A Rockefeller Explains: Why I Lost Faith In Exxon Mobil, And Donated My Shares

Los Angeles Times - Neva Rockefeller Goodwin*

Gas prices are displayed at an Exxon gas station in Woodbridge, Va. on Jan. 5. (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)

My great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Sr., created the Standard Oil Company and I inherited shares in the companies it spun off, including Exxon Mobil. But this year I donated those shares to the nonprofit Rockefeller Family Fund's Environmental program, which sold them and is using the $400,000 proceeds to fight global warming.
I lost faith in Exxon Mobil's future value. A prime reason is that Exxon's valuation is based largely on the immense untapped reserves of oil and gas it owns. And yet if future generations are to inherit a livable world, most of those reserves must stay in the ground.

After it was revealed that tobacco companies knew smoking caused cancer even as they funded hack scientists to deny it, they had to pay billions in fines and damages.

Cynics may say that foreknowledge of the dire consequences won't stop humanity from using this fossil fuel. I would answer that Exxon Mobil may not have any choice in the matter. The company bases its growth and stability projections on increasing its sale of fossil fuels to developing countries. And yet those are the places that will be hurt first and worst by climate change — indeed, many are already suffering the effects. As those nations confront ecological harm and consequent economic damage — in some cases even possible economic collapse — will they really provide Exxon Mobil with the growth it forecasts?
In shareholder resolutions and meetings with company representatives over the last 15 years, I and other members of my family have argued that it is shortsighted for Exxon to insist on remaining "an oil and gas company" — rather than evolving into an energy company prepared to transition to a post-carbon economy. I thought the company was being foolish. But we now know it was worse: it was being deceitful, in a way that is almost unimaginably heartless to future generations.
Reporting by two publications, working independently of each other — InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times — has shown that, starting in the late 1970s, Exxon's scientists were leaders both in understanding the role of carbon emissions in global warming and in projecting its effects. By the mid-1980s, however, the company took a different public stance. It began to finance think tanks and researchers who cast doubt on the reliability of climate science.
Internally, though, the company continued to accept the validity of the science it had helped pioneer. In the midst of its denial campaign, for instance, Exxon projected business opportunities presented by global warming: As polar sea ice melted, there would be new possibilities for oil drilling in the Arctic. At the same time, Exxon scientists warned the company of more dire climate change implications — for the planet and corporate revenue. These findings were given to the company's management, but not released to shareholders or to securities regulators.
Way back in 1982 Exxon Mobil's environmental affairs office printed a primer on climate change marked "not to be distributed externally." It laid out for company leaders the reality that major reductions in fossil fuel combustion would be required to avert "potentially catastrophic events." Since then globally catastrophic events have become virtually certain. We already feel the oncoming wave in storms, flooding, droughts, hunger, human immiseration and migration. How different things might be if Exxon and others had begun to pivot away from fossil fuels 34 years ago.
As the enormity of the effects of its lies becomes more evident, Exxon Mobil is positioned to supplant Big Tobacco as global Public Enemy No. 1. This is not good for a company's bottom line. The attorneys general in New York and California have launched investigations into whether Exxon defrauded its shareholders by hiding what it knew about climate change.
Such investigations, with their legal power of discovery, are likely to unearth even more about what the company knew and when it knew it. That, in turn, likely will lead to lawsuits. After it was revealed that tobacco companies knew smoking caused cancer even as they funded hack scientists to deny it, they had to pay billions in fines and damages. Exxon could face much worse.
Even before Exxon Mobil feels the loss in spending power among its expected developing country clients, public anger is likely to find other ways to take the company down. Just when Exxon's stock price will begin to reflect these realities is hard to predict. But I'm glad that the recipients of my Exxon stock sold it immediately.

*Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, an economist, is the co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

Link

• Exxon's damaging denial on climate change

Why Don't We Treat Climate Change With The Rigor We Give To Terror Attacks?

