How Exxon, Chevron and their buddies killed the world

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
But nope. Shit. Uh well, I'm Robert Evans. This is
another failed introduction. I don't I don't know. I don't
know why I keep I keep trying new things. It's
a bad idea to try new things. I should just
go back to what works, but I am permanently trapped
in a cycle of new attempts at success that in

(00:25):
only in failure. Anyway. My guest today Molly Lambert, Nightcall
podcast host. How are you doing? Molly? Excellent? Molly. I
like the new and trow thank you, just just the
word butts. It's better than Hitler. Yeah. Um, this is
a podcast where we talking about bad people. Molly. You
know that because you've been a guest on here before.

(00:47):
I'm ready ready to find out again who the worst
people of all time are. I am not ready. I
am strung at as fun because I got back from
a red eye from d C yesterday and I feel miserable.
But it's appropriate that I just got off of a
plane because planes are a major contributor to climate change,
and today we're talking about the bastards who covered up

(01:10):
climate change back when we could have done something about
it more easily. Molly, how do you feel about x
On Mobile. Are you a fan? Are you a mobis
stan Um? Aren't we all little little x on xcs xcs.
Oh that's a good one. That was a band right
in like the early two thousand's. It's definitely a band. Probably, Yeah,

(01:36):
I remember listening to them when I was a depressed teenager. Well, Molly,
if you had to choose between let's say, x On
Mobile Chevron, Uh, what's another big one shell shell? Yeah?
Would would would? Which is? Which? Is going to be? Like?
You're who are you gonna like root for? I mean,
we're recording this on Valentine's Day. It's like I feel

(01:57):
like we're in a love quadrangle? Who can choose among
so many great suits? I think fine products? Yet I don't.
I don't really know enough about the difference between the
oil companies. I just know they're all pretty bad. I
do remember, I do remember was Exxon responsible for perhaps

(02:19):
an oil spill? They share work now in their defense.
How could you higher a captain for a boat filled
with volatile fluids and make sure he's sober at the
same time. That's an impossible barrier. I mean, I do

(02:39):
know that people go out on the oil wells for
like months at a time. Yes, the documentary Armageddon informed
me of that. Is that the documentary about how people
put animal crackers on each other's stomachs as well? Is
that in Armageddon? Do I need to rewatch Armageddon? That's
the one with Affleck, right, Yes, oh yeah, that's definitely

(03:01):
the animal crackers romantic sequence the that's I just I'm
thinking back on it now and I've realized that in
my memory the movie Armageddon has been condensed to the
scene where Bruce Willis points a shotgun at Ben Affleck,
the scene where they have that machine gun on an
asteroid for some reason up an asteroid. They have to

(03:24):
blow up an asteroid, but a machine anyway, there's like
three minutes from that movie in the Criterion collection. It
should be so all right, well, let's just well, let's
let's we should we should get into this thing that
I wrote about these people that I hate, and then
I hope you'll hate with me, because that's what the
show is about, hating together. Yeah. In two thousand fifteen,

(03:50):
and internal x and report from the nineteen eighties, which
discussed the reality of climate change, was leaked out to
the public via The Guardian. In two thousands seventeen, a
Dutch news organization released a similar report from Shell. And
I'm gonna guess most of the people listening have heard
at least a little bit about both of these disclosures.
You've heard about this, right, Molly, Like, yeah, yeah. The
story is generally summarized and outrage social media posts. Is

(04:12):
this exon Shell slash whoever knew about climate change for
decades and hid their research? And this is more or
less accurate, Like it's close enough for Twitter. But you'll
notice if you hop over to Google right now, those
of you who aren't actively pooping or driving to work
while you listen to podcasts. If you if you hop
over to Google and you type in XON covered up

(04:33):
climate change the first two of the six million results,
you'll receive our articles from xn's own website with titles
like x on Mobile, don't be Misled, Understanding the facts
and understanding the hashtag x on new Controversy by X
on Mobile. So obviously I'm biased. I mean, who can

(04:55):
we trust for unbiased reporting on X on Mobile? But
started out there and the blog sphere. It's like, how
the very best people to report on whether or not
police departments are responsibly using force. Are members of those
police departments, which is why we have such excellent statistics
on police use of force. What could be better than
an internal review? Yeah, I mean, at this job, I

(05:18):
am responsible for making sure I am sober enough to work,
which is why I have been sober enough to work
a hundred percent of the days when I've done this podcast,
even the one where I was actively tripling on asset,
which one was that it's a secret. It's a secret
to everybody, which is proof that the self monitoring thing
is flawless. So I agree, you won't his mom, I

(05:45):
will not. I will not. It's a secret for only me.
So today I'm going to tell everybody the story of
how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It
didn't start in the nineteen eighties, which is when all
those now leaked reports were written. It actually starts further
back nineteen fifty nine, when physicist Edward Teller warn't the
oil and gas industry about global warming and a keynote

(06:07):
address at the Energy and Man Symposium UH nineteen fifty
nine was seen as the hundred year anniversary of the
oil and gas industry, and so the event was a
celebration of petroleum and its cousins, but Edward Teller did
not take to the stage to celebrate. Instead, he gave
out a grave warning to the executives assembled. He said, quote,
ladies and gentlemen, I am here to talk to you

(06:28):
about energy in the future. I will start by telling
you why I believe that the energy resources of the
past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources
will run short as we use more and more of
the fossil fuels. But I would like to mention another
reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies.
And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere.
Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. The

(06:50):
carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can't smell it.
It is not dangerous to health, so why should one
worry about it? Carbon dioxide has a strange property who
transmits visible light but absorbs the infrared radiation which is
emitted from the Earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes
a greenhouse effect. It has been calculated that a temperature
rise corresponding to a ten increase in carbon dioxide will

(07:10):
be sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York.
All coastal cities would be covered. And since a considerable
percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I
think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most
people tend to believe. So that's nineteen fifty nine wolf. Yeah,
he's a I mean, yeah, spot on. I mean, we

(07:31):
might quibble with him saying that, uh, you know, carbon
dioxide is not dangerous to health, but I think he's
saying specifically that, like, you're not gonna get sick from
carbon dioxide poisoning because of gasoline. Um, you won't be
able to tell it's happening until it's here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um.
So they have this warning in nineteen fifty nine, and

(07:53):
we do not know how Teller's audience reacted in that
moment because nobody was really taking notes, but we know
that they did not heed his warning. Eight years later,
Robert Dunlop, head of the American Patroleum Institute, took to
the halls of Congress to argue that electric cars were
not a practical investment, but the time they reached a
point of utility, he said, science would allow for emission

(08:14):
free gasoline vehicles. You may notice that this has not happened,
nor is it closed to happen. Yeah. Yeah, so he
went up being wrong. Now, this might not have been
a lie at the time. People believed stupid things about
the future back then, like the Jetsons was on the
air flying cars. Yeah, exactly. So maybe he just was
really sure that we'd we'd hit that point. I think

(08:35):
a lot of people are just sort of like, we'll
figure it out later, you know, which is the problem
with everything, but especially with environmental issues. Being like the people,
this will be the burden of the people of the
future to figure out, not mine, just do my job
making all the money by drilling all the oil out. Yeah,

(08:57):
it's it's weird. There's always this like this idea that Okay,
we'll figure out the technology necessary to like solve our
environmental problems before they become critical. But then when it
comes time to actually, you know, use the resources capitalism
uh has uh in order to devote manpower and brain
power towards like research, they all wind up making dick

(09:19):
pills and baldness as opposed to making emissions. Doesn't want
to do anything that doesn't just make a lot of
money and is easy. Um there even yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's a good documentary about Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring. Yeah,
you've seen that documentary. It's awesome because she's another person

(09:41):
who was like, hey, d d T is like gonna
give people health problems, and it was like actively buried
by the d d T lobby. But also because everyone
around her was like, it's a scientific innovation. We cannot
stand in the way of progress. Each new thing we
invent to exploit the environment is a or a coal
on the earth. So I don't know that we've gotten

(10:04):
out of that mindset really either, judging by like what
Silicon Valley thinks are the cool new things to invent.
We never will get out of that mindset because we're
very dumb. Or maybe we will, and I'm just a
pessimist because I spent all these hours researching X on
Mobile and Shell and Chevron and tell me more So. Yeah,

(10:24):
Dunlop like gets up in front of fucking Congress and
he's like, electric cars are stupid. We're gonna have emissions
free gasoline. That's what we ought to be working on.
And you know, the very next year after he does this,
he receives a report that the American Petroleum Institute had
commissioned from Stanford UH, and this report warned that carbon
diaccid emissions would lead directly to global warming and quote

