Tag Archives: tillerson

GOP Gov. Pat McCrory just signed a bill that limits his successor’s powers.

by LaureneRagsdale Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

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GOP Gov. Pat McCrory just signed a bill that limits his successor’s powers.

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Here Is Rex Tillerson’s Awesome Record at ExxonMobil

by JoleneBolick73 Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Was Rex Tillerson a good CEO at Exxon? Over at Bloomberg, Vincent Piazza says Tillerson has two big claims to fame:

Number one, it’s the relationship with Russia and the expanding relationship there as well. But also the recent acquisition of XTO back in 2010. That was a major bet on natural gas that did not pan out—a $35 billion bet on natural gas that seemed to turn the other way on them.

So…a lousy acquisition and, um, Russia. The Wall Street Journal goes into more detail on that:

“I have a very close relationship with Mr. Putin,” Mr. Tillerson told students at the University of Texas, his alma mater, in February….He was successful, in part because he negotiated with Mr. Putin, who became Russian prime minister in 1999 and has run the country, either as president or prime minister, ever since. Mr. Tillerson’s ties helped him catapult past other executives to lead the company in 2006.

….At a June 2012 meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Tillerson said Exxon’s Arctic deal enhanced U.S.-Russian ties. “I agree, as you point out, that nothing strengthens relationships between countries better than business enterprise,” a Kremlin transcript quoted him as saying. The next year, Mr. Putin awarded him Russia’s Order of Friendship for his work.

Well, OK then. He’s chummy with Vladimir Putin and he blew $35 billion on a bad acquisition. But at least he’s a great businessman, right? Here is ExxonMobil’s performance over the past decade:

But at least they paid dividends regularly! Sounds like Secretary of State material to me.

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Here Is Rex Tillerson’s Awesome Record at ExxonMobil

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Rick Perry once said he would eliminate the Department of Energy. Now he will run it.

by RandalHardwick Posted on December 13, 2016

The company recently admitted that it has invested heavily in Canada’s tar-sands oil reserves, InsideClimate News reports — and it was not a good bet.

Tar-sands oil is difficult, expensive, and energy-consuming to extract, making it especially bad for the climate. It’s only profitable when oil prices are high. Exxon acknowledged in a public financial disclosure report this fall that it could be forced to take a loss on billions of barrels of tar-sands oil unless prices rise soon.

The company made this unwise investment despite long knowing, as InsideClimate News previously reported, that burning oil causes climate change and future climate regulations could make tar-sands oil unprofitable or impossible to drill.

In 1991, Exxon’s Canadian affiliate Imperial Oil commissioned an analysis that found carbon regulation could halt tar-sands production. “Yet Exxon, Imperial, and others poured billions of dollars into the tar sands while lobbying against government actions that would curtail development,” according to InsideClimate News.

This news comes just after Donald Trump nominated ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state. The State Department is responsible for reviewing proposed pipeline projects that cross international borders, like Keystone XL, which would have carried tar-sands oil from Canada down toward U.S. refineries.

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Rick Perry once said he would eliminate the Department of Energy. Now he will run it.

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John Bolton Set To Be #2 At State Department

by MaikSeibert Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Andrea Mitchell reports on who will be working with Rex Tillerson at the State Department:

He will also be paired with former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as his deputy secretary of state, one of the sources added, with Bolton handling day-to-day management of the department.

John Bolton? This is hardly unexpected, but holy shit. Bolton is a lunatic. Here he is on Fox News today:

Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump’s reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton.

This is completely nuts. It’s deranged. It’s unhinged. And it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not a campaign desperately trying to keep the word “email” in any form out of the public discourse.

Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn’t mind sounding like one if that’s what it take to defend his side. And soon he’ll be the #2 guy at State, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.