The Guardian - Ruth Greenspan Bell

They're both extreme hazards, but evolutionary responses favor real-time threats, not those that take place on an extended time scale

If climate change doesn't impact our immediate reality, it's harder to prioritize how crucial fixing it is. Photograph: Dale Gerhard/AP

Extreme weather, water shortages and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika are all having very real effects on everyday realities globally, and they are all linked to a fast-heating earth system. Yet we still don't treat climate change with the reverence we reserve for something like a terrorist attack.
Maybe the blame goes deeper, into our very natures: evolution did not design our bodies to treat climate change with urgency.
Evolutionary responses favor real-time threats, not those that take place on an extended time scale. Shrinking Arctic ice cover, erratic changes in winter snow cover or rapid shifts in heat and cold don't provide the same sense of threat as our fear of terrorist attacks or other bodily harm.
The challenge in moving more forcefully to stop the flow of greenhouse gases is that if you have to stop and think about whether a specific action or activity is threatening, that very process engages very different parts of the human brain, and not the ones that impel us to action.
The hormones that flood through our bodies to provide increased strength and speed in anticipation of fighting or running won't kick in when the threat is one that can only be understood through research and thought. If you want to worry whether climate change will eventually make it more difficult for humans to feed themselves, for example, you need to break out the books and study science, statistics and a lot of other disciplines. Even after you study, it is hard to share that thought with your fellow humans in a way that elevates this to an Isis-like threat.
One result: we only pay attention to climate change from time to time, and usually when it hits us in the face – Hurricane Sandy or drought if you are a farmer in California. But disaster rarely hits all humanity at the exact same time. And life goes on – our memories of tragedy fade, a survival mechanism also bequeathed us by evolution.
One time when more of us paid attention was when the countries of the world met in Paris in December to map out the next steps in the battle to contain the dangerous greenhouse gas emissions that are trapped in the atmosphere and increasing planetary heating. Daily, for a few weeks, we heard stories, opinions, data and analysis. There was a "hook" – a small, international drama taking place in France.
Now that the moment has passed, we are back to our own devices, and most of us don't consciously connect whether gradual warming might double back to cripple human life. What if the changes make it difficult for critters and insects that play roles in food production to survive and perform their jobs? The cereal aisle in western supermarkets still offers dozens of choices. What if we don't sense in a personal way how these changes might make us more vulnerable to opportunistic illness? We can avoid the issue unless the boss directs us to travel to Brazil and we are forced to worry about Zika.
Our difficulty looking longer-term encourages the thought that someone, somewhere is taking care of this problem for us, that there is really nothing the rest of us need do. We sit back and leave it to the experts.
The US supreme court's recent insistence on looking through the lens of legal process – justices voted to stay Barack Obama's carbon emissions regulations pending a challenge to them – neatly captures the fatal time factor. The court's decision to cease implementation of the Clean Power Plan until the case is argued and decided isn't fatal if the rule survives legal challenge. Then states will get back to work and ways will be found to reduce emissions. But the time lost in climate terms cannot be made up.
Climate change is relentless; human habit, Daniel Kahneman tells us, is oblivious. Bridging those two extremes is the central challenge of our times.

Links

• Obama Is Right: Climate Change Kills More People Than Terrorism
• Doom With a View
• What Does 400 ppm Look Like?

If You're Not Terrified by Climate Change, Just Consider the Great Barrier Reef

Pacific Standard - Lane Severson

Climate change is set to erode the reef at a record pace. What used to take centuries is now happening in less than a generation.