(10:45):
serious worldwide environmental changes. So nifty nine Teller gets up
on warns people about this. Nineteen sixty seven, Robert Dunlop
takes to Congress and says that you know, none of
this is going to be a big issue. And then
the very next year his own organization gets a report
saying like we need to immediately start reducing carbon dioxide

(11:07):
emissions or horrible things are going to happen now. Dunlop
died in ninet He had a son, Richard G. Dunlop,
and a daughter, Barbara, neither of which I've been able
to find much out about. One presumes they're quite well off,
but since their dad shares the name of a member
of an Irish motorcycle dynasty who died tragically, the Google
results for them are kind of a mess. UH. And

(11:28):
we've got a lot more ground to cover here. So
while Dunlop deserves much blame for ignoring the early signs
of climate change, it must be noted that there were
warnings the broader American populace could have accessed and heated
if they had wanted to do so. UH. In nineteen
sixty five, philosopher Murray book Chin published Crisis in Our Cities,
a book about the negative consequences of urbanization UH. In it,

(11:48):
he noted, quote man's increased burning of coal and oil
is annually adding six million tons of carbon dioxide to
the air. This blanket of carbon dioxide tends to raise
the Earth's atmosphere by intercepting heat waves going from the
Earth into our or space. Book Chain was well ahead
of the curve on a number of environmental issues, including
the damage modern agriculture was doing the soil structure, but
no one listened to him. Part of the problem was that,

(12:09):
according to cultural critic Theodore Rozack, nobody cared to believe
the problem was so vast. Another reason why Bookchin was
ignored had to do with the fact that he was
an anarchist, and he suggested a fundamental revolution and human
civil organization as this way to combat climate change. So,
while it's important to point out and we're going to
spend the rest of this episode talking about all the
factory that oil and gas companies engaged to cover up

(12:31):
this stuff. We should note that there were people very
uh accurately predicting the problems in the future as far
back as the nineteen sixties. And yeah, it's just it's
it's very frustrating when you dig into all this, like
the number of warnings that we had, but also, like
I do think you have to have a little bit
of understanding for like our parents and grandparents and the

(12:54):
reason they didn't pay attention to this because in the
nineteen sixties, like we had all these fucking nuclear weapons
at everybody believe we're gonna get fired any day, and
like there was this this very real worry that like
the world was going to end at any moment, Like
my dad did like those those like duck and cover
drills where he'd get underneath the table because they were
afraid that nukes were going to come. So you can

(13:14):
also like, well you have where while like it's frustrating
that they had these warnings that they didn't heed, um,
there was also a lot of ship going on at
the time, Like my dad. My dad also talks about
the duck and cover drills, and there's a museum of
Nuclear History in Las Vegas. That is like one of
the best museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Atomic History. Uh,

(13:37):
that's all about that era. That is really terrifying. Um yeah,
and just to stand around some of those bombs, you're
just like, oh, yeah, there was a lot going on.
There was a lot going on. It was an immediate
threat and someone saying, hey, in like seventy years, gasoline
is going to be an issue. Like you can see
how like otherwise, like decent people could have been like, well,

(13:58):
fuck it, we'll probably figure that at if we have
time to figure They now understand why people always refer
to the sixties as tumultuous, you know, because I'm like, oh,
that is what it feels like now. It's funny. There's
so much to do. There's a lot going on, like
some of it good and some of it really really bad. Yeah, yeah,
there's something happening here, but what it is ain't exactly clear.

(14:22):
You know that songs about the Sunset Strip riots and
I read a really good essay about it by Mike
Davis about how people make fun of it for being
just like a riot of some kids, but it was
really about the beginning of like just intense police militarization
in Los Angeles of being like we're going to come in.
The cops were like beating up teenagers. Um. And so

(14:43):
some people, including Gilligan Bob Denver came to support the
kids on the Sunset Strip against the fast Wow, Bob,
Bob Gilligan is Antifa. Gilligan's antis Antifa. Yeah, So civilization
trundled along, no one paying attention to the warnings about
climate change, and by the end of the nineteen seventies,

(15:05):
the American Patrol leav Institute had established a committee to
monitor the evolving field of climate science. That committee of
scientists was allowed to work unimpeded, and they came to
the inevitable scientific conclusion that quote globally catastrophic effects would
be evident by the middle of the twenty first century
if fossil fuel production wasn't halted. Now, Chevron did not
exist at this point, but the companies that merged to

(15:25):
form it were members of the API, and they knew
all of this. In nineteen seventy seven, one of xn's
senior scientists spoke to a gathering of oil industry executives.
He warned them of a general scientific agreement that the
use of fossil fuels was changing the climate. In nineteen
seventy eight, he updated his warning and stated unequippically that
present thinking holds that man has a time window of
five to ten years before the need for hard decisions

(15:48):
regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical. That's nineteen
seventy eight. By the nineteen eighties, the early signs of
climate change had become very noticeable, and the newly formed
oil titans of the day XN and SHELL launched internal
assessments to predict the impact of fossil fuels on the
global climate. In a nine eight two report, EXN scientists
predicted that by twenties sixty, c O two levels would

(16:09):
reach five hundred and sixty parts per million, twice the
pre industrial level. This, they found, would raise average temperatures
around the world by two degrees celsius or more. In
Shell came out with a report of their own. It
came to the same findings, but also warned that c
O two could double well before twenties sixty, possibly as
early as twenty thirty. You might expect oil and gas

(16:30):
industry scientists who have been deeply compromised by their employer,
but other climate scientists who evaluated their works seemed to
agree that it was all pretty top notch. They did
not hold any punches when reporting to their corporate masters
about the danger that these products were going to do
to like society. Um so they had like really stark
warnings about what was going to happen. Shell predicted a

(16:50):
one meter sea level rise at minimum, with a good
chance that warming would cause the West Antarctic Sheet to disintegrate,
causing a five to six meter worldwide rise in sea levels,
resulting in the destruction of multiple nations. Their analysts predicted
the disappearance of specific ecosystems or habit stat destruction, leading
to an increase in runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of
low lying farmland. They pointed out that new sources of

(17:13):
fresh water would be necessary in this climate and that
changes in temperature would drastically change life for most people.
Shell scientists concluded the changes maybe the greatest and recorded history,
So that's pretty clear, uh A. Excen scientists were equally direct.
They warned about desertification in the American Midwest and other
parts of the world and potentially catastrophic sea level rise,
although they also noted optimistically that the problem is not

(17:36):
a significant to mankind as a nuclear holocauster world family.
I mean, it's bad, but it's not as bad as
the end of all life on Earth and atomic health fires.
I'm sure if you're in the power industry, you must
be like, well, we're not as bad as those guys.
It's like, it's like coke cads. They're like, I'm not
as much of a cocade as that other cocad. That

(17:58):
guy's at cocaine. It's had the conundrum, you're all cokeheads.
You're all cokeheads. That's the that's the problem. I mean,
I don't know. Maybe if we'd given these people some
ecstasy or something back in the eighties might have increased
their empathy. I don't know. Isn't that why people wanted
to put LSD in the water streams from having nuclear war?

(18:21):
But you know, I've in my research come across a
lot of Nazis who trace their development to acid trips
they had. So maybe the solution is, yeah, yeah, it's
not uncommon, um like neo Nazis or like yeah, neo Nazis. Yeah,
the original the original Nazis are on speed. They were

(18:42):
doing speed. Yeah. Um, I don't think you should be
allowed to use psychedelic drugs for evil is my personal feeling,
but I would support that too. I have seen also,
just like even with the rise of microducing, the way
people when people started being like, I'm going to take
acid to come up with better ideas for capitalism's yeah,
that's not great. I feel like the right thing might

(19:05):
be mandatory m d m A trips for all boardrooms
and executives at all multinational corporations. Just you cannot sit
down to discuss business unless you are rolling so hard
you're chewing your goddamn lips off. It will at least
be entertaining. Yeah, I can film it. Yeah, I'm sure
those people are rolling their faces off when they go

(19:27):
to their weird like retreats on private islands. Oh my god.
Yeah yeah, but they need to be doing it while
they're making like financial decisions about where to invest money
and stuff. Like I want I want to have like
the CEO of fucking Shell like announcing their new products
while like chewing on a fucking glow stick. That that

