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Who Pays the Real Cost of Exxon's Climate Deception? |
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Monday, 16 November 2015 09:07 |
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Bloom writes: "New York state attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman is investigating ExxonMobil to determine whether the corporation lied to the public about climate change, or to investors about the risks to the oil industry. A subpoena was issued last Wednesday, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents."
CEO of Exxon Rex Tillerson. (photo: AP)
Who Pays the Real Cost of Exxon's Climate Deception?
By Dr. Keely Bloom, EcoWatch
16 November 15
 ew York state attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman is investigating ExxonMobil to determine whether the corporation lied to the public about climate change, or to investors about the risks to the oil industry. A subpoena was issued last Wednesday, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents.
Exxon knew about global warming decades ago (and in fact launched its own extensive climate research program), yet spent US$30.9 million to support think tanks running climate denial campaigns from 1998 to 2014.
A common misconception about climate change is that we are all responsible for the problem, and therefore no one is responsible. However, a scientific study revealed that two-thirds of the carbon dioxide emitted the Industrial Revolution can be traced back to just 90 oil, coal and gas producers, dubbed the “Carbon Majors.” Exxon is the world’s second biggest polluter, according to the study, contributing 3.1 percdent of the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere. If New York finds that Exxon has indeed deceived the public and investors, this investigation will have significantly bolstered Exxon’s liability for the climate crisis.
Holding ExxonMobil Responsible
Exxon has also been targeted in a recent climate lawsuit. The communities that suffered the horrific impacts of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines have brought a case alleging that the contribution of the biggest fossil fuel corporations to climate change is a violation of their human rights. The 50 respondents include Exxon, Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Lafarge, Holcim and Taiheyo Cement Corporation.
In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan displaced 4 million people, destroyed or damaged 1 million houses, and killed at least 6,300 people. While the Philippines suffered a financial blow of approximately US$10 billion from the storm, Exxon made US$32.6 billion in profits. Yet the oil giant has not paid for the climate damage caused by its products. Chevron, the corporation with the most responsibility for carbon emissions, made US$21.4 billion that year. Big Oil is making a killing.
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights state that corporations must respect human rights, in compliance with both national and international legal standards. Yet the fossil fuel industry is fueling climate change, and has failed to prevent the human rights impacts directly linked to its activities.
Kick Big Oil, Coal and Gas Out of Climate Policy
Politicians have also failed to hold the industry responsible. Instead, these corporations receive obscene subsidies from the same governments that are meant to protect their people and their human rights. The IMF has found that the industry is supported by as much as US$5.3 trillion in subsidies, or $10 million per minute.
Exxon has clearly indicated that it plans to continue producing fossil fuels without limit, stating that serious emissions cuts are “highly unlikely.” And so far, the untold millions spent by Big Oil and Gas to block strong climate policies and other regulations—in 2014, the industry spent US$141 million lobbying in Washington, DC—have indeed been highly effective.
Fossil fuel corporations have long been treated as “stakeholders” at the UN climate negotiations, and they have used this position to push false solutions and ensure that no effective action is taken. A decade ago, the international community established a powerful precedent by removing Big Tobacco from public health policy through a treaty mechanism. It is now time to kick Big Oil, Coal and Gas out of climate policy.
A New and Innovative Source of Finance
Solutions are urgently needed to address this gross injustice, and particularly the impacts of climate change on the world’s poorest communities. A global levy on the extraction of fossil fuels could raise US$50 billion a year to help fund the international Loss and Damage Mechanism. The 13 largest fossil fuel corporations alone made $132 billion in profits in 2013.
This funding would be used to assist the most vulnerable, those already suffering the worst impacts of climate change. Existing international law supports such a system—especially the polluter pays principle, the “no harm” rule, and the right to compensation—and it needs to be part of a general phase out of fossil fuels.
Exxon’s climate deception comes at the cost of the lives and human rights of people around the world and of future generations to come. To genuinely face this crisis, we must find the strength to kick the fossil fuel giants out of the climate negotiations, and to make the industry pay for its climate damage.
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Can Obama Level With the People? |
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Sunday, 15 November 2015 15:06 |
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Parry writes: "The atrocities in Paris, killing more than 120 people, have brought forth the usual condemnations against terrorism and expressions of sympathy for the victims, but the larger question is whether this latest shock will finally force Western leaders to address the true root causes of the problem."
