In other words: he said that we'd all better just eat, drink, and be merry now, because hell is coming soon, no matter what we do. He is saying: We've held off and delayed for so long, that things are now hopeless, and that the only thing to do is thus party while we can, if we care at all about "peoples' health and well-being around the world." And his stockholders backed him, 3 to 1, in their vote on that. But they are the ones who are actually partying. "Exxon Mobil is coming off its second-biggest profit ever, having earned $44.9 billion in 2012."
The bottom line here is that the heat-buildup in our biosphere is happening too fast for species to adapt in any other way than by soaring extinctions, which are already beginning to happen in record numbers. The complex web of ecological changes that will inevitably result from this rapid heat-buildup in our biosphere will cause agriculture to crash, and starvation to become the norm.
Jamail closes by saying , "I wonder how coming generations will survive." He is an optimist: He doesn't expect the survival of his own generation to be at risk in this. But, looking at the data to which he links, that assumption is starting to become questionable. He says that he is 45 years old. Although he might not end up being killed by this escalating heating, billions of today's people probably will.
As for Rex Tillerson, the AP report said simply that "he repeated his optimism that technology will solve the problem," but it provided no details, and no quotation from Tillerson on that. In fact, the headline of that news story didn't even focus at all on global warming. That headline was instead "Exxon rejects gay-discrimination ban." The other primary news-source on Tillerson's statements at this stockholders' meeting, the Houston Chronicle, headlined about it, "Exxon Mobil 'off' on natural gas price drag." Global warming? Only "liberals" care about that. (And, for anyone who wants the detailed transcript of Tillerson's remarks, that is available here , and it shows that he was alternately acknowledging and dismissing the overwhelming climatological consensus, but that he basically discounted to zero everything except the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels; so, he was pitching to his supporters, since they were already invested in his stock -- he knew that they're true-believers in "the free market.")
Our news media generally ignore what is happening, but not all of them do. For most of them, the party is still going on.
And Tillerson must be partying hugely: "During the meeting at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in downtown Dallas, shareholders approved a pay increase for Tillerson, whose total compensation in 2012 was $40.3 million."
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .
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