(19:47):
would be fun at least, So all these studies noted
the fact that the gradual nature of climate change would
work to hide its effects from the world. Shell scientists
wrote in with the very long time skills involved, it
would be thing for society to wait until then before
doing anything. The potential implications for the world are, however,
so large that policy options need to be considered much earlier,

(20:08):
and the energy industry needs to consider how it should
play it's part. If the industry did not, they warned,
it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to
reduce the effects or even stabilize the situation. That's h
m hmmm. But despite this sober and accurate assessment of
the stakes, Shell's report did not actually suggest the company
do anything to fight climate change that would have impacted

(20:31):
their profitability. After all, and I'm gonna quote from the
Guardian now and Shell study. The firm argued that the
main burden of addressing climate change rests not with the
energy industry, but with governments and consumers. And that's not untrue.
Like legally corporate like corporations that are public like this
have a mandate to maximize profits and really nothing else. Um,

(20:53):
it is the job of governments to regulate them. In
our current system. The problem is that Shell did not
just sit back and to be regulated along with the
rest of these companies. They actively sought to convince the
governments that would regulate them that nothing was wrong when
they knew the opposite was the case. And that's really
like the core crime that's committed here. It's pretty bad,

(21:13):
it's pretty cool, pretty cool and good. For the next
ten years, climate change pushed more and more into the mainstream,
and an understanding about what was happening started to reach
well beyond the cloistered halls of gas company research teams.
Activists increasingly called for action, and despite knowing that all
these people were essentially right, Excell and Shell took every
available effort to stymy them. In February, released a review

(21:38):
of the Scientific Uncertainty and the Evolution of Energy Systems.
This was a public review, unlikely non public reviews that
they had released that had shown that all of this
was a serious problem, and in this public review, their
findings conveniently indicated that policies to curb greenhouse gases beyond
no regrets measures could be premature, divert economic resources from

(21:59):
more pressing needs, and further distort markets. So that's cool.
But you know what won't distort markets, Molly, the products
and services that support this podcast. That is right. Yeah,
they are fundamentally different from the products and services that
caused this climate change problem we're having for reasons that

(22:21):
I don't feel the need to get into. We're back
and we're talking about climate change. Stop lifting fun times.
In nineteen eighty nine, seven years after their own report
and one year after Shells Exon, spearheaded the creation of

(22:43):
the Global Climate Coalition. This was a group made up
of businesses from industries whose profits were tied to fossil fuels.
They carried out a massive thirteen year long propaganda campaign
with the chief goal of preventing the US from signing
onto the Kyoto Protocol. More broadly, they also sought to
drum up mass confusion and over whether or not there
was a scientific consensus on climate change, even though all

(23:04):
of their scientists had breached a consensus on climate change.
In the early nineteen nineties, they published a backgrounder for
lawmakers and journalists. Framed as an objective review of the
scientific literature. It concluded that the role of greenhouse gases
and climate change is not well understood and that scientists
differ on the question of whether human activity was warming

(23:25):
the globe. The New York Times reports quote even as
the Coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and
technical experts were advising that the science backing the role
of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
The scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential
impact of human emissions of greenhouse gasses such as CEO
two on climate is well established and cannot be denied,

(23:46):
the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the
Coalition in nineteen And this is where, like, I'm gonna
spend a lot of this episode talking about like corporate
executives and stuff who were major drivers of this. Part
of me wonder is, like, to what extent do we
call these scientists bastards? Because on one hand they're doing
really good scientific work to show very clearly the danger,

(24:07):
and on the other hand, they're watching the company that
is hiring them to do this lie about what they
know in order to maximize profits, and most of them
aren't coming out and and saying anything about it. And
it does you know they're scientists. They didn't get into
that field to go sit in front of cameras and
fight the power. But at the same time, like it's

(24:30):
there's a question of complicity there too. I think that's
like in the Thara No Stalk they got into that
a lot. It's like the people that hire scientists and
then the scientists are like, here's the deal, and they're
like no, no, no, we didn't want to hear that. Yeah,
And at what point it does the scientist have a
responsibility to make waves? Um, I don't know. It's it's

(24:50):
a difficult question. So the effort to basically spread the
belief that there was like this massive disagreement over climate
change among scientists was masterminded by a number of visuals,
but probably the most prominent among them was a guy
named Lee Raymond, who was the CEO of Exxonmobile for
the bulk of this period. For reasons that elude me,
mainstream journalists in the late nineteen nineties considered him a

(25:11):
credible source on whether or not scientists agreed about climate change.
Raymond has been described as notoriously skeptical about climate change
and fundamentally opposed to government interference on the matter. He changed,
there you go, the fundamentally opposed to government interference. That's
why people took him seriously, listened to him. Yeah, that's

(25:34):
what they wanted to hear. Yeah, and that is what
happened because I remember Michael Crichton too, was one of
those guys. Good lord, he was very surprising. But they
were like, can't have the government meddling in our environment.
We're not as free if the government stops these companies
from lying to us until the world. Yeah, it's very dumb. So.

(25:56):
Raymond was the chair of the American Petroleum Institute's Climate
Change Committee for two terms. In March of two thousands,
he signed off on an Exxon mobile ad titled do
No Harm. This ran in numerous magazines and newspapers, including
The New York Times. The add acknowledged that while climate
change was probably real, more needed to be learned about
it before taking any action. It claimed that the Kyoto

(26:18):
Protocol's goal for a thirty percent reduction and fossil fuel
energy would quote require extensive diversion of human and financial
resources that were critical to the well being of future generations.
It noted that although it is hard to predict what
the weather is going to be this weekend, we know
with certainty that climate change policies, unless properly formulated, will
restrict life itself. You said, some bit just very cool. Yeah,

(26:46):
other unknown bastardors whoever the funk wrote the copy for
that um string them up. The next week, Exon ran
another ad unsettled science based off of a nineteen temperature
study in the Sargasso Sea. The basic argument was that
they showed the world had started warming before people had
started burning fossil fuels. Therefore, we couldn't really say that
this was a man made problem. Two months later, Raymond

(27:08):
presided over a giant oil and gas industry meeting where
he made the same point to his employees. He did
this while ignoring the fact that the author of the
study had said this about his ad two months earlier.
I believe Exxon Mobile has been misleading in its use
of the Sargasso Se data. There's really no way these
results bear on the question of human induced climate warming.
I think the sad thing is that our company, with

(27:29):
the resources of Exon Mobile, is exploding the data for
political purposes. Now, Lee Raymond is still alive, eighty one
years young, he's a registered Republican, and he was succeeded
in his job by Rex Tillerson, who we'll be talking
about a bit later. H Lee Raymond's net worth has
estimated to be five hundred and three million dollars. In
addition to being a climate skeptic, Raymond headed Exon while

(27:50):
it was one of the very last large corporations to
explicitly exclude gay employees from its anti discrimination policy. This
seems to have been very important to Raymond. He was
in charge during the x On takeover of Mobile when
Exon rescinded Mobile's anti discrimination policy, which had included gay people.
So Raymonds sucks. He really feld of sucking like he

(28:12):
fucking yeah in the land of the people who suck
very hard. Lee Raymond sucks so hard that other people
around him seemed to suck less by comparison. Yep, that's
also sucks. He's not a good person. And his son,
John T. Raymond is active in the oil and gas

(28:32):
and he probably sucks to right. He absolutely sucks too,
and his net worth is an estimated five eight million dollars.
He had betwixt them. Yeah well, x On and Show
both spun up increasingly elaborate and expensive disinformation campaigns to
hide the truth from the public. Their internal reports continued
to paint a dire picture of the future. Most startling

(28:54):
is a nineteen planning document titled t I n A
for there is no Alternative Document Positive Yeah. The document
positive a series of massive damaging storms on the East
Coast in two thousand ten, triggered by climate change. The
company predicted that these storms would force action on climate change. Quote.

(29:16):
Although it is not clear whether the storms are caused
by climate change, people are not willing to take further chances,
after all, to success of I p c C reports
since have reinforced the human connection to climate change. Following
the storms, a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class
action lawsuit against the U. S. Government and fossil fuel
companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists, including their own,
have been saying for years that something must be done.