President Obama and King Salman of Saudi Arabia stand at attention during the U.S. national anthem at the start of Obama's state visit to Saudi Arabia. (photo: Pete Souza/Official White House)
Can Obama Level With the People?
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
15 November 15
Another terrorist outrage – this one in Paris – is spreading fear and fury across Europe. Which makes this a key moment for President Obama to finally level with the American people about how U.S. “allies” — such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar — have been aiding and abetting extremists, reports Robert Parry.
 he atrocities in Paris, killing more than 120 people, have brought forth the usual condemnations against terrorism and expressions of sympathy for the victims, but the larger question is whether this latest shock will finally force Western leaders to address the true root causes of the problem.
Will President Barack Obama and other leaders finally level with the American people and the world about what the underlying reasons for this madness are? Will Obama explain how U.S. “allies” in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, have been fueling this Sunni extremism for years? Will he dare recognize that Israeli repression of the Palestinians is a major contributing factor, too?
On a practical level, will Obama finally release those 28 pages from the congressional 9/11 report that addressed evidence of Saudi support for the hijackers who attacked New York and Washington in 2001?
Does he have the courage to explain how this scourge of Sunni terrorism can be traced back even further to the late 1970s when President Jimmy Carter started a small-scale covert operation in Afghanistan to destabilize a Moscow-backed secular regime in Kabul and that President Ronald Reagan then vastly expanded the program with the help of the Saudis, pouring in a total of $1 billion a year and giving rise to Saudi militant Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda?
Can Obama be convinced that telling hard truths to the American people is not only vital to a democratic Republic in a philosophical way but can have the practical effect of creating crucial public support for rational policies? Will he realize that propaganda schemes or “strategic communications” may be clever short-term tricks to manipulate the American people but they are ultimately counterproductive and dangerous?
Will Obama finally take on Official Washington’s well-entrenched neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” junior varsity by challenging their innumerable false narratives? Will he pointedly blame the neocons and the liberal hawks, including those who run the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, for the disastrous Iraq War? Will he take on the “deep state” dug in at the big-name think tanks, not just at neocon havens like the American Enterprise Institute but at the center-left Brookings Institution?
Can the President muster the courage to ally himself with the American people, arming them with real information, so they can act like true citizens in a Republic rather than cattle being herded toward the slaughterhouse? Can he shake his own elitism or his fear of social ostracism to somehow become a true leader in his last year in office, rather than a timid follower of the prevailing “group think”?
Just because the “important people” have fancy credentials and went to the “right” schools, doesn’t mean that they have any monopoly on wisdom. Indeed, in my nearly four decades covering Official Washington, these “smart” folks have been wrong a lot more than they have been right. A leader of historic dimensions recognizes that reality and takes on the know-it-alls. In this case, a leader who enlists the American public by giving them reliable information could change this depressing dynamic.
If Obama could muster such courage and show trust in the people, he could bend the prevailing false narratives in the direction of truth and reality. On a practical level, he could help make the current Syrian peace talks succeed by stopping his endless repeating of the neocon/liberal-hawk mantra blaming President Bashar al-Assad for the entire mess and insisting that “Assad must go.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.”]
Twist Some Arms
Instead, Obama could twist the arms of his Saudi, Qatari and Turkish “friends” to get them to halt their financing and military support for Sunni jihadists associated with Al Qaeda and its various spin-offs, like the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front. And he could work cooperatively with Russian President Vladimir Putin to squeeze concessions out of both the Assad regime and the U.S.-financed “moderate” opposition so a unity government can begin to restore order in Syria and isolate the extremists.
Once some security is achieved, the Syrian people could hold elections to decide their own future and pick their own leaders. That should not be the business of either Obama or Putin.
As part of this effort, Obama could finally release the U.S. intelligence analyses on both jihadist funding and the circumstances surrounding the lethal sarin attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which the Obama administration hastily blamed on Assad’s regime although later evidence pointed toward a likely a provocation by Sunni extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria Sarin Case.”]
To create crucial space for cooperating with Putin, Obama also could let the American people in on the reality about the Ukraine crisis in 2014, which was used by the neocons and liberal hawks to drive a wedge between Obama and Putin. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
U.S. intelligence analysts know a lot about key turning points in that conflict, including the Feb. 20, 2014 sniper attacks, which set the stage for ousting elected President Viktor Yanukovych two days later, and the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was used to build an anti-Putin hysteria. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “MH-17: The Dog Still Not Barking.”]