The Great Barrier Reef, Cairns, Australia (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

The Googanji people on the northeastern coast of Australia tell of a time when they could follow a river 25 miles through what is now ocean to the current location of the Great Barrier Reef. This story has been preserved without being written down for over 12,000 years, from when sea levels were 200 feet lower than they are today and the Great Barrier Reef was not a reef but groups of cave-pocked hills. The Great Barrier Reef is the best-protected reef in the world: a World Heritage site and an Australian marine park, home to hundreds of species of fish, coral, and sharks. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has successfully reduced threats to the reef from major industrial ports, agriculture, and poachers, and plans to spend over two billion dollars over the next decade to preserve the reef.
Despite this high degree of national protection and funding devoted to the reef, the leading expert on coral, Charlie Veron, told the Royal Society in 2009 that it is on track to be eviscerated within the next generation. Between 1985 and 2012, nearly half the coral in the Great Barrier Reef was lost to cyclones, crown of thorns star fish, and bleaching events. But Veron has described in detail how modern climate change is on track to change the ocean so drastically that corals and the reefs they build will be driven to extinction faster than in any previous mass extinction event.
The popular notion that climate change happens slowly and in small increments is a failure of human perspective. The rate of change happening in our environment is unprecedented over the past 450 million years of geological history.

Until the modern age, it used to take millennia to destroy a species completely. Today we can destroy natural habitats much more efficiently.

If the Great Barrier Reef is wiped out, it wouldn't be the first time. Each of the five mass-extinction events have wiped coral out, after which coral re-evolved again from scratch. Corals and the marine life they support have battled changes in temperature, water levels, and weather events like cyclones and tsunamis. They have lost, died, and evolved again over periods of millions of years.
But the similarity between previous mass extinction events and what is happening today only sounds similar because we use the word extinction without much context for how extinction happens. Scientists call extinction an "event," but the environmental changes of the past have occurred over tens of thousands—or in the case of the Devonian and Jurassic extinctions, millions—of years. Populations of animals, plants, etc. weren't destroyed overnight or over centuries.
Until the modern age, it used to take millennia to destroy a species completely. Today we can destroy natural habitats much more efficiently. The challenge here is that, to a casual observer, it doesn't appear that the world is ending. The world seems to exist today in much the same way it did yesterday.
This is the case with the impending annihilation of the Great Barrier Reef. We don't immediately grasp the importance of limiting climate change to a couple of degrees over the next few decades. The change can seem small, inconsequential. If we do happen to experience a moment of climate clarity, it is exceptionally difficult to use that information in a meaningful way—especially when what is required of us is a change to our way of life, a change that might require great cost (or at least great inconvenience) and still not be enough to save the reefs unless millions of others make those same sacrifices—and teach their children to do the same.
And so a growing amount of carbon dioxide will be contributed to the atmosphere this year as countries like America and China continue to use coal as a primary source of power generation and gasoline for transportation. Oceans will continue to act as a sponge for carbon dioxide, and surface temperatures will rise around the world. The increased water temperature will cause symbiotic bacteria in corals of the Great Barrier Reef to produce toxically high levels of oxygen, which will kill colonies of coral that are centuries or even millennia old and occupy the equivalent of Japan's landmass under water. Even as leading carbon emitters find a path toward sustainable levels of carbon emissions, the allure of coal-powered energy is too powerful for developing nations to forgo.
If the Great Barrier Reef dies, something else dies with it. The most diverse marine ecosystem on our planet does not go gentle into that good night. The impact of a marine extinction event would likely mean the extinction of major elements of terrestrial life. The Great Barrier Reef is a canary in the mineshaft that can be seen from outer space.
A mere handful of human generations will destroy an ecosystem that has existed since the Ice Age unless we can develop lifelong commitments to atone for the sins of our parents. The tragedy of modern American life is that most of the communities that used to support lifelong commitments are in their own final stages of extinction. The ones that aren't, primarily evangelical churches, don't traditionally identify climate change as part of their mission, though this is slowly changing. The idea of making a lifelong commitment is antiquated. But this is exactly what is required of us, because a human life is very short, and it will be a long time before we can heal the damage that has been done.

Links

• Saving the Paris Agreement From the Supreme Court
• The Inexact Science of Climate Economics
• Climate Change? What's That?
• Bumblebees Are Climate Change Deniers
• Climate Change Is Upending the Ecology of Lakes