The name of ultimate oilman John D. Rockefeller is attached
to one effort to rein in the energy industry in the 21st century.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Between the Lines / By Peter McDermott
They said it would be over by Christmas. That was the summer of 1914. But, in 1916, 100 Christmases ago, Europe was still very much at war. The Battle of the Somme, for instance, had begun on July 1 and only ended on Nov. 18, while America would join the conflict on April 6, 1917.
Beforehand, the world had hurtled towards war like an out-of-control train -- though historians have tended to prefer the “like a powder keg” simile, particularly when referring to the highly unstable Balkan region.
In any event, the war is generally seen as something that was allowed to happen by the best and the brightest, to borrow a term from a later era. And then Western civilization allowed a second war to happen. In 1940, three writers using the collective pseudonym “Cato” published a short book called “Guilty Men,” a reference to 15 public figures in Britain they said had appeased and emboldened Hitler. (The three writers were from the across the spectrum. The youngest of them, Evening Standard journalist Michael Foot, became leader of the Labour Party in 1980 after a distinguished parliamentary career.)
Are there guilty men and women in the story of impending global environmental catastrophe? For David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman, respectively president and director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the answer is “yes” and the nominee for U.S. secretary of state and Exxon CEO (since early 2006) Rex Tillerman is certainly close to top of the list.
The pair have written a wide-ranging essay about eight works in the current issue (Dec. 22) of the New York Review of Books. Readers should buy a copy of the NYRB themselves or at the very least they could view it here. Meantime, here is a list of titles under review: “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issue from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power”; “Exxon: The Road Not Taken”; “What Exxon Knew About the Earth’s Melting Artic” (which is an Oct. 15, 2015, article from the Los Angeles Times); “How Exxon Went from Leader to Skeptic on Climate Change Research” (another L.A. Times piece, from Oct. 9, 2015); “Big Oil Braced for Global Warming While It Fought Regulations” (L.A. Times, Dec. 31, 2015); “Archival Documents on Exxon’s Climate History” (available at www.climatefiles.com); and “Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science” (a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, January 2007 available at ucsusa.org).
The “Guilty Men” of the 1930s were in denial about Hitler at least partly because they wanted to avoid the horrors of the first war – the millions cut down before their prime, and the many more who’d come home wounded in body, mind and spirit. Climate change denial is fed by profit.
Kaiser and Wasserman comment: “When the Exxon scientist James Black wrote in 1978 that ‘the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical’ in ‘five to 10 years,’ he was right.”
In 2016, someone like Tillerson can be referred to as a “moderate” on climate change because of, it seems, this distinction between private acceptance and public denial, including to shareholders. But this is where it might get interesting, as the Rockefeller Family Fund and people like New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman see an opening. The Baltimore Sun editorial about Exxon put it: “Surely there ought to be consequences if a for-profit company knowingly tells shareholders patent falsehoods (and then those investors make decisions about their life savings without realizing they’ve been lied to).”
To show just what’s at stake, Kaiser and Wasserman quote a group of retired U.S. generals and admirals who studied the national security implications of climate change back in 2007: “Economic and environmental conditions in already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and large populations move in search of resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies.”