I’m told that these tragedies became propaganda weapons to deploy against Assad, Yanukovych and Putin rather than horrific crimes that deserved serious investigation and accountability. But whatever the ultimate conclusion about who is to blame for these crimes, why has Obama withheld from the American people what U.S. intelligence analysts know about those three incidents?
It was Obama, after all, who talked so much about “transparency” and trusting the American people as a candidate and during his first days in office. But since then, he has conformed to the elitist Orwellian approach of managing our perceptions rather than giving us the facts.
Yet, if Obama could get his cooperation with Putin back on track – recognizing how useful it was in 2013 when Putin helped Obama get Assad to surrender all his chemical weapons and assisted in wresting important concessions from Iran about its nuclear program – then the two powers could also weigh in on securing a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, another major irritant to peace in the region.
Indeed, it appears that the possibility of Obama and Putin working together to force the Israelis to make meaningful concessions for peace was a factor in the neocon determination to turn an eminently manageable political dispute in Ukraine – over the pace of its integration into Europe without rending its ties to Russia – into the dangerous frontlines of a new Cold War.
The neocons and liberal hawks outmaneuvered Obama who fell in line with the Putin-bashing, all the better to fit within Official Washington’s in-crowd.
Thus, the Syrian crisis was left to fester with Obama acquiescing to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for arming and training “moderate” rebels although the President recognized that the idea was a “fantasy.” He also resisted some of the more extreme ideas, like an outright U.S. military invasion of Syria framed as a humanitarian “safe zone.”
But the Paris tragedy is another reminder that it is well past time for Obama to resurrect his helpful relationship with Putin and restore the teamwork that held such promise toward settling conflicts through negotiations, along the lines of the Iran nuclear deal.
If Obama were to choose that route – which could be implemented through a combination of truth-telling to the American people and pragmatic big-power diplomacy with Russia – he could at least start addressing the underlying causes of the violence tearing apart the Middle East and now spreading into Europe.
Or will Obama’s reaction to the Paris attacks be just more of the same – more tough-guy talk about “resolve,” more “targeted” killings that slaughter many innocents as “collateral damage,” more tolerance of Saudi-Turkish-Qatari support for Sunni militants in Syria and elsewhere, more acceptance of hard-line Israeli repression of the Palestinians, more giving in to neocon/liberal-hawk demands for “regime change” in the neocons’ preferred list of countries?
If the history of the past seven years is any guide, there’s little doubt which direction President Obama will choose. He will go with Official Washington’s flow; he’ll worry about what the editorialists at the Post and Times might think of him; he’ll accommodate the neocons and liberal hawks who remain influential inside his own administration. In short, he’ll continue down the road toward destruction.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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After Paris Attacks, Don't Close Doors to Refugees - Open Them |
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Sunday, 15 November 2015 15:03 |
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Berney writes: "When we see attacks like the horror in Paris, we should open our borders to a flood of refugees, not close them. We should shower those families with generosity."
One World Trade Center in New York City was lit in the colors of the French flag Friday evening. (photo: Daniel Pierce Wright/Getty Images)
After Paris Attacks, Don't Close Doors to Refugees - Open Them
By Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone
15 November 15
The West should do everything in its power to make those fleeing ISIS and extremism feel welcome and wanted
he anti-Muslim ugliness began as soon as the attacks in Paris became international news. Texas senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz said in a statement Friday evening that the U.S. must "immediately declare a halt to any plans to bring refugees" from Syria into the United States. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said more or less the same, while South Carolina's Jeff Duncan asked cynically on Twitter, "How's that Syrian refugee resettlement look now?"
As German Lopez pointed out in Vox, these politicians have it backwards. Terrorist attacks in Western cities should make us more sympathetic to refugees fleeing Syria: The horror in Paris Friday evening is a daily reality of the civil war they're trying to escape.
There will be more calls in the coming days to close the United States' borders to refugees, and in France and the rest of Europe, those voices will likely be deafening. Already in the midst of a refugee crisis, European nations may give in to anger and fear and shut their doors for good. Congress will urge President Obama to do the same and cancel modest plans to resettle some refugees from Syria.
But we should do the opposite. When we see attacks like the horror in Paris, we should open our borders to a flood of refugees, not close them. We should shower those families with generosity. We should make sure they have jobs that fit their skills. We should educate their children. We should provide them health care and whatever social services they need.
