Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Exxon flips on carbon
Regular readers may remember that more than a month ago I complained that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe were essentially threatening Exxon into changing its position on climate change, which I argued was intimidation of precisely the sort that drives the left wild in other contexts. Well, the threat seems to have worked. Exxon has apparently decided that global warming is real after all, and will now dedicate its lobbying efforts to spreading the regulatory pain rather than arguing against the phenomenon.
Being no fan of emitting more carbon than necessary, I am happy about the result. I remain outraged by the means by which it was obtained.
CWCID: Our regular commenter, the Lanky Bastard.
4 Comments:
By 
DEC, at
Tue Jan 16, 02:12:00 PM:
Oil obviously is a tough business. Raymond Chandler was an oil company executive before he began to write hard-boiled detective stories.
By J. Peden, at
Tue Jan 16, 02:31:00 PM:
Strange, except for the feckless "Europeans", there don't seem to be many people or States who believe in the popular consensus that global warming would be a net disaster and that fossil fuel C02 would be the culprit:
1] The U.N. IPCC excludes 5 billion of the Earth's 6.5 billion people from having to follow the Kyoto Treaty Protocols; and it does not recommend nuclear energy as a cure for the alleged disease and its alleged cause. It even refuses to study the possible adverse consequences of its own alleged cure to the alleged disease, so how can it be serious about applying the cure?
2] China and India - excluded from having to follow the restricting Protocols - are embarked upon a very ambitious program of constructing 800-1200 coal fired electricity plants over the next decade. These Countries apparently believe that measures which will massively increase fossil fuel CO2 emissions will result in less of a disaster to themselves than measures which don't produce as much CO2.
3] I am not aware that global warming disasterizers undertake anything other than token measures in their own lives to decrease their own contribution to fossil fuel CO2 emissions. I haven't seen any who can even match me in this respect, though I certainly do not act efficiently because of a fear of the alleged GW disaster.
In short, the show of GW disasterizing/blaming is just that - for p.c. show, among many people and entities.
I'll bet that is exactly what Exxon is doing.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Tue Jan 16, 06:53:00 PM:
I recently reviewed Ruddimans' Plows, Plagues, & Petroleum, which suggests that anthropogenic warming has been going on for 8,000 years. He believes it has been mostly a positive thing, though he worries about the speed of recent (geologically recent: 200 years) warming. He advocates slowing the use of fossil fuels, but considers warming less of a problem that fresh water and topsoil. Very interesting book from a professor of Environmental Science at UVA. (Wake up there, Charlottesvillain).
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2007/01/plows-plagues-petroleum.html
By 
, at
Tue Jan 16, 11:31:00 PM:
ASgain a wealthy socialist like ROCKIFELLER is most interested in controling our lives just like any leftists scum and now their intimadating the tiger