(29:39):
So this is like a fake future that they posit
where there's horrible storms caused by climate change and there's
a massive ground swell of rage and lawsuits against these
companies for doing exactly what they knew they were doing.
This is like the scientists telling them, we could get
in trouble for the ship that we've been doing, like
we should change our ways. Unfortunately, their prediction of horrible

(30:03):
hurricanes spurring climate action was wildly optimistic a a a
very inaccurate prediction about the level of fox given by
the people of the United States. The two thousand ten
hurricane season was, in fact devastating. It would go on
to tie for third most active hurricane season in Atlantic history,
tying with both subsequent years two thousand eleven and two

(30:23):
thousand twelve. Three hundred ninety two people died and seven
point four billion dollars in damage was done. This would
be widely eclipsed by the two thousand sixteen hurricane system,
which killed seven hundred and forty eight people and did
seventeen point four nine billion dollars in damage. The two
thousand seventeen season was even worse, claiming three thousand, three
hundred and sixty four lives and doing nearly three hundred

(30:44):
billion dollars in damage. Now, two eighteen and two thousand
nineteen were comparatively mild years, but both still did more
economic damage than two thousand twelve season. So that's cool,
pretty cool, horrible, pretty cool. You'll know what didn't happen.
A bunch of NGOs and activists bringing suit against the
federal government and oil companies and forcing change on the matter.

(31:08):
Because because because excen scientists overestimated how decent people are.
Oh that's fine, surreal bummer, because they we'll figure it
out in the future. Thing is also like, uh, those
people in the future can get fucked as long as
I'm here. I mean, I do hate the people of

(31:29):
the future with a burning passion. No, I feel bad
for them. I used to be jealous of them because
I thought the future would be cooler, but now I'm
just like, Nope, nobody's going to talk to anybody, and
then they're going to die. We got we got a
little taste of the twentieth century, which is honestly probably
the best thing we could have had. You know, a
little bit of the prosperity before it all goes to hell.
But you also get to be here to see it

(31:51):
go to hell. Yeah, by bolt cutters, millennials roll, It's
gonna be a fun time. So Shell was also a
member of the Global Climate Coalition, but to their very
very very very very very very very very very very
minimal credit, they left the Global Climate Coalition in nineteen

(32:12):
because they actually agreed with the emissions targets set by
the Kyoto Protocol. So that's something if you're if you're
gonna pick the least shitty gas company, I guess it
might be Shell, although again they still did a lot
of this and irresponsible for huge amounts of this. It's
not a high bar. It's like picking which of your
Nazis is least responsible for the Holocaust. Uh, there's still

(32:35):
all Nazis. So um, yeah, before you give Shell too
much credit, you should know that In nineteen, despite having
a very clear understanding of the consequences of climate change,
Shell's annual management brief suggested, quote, although climate change is
a long term issue, today's responses do not have to
be long term. Irreversible actions need to be avoided. So like,

(32:56):
we shouldn't have people fixing this, don't think of just
keep going deep. As the millennium turned, it became increasingly
obvious that scientific consensus suggested that irreversible action really did
need to be taken in order to avoid irreversible consequences.
Exxon and Shell both began investing fortunes into a series
of think tanks, including many of the same think tanks

(33:17):
that it helped the tobacco industry fight against stricter laws
about cigarette marketing and smoking because you like, really we
talked about like that big court case and the billions
they paid in fines, but they made so much more
money from lying to everybody about cigarettes forever. Look the
can they all be bad? They So there's like, it's

(33:38):
it's very worrying when you start comparing people to the
Nazis because in terms of like the personal level of
responsibility or odiousness of these individuals as human beings, there's
no comparison. But when you do talk about, like, one
of the things that really interests me is the Nuremberg
Trials and the ethical arguments around them. So, like, part
of one of the big questions that a lot of
people fairly had about the Nuremberg Trials is we are

(34:00):
charging people for things that weren't crimes when they committed
them where they committed them, And that is an unsettling
precedent because it can be used to justify some really
messed up ship potentially um And the reason that most
folks came around on that is they were like, well,
if we don't try these people and punish them all
very publicly, this will keep happening and nothing was done. Twist,

(34:23):
they punished them, and it's still kept happening. Well, not
the same way, like no, but when you look at
where we are now in terms of like people doing
full scale, like technologically aided genocides, yes, And also it
feels like we're at a really scary point right now
where Holocaust survivors are almost all gone and like Civil

(34:44):
rights era people are going to be gone soon. And
when those people are gone, you know, how do you
convince people this stuff even happened, let alone that it
is like relevant and the same thing is happening now.
I think we got about sixty seventy years of people
like the worst people in the world being slightly more

(35:04):
careful as a result of the Nuremberg trials. Um. And
then they started to push again and they found out
you know, there were actually a couple of moments where
there was pushback against them, um. But overall, the neoliberal
world order failed in reigning in that kind of thing,
and now it is becoming more common. So it does
require you can't just punish them once publicly, but you

(35:25):
do have to punish these people publicly, and you know,
they punished them too late. Was what The other problem was,
there was a lot of opportunity for other countries for
the world to step in and say, hey, this is
fucked up. I've probably talked about this before, but my
grandmother was a German jew who was an athlete who
was supposed to be in the nineteen thirty six Olympics,

(35:46):
and Hitler kept her on the team for a very
They kept her on the team for a long time
because they were like unsure if the world was going
to boycott the Olympics, if the Germans were just very
upfront about wanting to do genocides. Um, And ultimately they
cut her from the team because they didn't wanted you
to win and embarrass them. But also nobody pulled out. Uh.

(36:09):
I think maybe one country pulled out, but everybody just
let the Nazi Olympics happen. Uh. And you know, they
they maybe didn't know what what Germany was doing and
just didn't care because it because people are bad, yeah,
you know. And some Americans like Henry Ford were like
into it also. Yeah, and so I think we also

(36:32):
countries underestimated that. Yeah. It takes a level of to
stop all of this kind of behavior. Um, it takes
a lot of aggressive commitment to fucking people up when
they do this stuff. And I have to wonder if,
when it came out that the tobacco industry had suppressed
the truth about the health dangers of tobacco, if a

(36:56):
bunch of those guys had gone to prison, If I
don't know, maybe some of those guys had been fucking
like literally sentenced to hang for their crimes, for what
is effectively mass murder. Would the same should have happened
in the oil and gas industry. Might some of those
executives been like, oh, ship, instead of hiring the same
firms that had protected cigarette companies with some of these

(37:16):
guys been like, we have to be really fucking careful.
I think rich people are just so protected that even
when they do get punished, they get punished in such
a different way than a regular person or a poor
person that it doesn't have the same effectiveness. They get
golden handcuffs, you know, to stay in their mansion or whatever.
That doesn't have the same effect on people as if

(37:38):
you know they were going to go to solitary confinement
or as you say, be hung in the public square.
I personally feel like maybe that kind of public execution
will come back at some point because things have gotten
so medieval. Why not why wouldn't that come Uh, But

(37:58):
I'm also worried it'll be of like the people that
we like are gonna no, no, no, that that's part
of the problem. Yeah, but I I do, I think that.
Um yeah, well we'll talk about that a little bit later.
So yeah, these guys hire a bunch of tobacco industry
like former tobacco industry think tanks to like do the
same thing um that they done to argue against more
laws about cigarette marketing and smoking. Um. And I'm gonna

(38:20):
read a quote from The Guardian on this why to
hide their fingerprints. X In, which quickly proved to have
the deepest pockets, at least until the Koke Brothers surpassed
it in two thousand five, kicked off at spending spree
on these think tanks and other nonprofit advocacy groups in
nineteen nine, a year before it merged with Mobile, and
Kenneth Cohen became the company's VP from Public and Governmental affairs.
In January two thousand seven, u c S issued a

(38:42):
report that revealed that between nineteen and two thousand and five,
X on Mobile had spent at least sixteen million dollars
on a network of more than forty anti regulation think
tanks and advocacy groups to launder its message. A few
years later, when asked about the report by a Green
Wire reporter, Cohen said that x on Mobile had stopped
funding them. That claim is as preposterous today was eight
years ago. Just last year, the company spent one point

(39:02):
nine million on fifteen climate science denier groups, including the
American Enterprise Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Manhattan Institute,
in US Chamber of Commerce, and ten of last year's
grantees were among those sided, and ucs is two thousand
seven report all told Green Pieces documented that x on
Mobile has spent thirty one million dollars since nineteen nine
on denier groups. But there is good reason to suspect

(39:23):
that that's not even half of it. And in fact,
the numbers on this are really hard, but it could
be like five ten times that much. Um, we'll never
know really now. Like any good, unfathomably evil company, XN
and its comrades hid much and perhaps most of what
they spent on disinformation In two thousand, fifteen and anonymous
former executive with the Conscience revealed to the Union of

(39:44):
Concerned Scientists that x On Mobile had paid ten million
dollars per year from nineteen to two thou five on
what he called black ops. And we have no idea
what form all of this black ops took, but I'd
be fucking shocked if some of it didn't wind up
into the ckets of guys like Ben Shapiro. Um, you know,
they just they they The goal here, as always is

(40:05):
to make it seem like there is a lively debate
about whether climate change is dangerous and action needs to
be taken um, which they know is not true. But
like my dad still believes that that there's not scientific consensus,
and it's because these companies succeeded very very well in brain.
I think there's also just contrarians, just people that will
just think the opposite of whatever is true, you know,

(40:26):
will just be like yes. But those contrarians only are
able to have an impact on the public discourse when
they receive funding, funding that allows them to buy Facebook ads,
funding that allows them to influence these algorithms to pay
for the reach that they need. Um, if it's just
this guy who has no credentials, thinks climate change is bullshit.