The West should do everything in its power to make those fleeing ISIS and extremism everywhere feel welcome and wanted.
We've been at war with terror for nearly a decade and a half now. We killed Osama bin Laden. We replaced hostile governments in Iraq and Afghanistan with client states. We defeated tyrants, yes, but we left chaos in their place.
And nothing we have done has stopped the tide of terrorist recruitment. One eyewitness account from Paris described a shooter in the Bataclan theater as 20 to 25 years old; that would have made him a child on 9/11.
How do we stop the next generation of terrorists from radicalizing? Bombing them sure doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Keeping open the prison at Guantanamo Bay isn't doing it either. Eliminationist rhetoric directed at Muslims isn't going to convince terrorists not to attack us.
To win the War on Terror, to actually defeat the terrorists, we have to dry up their recruiting once and for all. We have a chance of doing that by showing Muslims everywhere – Muslims targeted by terrorists in their homeland – that we stand with them as fellow humans, and that when they face violence and oppression in their homelands, we should welcome them in ours. Even if the Paris terrorists turn out to have come from Syria – a Syrian passport was reportedly found at the scene of one bombing, though it may not have been real, and ISIS has claimed responsibility – we should still open our doors to more Syrians and other Muslims escaping extremism.
It will take a very long time to make a difference – generations. But if we want a world where terrorists can no longer recruit young people to give their lives to senseless murder, we have to show that the United States is not their enemy. Welcoming those fleeing terror is a critical first step. And rejecting refugees won't keep terrorists determined to attack us from finding a way in.
Yes, in the short term we will ramp up our military effort against ISIS in an attempt to find some kind of justice for the deaths in Paris. But so long as we meet death only with death, the only associations we are creating in future generations with the United States and our allies are ones of pain and, frankly, terror.
We've bombed hospitals and weddings. We've killed children with drones. If those are the only responses we can muster to terrorism, we will create generation after generation of people who want to strike back. That doesn't make us responsible for attacks against us; only those who carry them out bear that responsibility.
Our responsibility is to be better than the terrorists, and to show those who might be seduced by their hatred that the world isn't narrow and ugly. Closing off our borders to terrorized refugees sends exactly the wrong message.
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We Must Keep Brewing Gale-Force Winds to Shift Political Landscape |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24462"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, EcoWatch</span></a>
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Sunday, 15 November 2015 14:49 |
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McKibben writes: "2015 will be the hottest year ever measured, smashing the record set in ... 2014. We've burned more of America this year than ever before. Our biggest, richest state is in a drought like none that's been measured before."
Bill McKibben. (photo: 350.org)
We Must Keep Brewing Gale-Force Winds to Shift Political Landscape
By Bill McKibben, EcoWatch
15 November 15
he key passage—the forward-looking passage—of President Obama’s speech last week rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline came right at the end, after he rehashed all the arguments about jobs and gas prices that had been litigated endlessly over the last few years.
“Ultimately,” he said, “if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.”
This is a remarkable evolution for the president. He came into office with “Drill Baby Drill” ringing in his ears from the 2008 Republican convention, and baby did he drill. Before his first term was out, he gave a speech in front a stack of oil pipe in Oklahoma in which he laid out his accomplishments:
“Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place.”
Obama believed he could balance all this drilling with an effort to cut demand for fossil fuels. In his first term he used the Detroit bailout to skillfully exact big increases in auto mileage, and in his second term he’s employed EPA’s regulatory authority to imperil coal-fired power plants. And his team carefully negotiated an agreement with China that pledges rollbacks in the emissions of these superpowers. These were not exactly easy lifts, but they’re the kind of step politicians like to take: They work in fairly hidden ways, and they really bite later, once you’re out of office.
Oh, and they would have been more or less enough—25 years ago. Back then we had plenty of steps we could still take that would have moved us gradually on to a new energy trajectory—low but rising prices on carbon, say. But we didn’t take those steps, in part we now know because energy giants like Exxon simply lied about what they knew, and bred a quarter-century worth of phony debate that prevented real action. Now we’re in literal hot water (hot enough that an international team of scientists recently confirmed that a worldwide wave of coral-bleaching is underway). Which means that the president’s suite of policy initiatives were by definition too little too late. Not unimportant, but by themselves clearly insufficient to lead the world in the race to catch up with physics.
