution.

I support concurrent funding of sustainable renewable choices (and structuring the funding to bring about distributed, rather than centralized ownership) together with taxing fossil fuel use down to zero as fast as possible.

Thank you — I’m glad to share an eco-victory for a change!

I am extremely skeptical of anything Big Oil says. Why would they want to have their own product taxed?

Exxon’s behavior around the Valdez shipwreck and spill is an evil mark even for them.

As I read this it seems to say that Exxon would prefer a carbon tax to a cap and trade system. A cap even one with trades could limit its output depending on who all gets covered by a cap. Even so they would plants like refineries that would almost certainly be affected. But a carbon tax would not limit their output and most of those paying the tax would likely be others downstream from Exxon, not Exxon itself. So I can see why this would be an acceptable fallback position for it.

I share your scepticsm. One possibity is that Exxon is lying again. Another possibility is that cited in the piece — Exxom sees the Carbon Tax as a way to hold off cuts in usage they believe a cap and trade system could bring. Another possibility is the one bartonf set’s forth: with new eco-sherrifs in town, Exxon’s making a virtue of neccessity.

Yet another possiblity — now that calls for asset forfeiture and prosecution for crimes against humanity are no longer confined to EarthFirst! Journal, but now feature in the MSM…quoting NASA’s James Hansen — Exxon’s running scared about asset seizure and executives’ personal liability.

Thanks Dr. Kirk!

Exxon’s running scared about asset seizure and executives’ personal liability.

good.

Yet another possiblity — now that calls for asset forfeiture and prosecution for crimes against humanity are no longer confined to EarthFirst! Journal, but now feature in the MSM…quoting NASA’s James Hansen — Exxon’s running scared about asset seizure and executives’ personal liability.

I happen to agree with Hansen that anyone found to have altered or misreported data should face serious penalties and consequences. He’s speaking about the biological damage done, and that’s what too few electeds understand yet.

He’s an example of moral courage, yet I predict within 5 years his views may very likely be mainstream. Particularly given studies that extrapolate that as many as 50% of the twentysomethings may at some point be diagnosed with cancer. Given stats that grim, even the offspring of oil execs face some wrenching choices ahead. That tends to focus attention, even for people with law degrees and very big egos.

Hugh, thanks for that insight!

Are you serious? What about the other half of scientists claiming that this all man-made global warming is a bunch of bull. Last records show Antarctica is growing. The north pole which some extreme global warming theorists hav e said will be a pool by summer is the same size as in 1962 when newsweek came out with a huge article proclaiming that the earth is on the verge of the next ice age. Solar power and wing power are great in certain applications but not on a large scale. The amount of land wind power would need to make power a fraction of a small city is enormous. All the wind turbines combined in the US running at peak efficiency (which isn’t probable, they normally run at about 50% efficiency because of breakdowns among others)would produce as much power as 1.5 average size coal power plants. Government subsidies to make things profitable is only beneficial so long and it doesn’t look like we can get there on a large scale. Look at ethanol, still not great and took up valuable farmland and helped food prices to rise dramatically. Nuclear power is a great answer that doesn’t get enough traction. France has done it for years with great success. The safety concerns are overblown and the general populations knowledge on the subject is close to nil. Storage of waste, safety, price, and technological advances have all opened the door so wide that the American people should be begging to look at this.

As for Exxon, I am disappointed, not that they are withdrawing lobbyist dollars but that they are giving the impression that they are admitting fault. They are an oil company (definitely not the largest in the world as stated in the article, largest public oil company but all the public oil companies control less than 10% of the world’s oil, I rounded up on the 10% to be very generous. There are 13 countries that have state owned oil companies that individually dwarf Exxon in size and production.) and just as any company they are supposed to strive to be the best in their industry. McDonalds doesn’t say Red Lobster shouldn’t exist or isn’t fighting them, they just focus on what they do best. The oil companies should do the same and as for Exxon and other Public Oil companies they are doing a lot more good than the country owned oil companies because their profits are going to the shareholders and reinvestment, not running a government

An even better solution is to revise the legal framework that protects the fictitious legal entity called a ‘corporation’, and whose LLC designation absolves it of too much liability.
Liability should be limited, but to what?
That maybe needs to be revised to something larger that the size of a donut hole.

Let me explain my opinion simply. The corrupt hydrocarbon system is only part of the problem. The people who control these energy monopolies are the most difficult part because they are criminals. Any new taxes on these companies is paid by everyone else,and still allows them to pay bribes to elected officials.

Whoever controls energy controls everyone else. They will never support renewable energy so the rest of us have to create it on our own.

Sunlight can decompose H2O (water) into hydrogen, which is a portable fuel without pollution. Nuclear has failed and is only supported by Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell and the other capitalists who own the uranium. You obviously will not admit that corporations can never own the sunshine.

The people who control these energy monopolies are the most difficult part because they are criminals.

Well, although I put Cheney in that category, I must respectfully disagree with the blanket nature of this statement.

I don’t think they are all criminals. Some may be; others are trying to look out for what they perceive as their families, their interests, in a rapidly unraveling geopolitical context.

I think some of their best laid plans went belly up.
I think that Putin probably holds cards the rest of us are not aware of (see: Gazprom, Ukraine).

I think there are players like China, India, and others that we don’t give enough credence to as a general topic of discussion.

Agree that uranium doesn’t make as much sense as searching out other alternatives as rapidly as it’s efficiently possible.

Agree that oil companies kind of seem like dinosaurs at this moment. But I don’t see how calling everyone a criminal is really going to produce the most productive results moving forward. There is expertise in some of those companies that is not controlled by criminals.

However, I would argue that having the US appear to be a national interest that condones and protects torturers (like Cheney, Addington, etc) is not in our long term interests. Nor does it seem to be in the interests of US-based international corporations. So why Exxon hired torture-enabler Haynes does on the surface seem to complicate their public image. But then, I’m not on the Exxon board and in no position to point out how fraudulent and stupid it makes them appear.

JMHO.