(40:48):
That doesn't mean anything. But if it's the chairman of
the Climate Research Committee, Uh, this company with enough money
to put out ads in the New York Times, This
guy says that the New York Times fault also for
taking those ads. Oh, absolutely, they bear some complicity for
running any of these things, as though there's absolutely hud.

(41:09):
The New York Times is partly culpable in this for sure,
just stating facts. It's frustrating because like, I don't know
who exactly. I there's so much additional research to be
done this. I don't know who because it's someone's, some
individual person, A group of people at the New York
Times made the choice to take that money, and, in
fairness to the Times as an organization, a lot of

(41:29):
the evidence for this article came from incredible reporting done
by Times reporters who clearly are furious about all this. Yeah. Well,
I think a lot of these big organizations. One thing
that's key to understanding them is that they're actually totally disorganized.
You know, Yes, you think that a place where the
big name is gonna be the most well organized ship
because they will have been doing it for so long,

(41:50):
but even from section to section there's total just you know,
people don't know what anyone's doing in another cylicle over.
So I think decisions like that, some of the really
bad decisions made by newspapers, especially this year, I think
they're just coming from somebody at the top who's just like,
you know what, I like Bloomberg, Let's give him an

(42:10):
editorial or something, you know, like he's my friend, which
again comes that back to the rich people all protecting
each other. And uh, that's why things don't change. Scott
really angry. But you know what doesn't need to change
because it's perfect. Molly, what's that the products and services
that support this podcast. Amen, we're back. We're talking about

(42:39):
how the system that we live under, both economically and
in terms of the way our media organs work, is
fundamentally fine and doesn't need to have anything but minor
changes made, and you certainly should not be, for example,
purchasing machete's, boat cutters, other forms of munitions, armor, None
of that's necessary. Things are good. Tiny changes will solve everything.

(43:03):
Not using plastic bottles so much, that's gonna If we
get rid of straws, we're gonna fix this ship. Glass
straws are lovely, glass straws. Everything made of glass. Make
cars out of glass, glass cars to go to Mars,
glass cars, glass hearts, like that Abba song. ABBA's great,
perfect solve the problem. You know what, we can get

(43:23):
to this episode early. So let's let's play us out. Yeah, everybody,
just listen to Abba. We'll be fine if you change
your mind to take a chance. They have so many hits.
But they have so many hits. It's weird that one
of the most popular songs in the history of human

(43:47):
music is a song by like a Scandinavian band about
a bunch of Mexican revolutionaries. It's such a weird and
it's based off of another completely different like a weird
like a like a Spanish love song or something. Yeah,
it's great. X On Mobile is close lipped about their

(44:08):
black ops budget, and I guess it wouldn't really be
a black ops budget if they weren't um. But they've
actually admitted to a surprising amount of what they've done.
In a two thousand fifteen PBS News Hour interview, Kenneth Cohen,
ex On Mobile's vice president of Public and Governmental Affairs,
was asked by host Judy Woodruff about an allegation New
York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made during a taped segment

(44:29):
aired before Cohen's interview. Schneiderman had announced a week earlier
that he was investigating x ON Mobile for misleading shareholders
and citizens about climate change, and he had accused the
company of funding climate denial. Wouldruff asked, Kenneth Cohen, has
Exon been funding these organizations? And Cohen replied, well, the
answer is yes, and I will let those organizations respond

(44:49):
for themselves. So that's cool. Now, I'm going to quote
from a Huffington Post article on the matter now, discussing
the fallout to that nineteen eighty two climate change report
leaking out back in two thousand five, Team Quote Cohen
and other ex On Mobile officials, including CEO Rex Tillerson
and the aforementioned Richard Keel, hit back with a flurry
of press releases, newspaper columns, TV and radio interviews, and tweets.

(45:10):
Right out of the box. They attacked the credibility of
Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, calling them
activists and mischaracterizing their reporting. Activists deliberately cherry picked statements
attributed to various company employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions
were reached decades ago by company researchers, Cohen said in
an October twenty one press release. For example, these activists

(45:31):
took those statements out of context and ignored other readily
available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature
of climate change at the time, which in fact mirrored
global understanding. So let's talk about Kenneth Cohen for a
little bit, since we've just established the role that he
had in all of this. Cohen is a lifetime Exon
employee and a lawyer. He joined the company back in

(45:51):
nineteen seventy seven and was present on its spin team
in nineteen eighty nine. During the nightmarish Exxon Valdis crash,
which deserves its own separate episode, and all the inconvenient
information about ex On blatantly spreading this information about climate
change came out, Kenneth wound up on the front lines
of the company spend team again. I found a largely
positive interview with kenn on the corporate shill website Provoke Media.

(46:13):
It's framed as a Q and A to Kenneth. Their
question what's the best advice you ever received. Kenneth responds,
never stop trying to learn. There's always more to know.
What do you enjoy most about working in pr to
which Kenneth responds, the daily challenge of explaining what we do,
why we do it, and the benefits we bring to society.

(46:34):
And lastly, who inspires you? My daughter Devon. That's Nice
Dallas's daughter. We all of our daughters, right. My dad
left me a voice fill in the middle of this
recording saying, Hey, it's dad, have a Valentine's Day call
me back. There you go. Moment, I bet Kenneth since

(46:55):
his daughter Devin messages like that, And when I think
of Kenneth's daughter Devon, I can't help it. Recall a
passage from Shells nine report on climate change. Quote the
changes in climate being considered here are at an unaccustomed
distance in time for future planning, even beyond the lifetime
of most of the present decision makers, but not beyond
intimate family connection. So they're saying, the people making decisions

(47:20):
at our companies about what to do about climate change
will not live to see the effects of climate change,
but their children. As a fun fact, Kenneth's daughter Devon
has never lived through a year that was cooler on
average than the year before it, and her dad has
dedicated much of his life to obscuring this fact. That's neat,

(47:41):
isn't it? The take back my awe now. The fact
that climate changes impacts are undeniable now, even to the
binnest of Shapiro's, means that the pr flax for Exxon
and Shell and their fellow oil and gas giants have
had to work overtime to counter an increasing stream of
negative publicity. One of x ON mobile tactics has been
to point out, over the last thirty years that the

(48:03):
company's scientists have published a huge amount of peer reviewed
climate research quote. Our scientists have contributed climate research and
related policy analysis to more than fifty papers, have peer
reviewed publications, all out in the open. They participated in
the United Nations inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change since
its inception in nineteen eight and were involved in the
National Academy of Sciences review of the third U S

(48:25):
National Climate Assessment Report. And all this is technically correct,
the best kind of correct. X On scientists did, in fact,
publish fifty three climate papers between eighteen eighty three and
two thousand fourteen. And you may remember earlier when I
said that the climate research done for these companies internally
was top notch. That is true. I found a review
of these fifty three studies by Dana Noosatelli for the

(48:46):
Guardian quote. I reviewed all fifty three of the papers
referenced by x ON spokesman, and they indeed consist of
high quality climate research. Most of them implicitly or explicitly
endorsed the expert consensus on human calused global warming. None
minimized or rejected it. This means that there is a
hundred percent consensus on human caused global warming among ex
sons peer reviewed climate research, even higher than the nineties

(49:08):
seven percent consensus and the rest of the peer reviewed literature.
So EXN cites this, and they do not do so inaccurately.
But it is not as exculpatory as the company seems
to think it is. A recent study in the Proceedings
of the National Academies of Science found that, after promising
to stop funding climate denial groups in two thousand seven,
Xon gave two point three million dollars to the American

(49:29):
Legislative Exchange Council and several Congress members who denied climate
consensus and fought against climate policies. They also continued to
fund scientists who published work disputing the global warming consensus,
even though their own paid scientists were completely in agreement
about the reality. Exon gave contrarian scientists Willy Soon over
a million dollars, and that's just what they spent on