Keystone, by contrast, was the kind of decision politicians hate to make. Here was a big project with lots of money on the line, a clear priority for important players. (The Koch Brothers, never forget, are the largest foreign leaseholders in Canada’s tar sands). So on the one side was the conventional power of the fossil fuel industry, which literally Never Loses. And on the other side was—at the outset—a slightly motley environmental crew of scientists, indigenous people, farmers and ranchers. That small fight eventually attracted lots of others, who saw an opening for venting their great fear of climate change. They were willing to go to jail, and on the back of that commitment came the big green environmental groups, media attention, and the resulting dilemma for the president: Who do I disappoint?
After holding off for four years, the answer was: the oil industry. Which is a very new development. As recently as this summer he’d been willing to give them permission to go drill in the Arctic. But that permission was met with true outrage, enough so that when Shell slunk away in September the administration said it would be giving out no more permits for the Arctic Sea.
One thing that’s changed is the economics of energy. It’s beginning to look like the drop in oil prices is more than just the usual boom-bust cycle. Instead, it’s starting to reflect the dramatic, exponentially accelerating rise in renewable energy. Over the course of Obama’s decision-making on Keystone XL, for instance, the price of a solar panel dropped more than 80 percent. All of a sudden the oil companies look a little tiny bit less mighty.
And the other thing that’s happened is heat. Obama’s term turned out to be the moment when global warming became undeniable to everyone who hadn’t blinded themselves for the sake of ideology or profit. 2015 will be the hottest year ever measured, smashing the record set in … 2014. We’ve burned more of America this year than ever before. Our biggest, richest state is in a drought like none that’s been measured before.
The realization that we had no more time to wait became mathematical in 2012, when a few of us started spreading what at the time seemed like a fringe idea: that the data showed the fossil fuel companies had four or five times as much carbon in their reserves as we could ever safely burn. This argument was fringe at first, but a mushrooming divestment movement spread it across the globe. By this fall it was the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, speaking on the floor of Lloyds of London, who was making the case that we faced “huge risk” from “unburnable carbon” that was likely to become a “stranded asset.”
In this new world, the political equation begins to shift. Four years ago neither Obama nor Romney even mentioned climate change during their presidential battle. This year Bernie Sanders has made it one of the two centerpieces of his campaign (alongside inequality), and he’s skillfully pulled Hillary Clinton along with him. She has so far ended up opposing Keystone and Arctic drilling, but also lifting the ban on crude oil exports. Meanwhile, with polling showing that even 59 percent of Republicans take climate change seriously, the GOP candidates are scrambling to figure out some middle ground that both satisfies the Kochs and doesn’t make them look like loons.
All of this is to say: Read President Obama’s decision as the decision of a weathervane. That’s not an attack—that’s pretty much the way politics work. The (interlocking) combination of a strong movement, strong alternative sources of energy, and the strong signal from the natural world make it easier for him to reject Keystone than approve it. There are other signs of the direction this political wind is now blowing: New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, for instance, has issued subpoenas to the word’s richest and most powerful company, asking Exxon to explain its catalogue of deceptions over the last quarter century. That’s a gutsy move—but in this new context not a suicidal one. Maybe it’s even a brilliant one politically, which could end up making him a hero in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt breaking up the Standard Oil trust.
As to where it blows next, remember the president’s words in announcing his Keystone decision: “We have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” With Keystone he kept some Canadian fossil fuels in the ground, but the pressure builds to do the same at home. Without asking Congress, he can exercise his jurisdiction over public lands in the U.S.—an interesting test will come later this year when he decides whether to lease the offshore Atlantic Ocean for oil drilling. Perhaps they’ll even give up offering up the vast coal deposits of the Powder River basin.
Don’t expect President Obama (or President Clinton) to be out in the lead, and don’t expect Congress to do a damn thing. They’ll need that same kind of movement out there pushing them (as Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) pointed out last week when they launched the Keep It in the Ground Act on Capitol Hill). The job of movements is to keep brewing up the gale-force winds that shifted our political landscape last week—and to hope we can do it before hurricane-force winds, drought, flood and sea level rise shift our landscape.
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bama has yet to fulfill the promise he made in his January 22, 2009 executive order to shutter Guantanamo “no later than one year from the date of this order.” Any individuals remaining there at the time of closure, Obama wrote, “shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”