(49:49):
one guy. Exxon and Shell and their fellow corporations spent
tens of millions of dollars hiring contrarian scientists and skeptical
journalists to confuse the issue of climate change, and the
research shows that this campaign was startlingly effective. I found
a two thousand fifteen study published in the National Academy
of Sciences by researchers from Harvard and Cambridge. They note

(50:10):
the comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in
the climate change counter movement a hundred and sixty four organizations,
as well as all written and verbal texts produced by
this network between nineteen and two thousand, thirteen forty thousand,
seven eighty five texts and more than thirty nine million words.
Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding

(50:30):
were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant
to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly,
that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these
polarization efforts and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content
over time. A more recent two thousand seventeen report by
Geoffrey Soupran and Naomi Areskies from Harvard expanded on these

(50:51):
findings by analyzing hundreds of exxonmobiles internal reports and research
papers and comparing them to its paid advertorials, most of
which were play in the New York Times op ed
section from nineteen seventy two to two one. They found
the company consistently spread information that directly contradicted the findings
of its own scientists. And it must be said, the

(51:12):
New York Times let them do this without any meaningful
fact checking. So that's cool, Pretty cool. You're happy about
all this? So happy, we're just like frowning at each other. Yeah,
it's good stuff. I don't have many jokes about this,
but I do want to emphasize that I am not
joking about the bolt cutters. Um. I did enjoy your

(51:33):
bennest of Shapiro's line, I'm thank you. I just want
to commend you on that. Thank you. I take a
lot of pride in that. Uh. Sometimes dunking on old
binny shaps is the the only good part of my day,
so I try to do it regularly. Word so muchhould
dunk him in a trash can? Someone should, and he would.

(51:55):
You would have ample room left in the trash can.
I've seen one of those mini trash can ends, like
for a dorm, little paper paper one. Yeah, like, yeah,
one of those would fit. Now you know what wouldn't fit.
I don't have an ad transition, but I am going
to put some Tamali's in the microwave because I have
to go to the gym after this, so I'm gonna

(52:16):
ask for like thirty seconds. Here. We're back. We're back,
And we were talking about how though I talk about
bolt cutters because they are both symbolically powerful and have utility.
If you really want to get through locks and even fences,
most effectively, an angle grinder is going to be a

(52:39):
lot more practical for a sizeable amount of the population,
and part because of the arm strength and upper body
strength that bolt cutter is required to really get through
a thick lock. An angle grinder is gonna cut through
a lot of those much easier. These are just pieces
of information that I hand out for no reason. Angle grinder. Yeah,
and you're gonna want like like a solar battery or
something that can at least run it for you know,

(53:01):
a couple of minutes at a time, um, so that
you can get through stuff and potentially charge if the
grid's down. There's a lot of things to consider here.
Good to know, good to know, always good to know
about angle grinders for no specific purpose. So yeah, big companies,
like the companies we've talked about today, are very good
at obscuring the precise individuals responsible for their most shady activities.

(53:24):
For example, that a rescue Supron paper that I I
I cited a little earlier does not mention Rex Tillerson
directly or in neither does the n A. S paper
that came before it. And you might conclude from that
that Tillerson, you know, big company, maybe it inevitating to
do with the cover up of climate change. But Rex
Tillerson was the production general manager of ex On Mobile

(53:44):
starting He was a director starting in two thousand four,
and the chairman and CEO. Starting in two thousand six,
and thanks to a super fun lawsuit launched by the
State of New York, we do know a quite a
lot about how he obscured his role in all this
and why there's not a lot of direct information on
what he may have done on to further obscure the
reality of climate change. So, starting in two fifteen, New

(54:06):
York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, my very favorite cop,
launched an investigation into XN Mobile's history of lying to
the entire world about climate change, which is, in an
ideal world what police would spend most of their time
doing is looking into guys like this, like this is
what I want that brain power going towards, not I
don't know, stopping fair jumpers. So the actual case wound

(54:28):
up being mostly about whether or not Exon had misled
shareholders by hiding the real cost of climate change and
thus overvaluing their stock. And it is profoundly dumb uh
and a powerful symbol of how fun their civilization is
that EXN Mobile did the moral equivalent of drunk drive
the planet into a brick wall, and the only thing
they got tried for was maybe lying to shareholders. But
that's not on Schneiderman. If you read about the case

(54:49):
and what he did, his goal was very clearly to
take as big a swing at EXN Mobile as he
possibly could, because it would lead to a bunch of
documents getting released upon discovery and put as many of
the assholes as possible on the and to answer for
their actions. In other words, Schneiderman was creating a record
of their perfidy um, even if he wasn't actually able
to punish them for much um. And in this he

(55:09):
was successful. One of the billiest bastards he got on
the stand was Rex Tillerson. Under oath, Tillerson denied that
EXON had misled investors about the risks it faced from
future climate change regulations. He described a detailed system he
had ordered created in order to manage those risks. But
you'll notice there was no system developed to manage the
actual risks of climate change. That was not Rex's job.

(55:32):
And even then Rex claimed repeatedly to have forgotten important
details that were critical to the case. And I'm gonna
quote now from a write up on Inside Climate News. Quote.
Much of the case revolves around Excen's use of two
different estimates for the financial impacts of future regulations, a
higher estimate, which it disclosed publicly, and a lower one
which it used internally and did not disclose. In two
thousand fourteen, top executives decided to align the two estimates,

(55:55):
and the reasoning for doing so may prove pivotal to
the case. The Attorney General's Office obtained notes can acted
with an internal presentation given to XNS management in May
two thousand and four team that listed reasons for making
the change, including that recent reports to investors had implied
that XN was using the higher estimate when evaluating investments,
when in fact it used the lower one. So Tillerson

(56:15):
was asked, do you recall anyone recommending that corporate management
aligned the costs for this reason? Uh, And he responded,
I don't recall any discussion of that nature. He was asked,
do you recall any discussion about aligning the two estimates?
He said, I don't. He was asked, do you recall
why they were aligned? He said I don't, and you
get the picture. He just basically denied as often was possible,

(56:36):
and said he didn't recall any of the things that
were done by x and that were potentially criminal. This
pattern repeated itself over and over with Rex's answers, and
during the trial, New York's attorneys stumbled across something even
more damning. That explains why there's just not much documentation
as to what Rex Tillerson may have illegally ordered. During discovery,
XN was obligated to hand over a huge tranche of

(56:57):
emails from Tillerson. The CEO of a publicly traded company
like this, you cannot delete their emails because like it's
it's potentially actionable in a wide variety of lawsuits and
stuff like you have to you have to maintain that stuff.
It's like it's like a legal requirement. But when Exon
handed over Rex's emails, Schneiderman and his lawyers were shocked
to find that there weren't very many of them and
that they didn't like a lot of stuff that you

(57:19):
would have expected a CEO to weigh in on. We
have no record of Rex Tillerson saying anything about This
is not because he was a hands off boss. This
is because for seven years the CEO of EXN Mobile
used a fake email address to do his business, using
the alias Wayne tracker Uh. He handled all of his
official communications with this email address. He had Tracker as

(57:42):
his last name for his Wayne Tracker. He was the
name of another employee, but he had Tracker for an email.
He didn't want to be tracked. Yes, I I understand
the irony here, but it wasn't. Wow. Yeah. So Tillerson's
justification for why this was not clearly criminal is that
his official CEO email just got too many messages and

(58:04):
he needed a fake account so he could get some
work done. Now, Molly just made a face like that's
pretty frustrating. And what's more frustrating is that when they
found out about this, the State of New York demanded
access to the Wayne Tracker emails and she shucks, wouldn't
you know it. Exon realized then that they accidentally deleted

(58:25):
all of them. Oh, what a what a goof? What
what a goof? Of course, this is not at all shady.
Since the CEO was communicating under a fake email, Exon
just forgot to preserve his emails because he wasn't using
his official CEO email account. Anyone could have made this mistaken.

(58:47):
It's fine, it's fine, nothing's wrong. He wasn't committing blatant
crimes and then coming up with an incredibly obvious justification
for why he hid the evidence of those crimes. That
can't be what happened. Mm hm, cool, cool stuff. On
February four, two thousand and twenty, Rex Tillerson spoke at

(59:08):
an oil and gas industry conference in Houston. During his speech,
he revealed that he has grave doubts as to whether
or not human beings can do anything to fight climate change.
Quote with respect to our ability to influence it, I
think that's still an open question. Our belief in the
ability to influence it is based upon some very very
complicated climate models that have very wide outcomes. I want

(59:28):
to note here that Rex Tillerson is worth an estimated
three million dollars yep, state, just just three. Most of
these guys aren't really super super super rich. They're just
super super rich. Yeah. The state of New York eventually
lost its case against ex On Mobile. According to Forbes, quote,

(59:50):
the lawsuit failed because the notion that the company was
attempting to obfuscate the impact of future governmental actions to
address climate change and cheated shareholders was simply untenable. Now
this is a you're bummer, But the good news is
that numerous lawsuits are still underway across the country. Rhode Island,
the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations, and a number
of other groups and governments have started tossing lawsuits at

(01:00:10):
the oil and gas companies responsible for covering up the crisis. Chevron,
we have not talked enough about today, is a defendant
and at least eight of these lawsuits they are guilty
of essentially the same basic ship as Exon and Shell.
Their CEO, Michael Worth, is new to the field, and
he's made vague statements about wanting to move into renewables
and fight climate change while increasing the rate at which

(01:00:31):
Chevron sucks out gas and ships out poison into the atmosphere.
His network is probably around fifty million dollars minimum, but
is off like there's a good chances much higher um now.
A few CEOs back for Chevron, Kenneth T. Derr was
the guy in charge. Here's something he said in n
I believe we have an obligation to use our technology

(01:00:52):
to minimize the environmental impact of our operations and products.
What disturbs me is not the ever president perfectly valid
public requirements for health and say in the use of energy. Rather,
I'm distressed by growing conviction the oil does not and
cannot meet those requirements. That's distressing. Here's something else he
said a pal that of Americans think the greenhouse effect

(01:01:14):
is a problem and believe it's a serious problem, and
some people in our industry tend to simply waive the
issue away by saying that the threat is unproven. That's true,
but it's not an appropriate response. It's true that the
threat is unproven. Um, I hate this guy. On an
unrelated note, here's something else Kenneth T. Durr said publicly

(01:01:35):
prior to the Iraq war quote, Iraq possesses huge reserves
of oil and gas. I'd love Chevron to have access
to them. Pieces of ship. Now, the folks that I've
named today are just the very tip of the iceberg,
and some of the most culpable people out of the
hundreds and maybe thousands of villains. It's clear that Eric
Schneiderman's strategy well better than nothing, is not going to

(01:01:55):
bring any of these people to justice. But there are
some promising leads into how we can. Richard Heed, a
Norwegian academic, has spent more than ten years trying to
figure out the start to the answer of the question,
how do we make these people pay? He actually helped
to create a new branch of scientific research called attribution science,
and the goal of attribution science is to take the

(01:02:16):
blame for things like climate change off of the individual
consumer and figure out who was actually responsible for the
bulk of the consumption. According to Politico quote, over time,
he recognized there was a flaw in that approach. Individual
consumers can make choices only among what's already on the market,
but who determined what was on the market. Other larger
forces had shaped an economy dependent on fossil fuels. He

(01:02:36):
realized companies who developed the markets for fossil fuels and
influenced decisions to build the infrastructure that supported them. He
asked himself, shouldn't the companies who profited from those decisions
play a role in mitigating them? Without world governments making
a little progress towards reducing making little progress towards reducing emissions,
perhaps pressuring companies whose products were causing the harm might
have more effect. In two thousand thirteen, Head's research revealed

(01:02:59):
that nine d companies had contributed two thirds of the
world's industrial emissions. He could pinpoint directly the share of
emissions for which modern industrial companies are responsible. Chevron is
number two on that list of ninety XN is number four,
Shell is number seven. The data about what precisely these
individual companies are responsible is out there. We know how

(01:03:21):
much of the coming catastrophe we can blame on each
of them. The only question left is what are we
going to do about it? The oil and gas industry
has answered that question for itself. Since the Paris Agreement
in two thousand fifteen, the world's five largest oil and
gas companies has spent a combined one billion dollars at
minimum lobbying to stop climate change regulations. One million dollars

(01:03:43):
a year has been spent by these companies on branding
campaigns to suggest that they support an ambitious climate agenda.
So while they are funding efforts to stop any regulations
from them polluting the environment, they also have a massive
branding campaign like aimed at making people think that they're
hard at work researching alternative methods of fuel. And you've
probably seen the results of this in billboards and bus

(01:04:05):
stop ads that brag about, for example, exon mobiles, Algae
biofuels research. Yeah, you've seen some of that. I've seen
a lot of that, even especially in the city of
Los Angeles. UM. They claim that algae biofuels offer some
of the greatest promise for next generation biofuels. They're tiny organism.
Ad campaign features colorful central illustrations of bright green, healthy

(01:04:27):
looking algae under microscopes and in specimen jars. They bragg
that their goal of ten thousand barrels of biofuel a
day represents the future of clean energy, and that sounds
like a lot right there. Like, look, we're gonna we're
gonna be making ten thousand barrels a day of biofuel.
That's a lot, right. That's so much fuel, isn't it. Yeah.
What they don't like to bring up is that this

(01:04:47):
would equal point to percent of their current refinery capacity.
It's just nothing. It doesn't matter point to percent. The
American Petroleum Institutes still exists and currently spends its time
lobbying against things like subsidies for electric cars. They spent
an estimated five hundred and thirty nine million dollars during
the two thousand eighteen election cycle, according to Influence Map quote.

(01:05:11):
During this time, x on Mobile was by far the
most prolific spender, racking up over four hundred thousand dollars
in four weeks on over three hundred and sixty individual
political ads. The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives while
promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebooks data
indicates that x on mobiles ads made over ten million
impressions in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.

(01:05:32):
And they put together a really fun map showing that
for example, BP, Chevron UH and the Western States Petroleum
Association spent one point five million dollars in the state
of Washington to convince people to vote no on ballot
Initiative one six three one, which would have placed an
annual rising fee on c O two, and this ballot
initiative was in fact defeated in the state of Washington.

(01:05:55):
They spent two hundred thousand dollars in Alaska on the
stand for Alaska Vote No. One one campaign. That money
was contributed by Exxon Mobile and BP. The ballot initiative
in that campaign would have increased environmental protections and impacted
resource development, would have reduced the amount of places they
could suck wail out of and that ballot initiative was defeated.
They spent another two thousand dollars In Colorado. The corporates

(01:06:17):
there were the Exxon Mobile in the American Petroleum Institute.
This was to defeat a ballot initiative that would have
limited areas available for oil and gas development, and they
succeeded in defeating this ballot initiative. In Texas, Exxon Mobile
UH and some other petroleum innistry UH companies spent about
a hundred thousand dollars supporting the campaign of Ted Cruz
to defeat betto o Ork in the mid term elections. UH.

(01:06:39):
In Louisiana, Xon alone spent a hundred thousand dollars trying
to like prevent um UH federal like like predact event
more regulations on like drilling off shores. Like this is
like an example like the kind of where all this
money goes, Like it's not just trying to obscure the
debate over climate change by making a look there is

(01:07:00):
a debate. It's like very targeted and stopping specific ballot initiatives.
Like there's this, and I don't think there's much understanding
of like what is actually going on at the local
level to increase the factory. These companies are able to
go after um, but it's extensive, like and it they
get a lot of bang for their buck. A hundred
thousand dollars is not a lot of money in the
context of like national politics, but it's enough that Exxon

(01:07:23):
can stop a little law in Louisiana aimed at reducing
the amount of places they can drill. It's not a lot,
you know, but it's enough to help Senator Ted Cruz
defeat Beto O'Rourke and continue to give them like an
open hand on whatever the funk they want to do
in Texas. So the question we're left with at the
end of this is what do we do about these people?
How do we actually fight back? Are we doomed to

(01:07:44):
just lob a series of mostly hopeless lawsuits at them
and the the the vain belief that one of them
might net a couple of million dollars in fines. Even
if they were find a billion dollars ten billion dollars,
that wouldn't be enough to punish any of these companies
or the people behind them. The only answer I can
see is something our current legal system does not make

(01:08:04):
room for something unprecedented. Attribution science offers us a chance
to actually determine the relative levels of guilt for each
of these companies and the individuals inside them. What we
need is a modern equivalent of the Nuremberg Trial for
these people, a comprehensive, sweeping attempt to actually do justice
by charging the individual human beings responsible for the crimes

(01:08:24):
they've committed and levying criminal penalties against individuals like Rex Tillerson,
rather than just finding their companies a pittance of the
amount of money they made committing crimes. Now, as with
the Nuremberg trials, this will require a number of things
that are not considered legally ideal. Many of the things
these people did were not crimes in the law code
when they committed them. The same was true of the

(01:08:46):
crimes of men like Julius Striker, General Alfred Yodel and
Hans Frank, But the world decided that the crimes those
been committed were too grave and the cost too dear
to risk letting them get off without punishment. And I
think you can make the same argument in this situation.
So that's my fucking rant. I don't know, I agree.
I totally agree. Maybe maybe hanging isn't a bad idea.

(01:09:10):
Sometimes I would go with something more appropriate for these people,
like some kind of eco death, you know, put them
in a mushroom suit. If I'm honestly, yeah, I like,
I get frustrated and uh seek more objectively barbaric. Yeah,
hanging has too much baggage culturally and too much culture.

(01:09:34):
I think, um, like digging a hole in the earth
and letting these be these people be consumed by the
earth that they destroyed, would be nice. I I actually
think if you really wanted to penalize them in the
maximum way, you take away all of their money and
you make them spend the rest of their lives living
in like random towns in America working jobs. I definitely

(01:10:01):
think the solution to everything is to undercover boss all
the work well yeah, and just have like every time
there's a hot day, you know, as Rex Tillerson goes
into his shift at the waffle house, his his his
fellow coworkers are like thanks, motherfucker. Like, or whenever they're
a hurricane hits and it damages people's houses, they're like, yeah,
thanks for that, fucking Rex, like and he has to

(01:10:23):
just deal with that every day um goes home smelling
a fucking hash browns and stuff as he works like
a normal person and is never violently attacked for his crimes,
but lives every day with everyone around him knowing what
a piece of ship he is and how he contributed
to their shared misery. That that I think would be

(01:10:45):
a really fair penalty. I agree, Molly, how are you
feeling feeling feeling a little depressed? Not gonna lie. Yeah,
it's not great. It's not great. Uh. It just makes
you wanna go, like eat a cheeseburger and use a
plastic single use plastic bottle and just fuck it man.

(01:11:09):
Or invest in angle grinders the only grinder solution for
grinding angles. Yeah, that's very useful information, actually, very very useful,
And I mean I do want to know more like
leftist prepper facts from Robert, but avoid harbor freight. You know,
they're more affordable, but they tend to be pretty low quality.
Like if you if you just roll into roll in

(01:11:32):
and like like an off hour into a home depot,
you can usually find some like old dude, uh, kind
of crusty looking with a beard, who can tell you
everything you need to know about angle grinders. Um yeah,
especially if you live in Los Angeles. Great town to
buy an angle grind. L A has the best fucking
home depots in the world. Love those home depots don't

(01:11:54):
open places, really tall shelves. I love Home Depot. I
find it so so thing. I don't like Costco. I
don't like Home Deeper. I don't like those what about
Target But their shelves aren't like super duper duper duper high.
But don't you ever feel like to feel like a
tiny speck of dust and a home deepoverse? No? No,
I do like their plant department. Yeah. I like to

(01:12:16):
get lost in the plants. The plant departments. I take
it back Home Deeper your sorry. The plant zone is
especially during Christmas tree season. Just wander around those trees.
They got the best cheap trees. That's cheap trees in
l A. For sure. This is turned into a home
deepo ad Yeah, home depot that will sell you the
tools you need to rebel against constituted authority. Um yeah,

(01:12:42):
cool stuff, cool stuff. Well, Molly, you want to plug
your plug doubles? Please? Everybody listen to Night Call podcasts
also on the I Heart Radio podcast network and also
check out no Olympics at no Olympics l a dot com.
Um I would love to see the International Olympic Committee
roasted on bastards sometime because truly a cabal of supervillains,

(01:13:07):
the true monsters in humans and and honestly like part
of sucking up the environment. Real bad they are now.
Can you believe that they're holding events at Fukushima for
the Games and they have not You're finished irradiating the soil,
So it's almost like they just plow ahead with their

(01:13:28):
plans even as climate change makes it harder and harder
to hold outdoor sports events because of the temperature going
up so much in the summer. Molly, I feel like
what you're trying to tell me, which is fundamentally ridiculous,
is that the city of Los Angeles, a city that
bakes in the summer much of the year, that has
severe drought problems, that is surrounded regularly by horrific wildfires,

(01:13:53):
and that has the worst traffic of anywhere in the nation.
You're telling me this is a bad place to hold
the Olympics in the future. Would you believe that a
city that can't deal with its own housing crisis and
has perpetually failed the most vulnerable people in the city
and failed to give them proper housing and shelter. Would
think they should be doing anything else but working on

(01:14:16):
fixing that by building housing. For that to be relevant,
you would have to be able to cite to me
evidence from I don't know, let's say more than eight
cities that the Olympics increases the cost of housing in
a city that holds and I doubt you can honestly
name more than Why don't you check out no Olympics.
I've got at least thirty to forty How long has

(01:14:39):
the game's been going on? That's how long they've been
fucking shut up, funck the Olympics, the Olympics. The Nazis
invented the torch rel a Uh, Nazis like torches, naziszy stuff.
Nazis like weird Freemasonic fascist assemblies of body. He's all

(01:15:00):
moving in in synchronicity. I mean, nothing you're saying is
familiar to me as someone who researches all of this
term like professionally. Please do I think I don't know
if you've done Lenny reefinstall yet either, And but please, oh,
we're gonna we have a that's gonna be a fund.
The problem is that like hate her. It's kind of
hard to Yeah, yeah, it'll be well, well, we'll get
to her. She's a bad directors, bad director. And then

(01:15:22):
she was wrongly brought back as like a feminist hero filmmaker,
but feminist icon that Nazi lady. Yeah, the Nazi lady
who's not even good at at making movies. Um strong
takes strong, Strong takes. You know, you're gonna catch some
hell on Twitter for that, because we have a lot

(01:15:44):
of Lenny Reef install fans. You know what, there's more
than you think, because I do say this all the
time and people are always like, but the shots in
a Priumph of the Will, and I'm like, yeah, they're
fucking shitty and it's a boring movie anyone who's watched
that whole thing ever, But if you look at how
the Olympics are shown on television, it's just like Triumph
of the Will. They just uncritically sort of, you know,

(01:16:08):
praise the idealized human form, and I don't talk about
all the fun they're doing in the cities or they
hold them. So thanks for letting me do m spiel.
Thanks for letting thanks for that spiel, and I just
I feel like you are unreasonably slandering an event that

(01:16:29):
I don't know. I don't have a joke. Let's let's
replace the Olympics with people failing to ski and harming themselves.
Make it a real amateurs conventioned only if you want
to have a skiing competition, only people who have never
put on Let's replace the Olympics a worker owned jackass. Yeah,

(01:16:54):
and I think we should really gear it towards Instagram
influencers with the goal of ding out their numbers. I
think they're doing that themselves. Wow, we have really gone
on the war path today. Well, I want to say,
last time I did this podcast, I believe the other
Robert Evans was still alive. And now you're the only

(01:17:18):
Robert Evans. So congratulations on being the soul Robert Evans.
I am the last bearer of the name. You could
start wearing a cravat and just I am regularly inhaling
my body weight and cocaine to honor his memory. R

(01:17:39):
I p to the other Robert Evans and long may
you live real Robert Evans. Not with all this cocaine
I'm doing I'm gonna tell you that much right now.
Are you sure it's not a ski jump? No. Never.
I will watch ski fails, but I will never go skiing.
Everybody has to do a lot of cocaine and then
do skiing. Those are the future games, the new Olympics rules,

(01:18:01):
and we only the only place it's legal to hold
they Again, we might just be describing the Nazi Olympics again,
just doing a lot of speed and skiing. Yeah, but
the goal is to watch people agree to do something
dangerous and get hurt. And that's fine, that's noble. That's
going to be when we get to the Hunger Games,
which will be any moment now probably. Yeah. Yeah. That.

(01:18:26):
On that note, I'm Robert Evans and Molly Lambert. He
wants to say you can follow him on Twitter at
irit Okay, you can follow us at Bastard's Thought on
the twin Instagram and we have a t public store
and he's doing a live show with Billy Wayne Davis

(01:18:46):
in l A on March at Dynasty Typewriter. I do
it all, Robert, I don't know. I have forgotten my
name in the face of my father. Great, the episode
is over. Great,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How Exxon, Chevron and their buddies killed the world