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John Bolton Set To Be #2 At State Department

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Swamp Watch – 10 December 2016

by AlfredoMoffet Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Apparently it’s now settled that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson will be Donald Trump’s Secretary of State. It’s hard to know what to make of this. My main takeaway is that Trump had a really hard time finding someone who checked all his boxes. I don’t want to go too far overboard on Tillerson’s friendly relationship with Vladimir Putin—it’s hardly damning that his company submitted bids for drilling rights in the Arctic—but it’s very hard to figure out what Trump didn’t like about the dozens of far more plausible candidates available to him. The best I can come up with is that pretty much everyone on the Republican side of the aisle is a Russia hawk, and that’s the one thing that disqualified them all.

Then again, Tillerson is a wealthy fossil-fuel CEO, and Trump likes rich people, fossil fuels, and CEOs. Maybe that’s all it is.

NOTE: I wouldn’t normally mark Tillerson as a member of the swamp, but I’m making an exception due to his apparent chumminess with the swamp. Details here.

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Swamp Watch – 10 December 2016

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Big Oil Won’t Let the Developing World Kick the Habit

by HannaDabney Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In the 1980s, encountering regulatory restrictions and public resistance to smoking in the United States, the giant tobacco companies came up with a particularly effective strategy for sustaining their profit levels: sell more cigarettes in the developing world, where demand was strong and anti-tobacco regulation weak or nonexistent. Now, the giant energy companies are taking a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook. As concern over climate change begins to lower the demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Europe, they are accelerating their sales to developing nations, where demand is strong and climate-control measures weak or nonexistent. That this will produce a colossal increase in climate-altering carbon emissions troubles them no more than the global spurt in smoking-related illnesses troubled the tobacco companies.

The tobacco industry’s shift from rich, developed nations to low- and middle-income countries has been well documented. “With tobacco use declining in wealthier countries, tobacco companies are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on advertising, marketing, and sponsorship, much of it to increase sales in… developing countries,” the New York Times noted in a 2008 editorial. To boost their sales, outfits like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco also brought their legal and financial clout to bear to block the implementation of anti-smoking regulations in such places. “They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the Times.

The fossil fuel companies—producers of oil, coal, and natural gas—are similarly expanding their operations in low- and middle-income countries where ensuring the growth of energy supplies is considered more critical than preventing climate catastrophe. “There is a clear long-run shift in energy growth from the OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of rich nations to the non-OECD,” oil giant BP noted in its Energy Outlook report for 2014. “Virtually all (95 percent) of the projected growth in energy consumption is in the non-OECD,” it added, using the polite new term for what used to be called the Third World.

As in the case of cigarette sales, the stepped-up delivery of fossil fuels to developing countries is doubly harmful. Their targeting by Big Tobacco has produced a sharp rise in smoking-related illnesses among the poor in places where health systems are particularly ill equipped for those in need. “If current trends continue,” the WHO reported in 2011, “by 2030 tobacco will kill more than 8 million people worldwide each year, with 80 percent of these premature deaths among people living in low- and middle-income countries.” In a similar fashion, an increase in carbon sales to such nations will help produce more intense storms and longer, more devastating droughts in places that are least prepared to withstand or cope with climate change’s perils.

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Big Oil Won’t Let the Developing World Kick the Habit

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Fracking infrastructure? Not in my backyard, says Exxon CEO

by TerryQnhtwe Posted on February 21, 2014

Fracking infrastructure? Not in my backyard, says Exxon CEO

By

World Economic Forum

Woe is Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil.

Public utility Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp. has had the nerve to plan a water tower in Bartonville, Texas – right next to Tillerson’s own personal horse ranch! Not only is the tower a blight on Tillerson’s very own piece of Texas forever, but it’s also going to bring all kinds of noise, traffic, and plebeians to his driveway. Oh, and one more thing – it’s also going to supply the energy companies that are quickly growing their fracking operations in the area. Included among these companies is XTO Energy, which ExxonMobil acquired in 2009.

Tillerson and his wife have brought suit against Cross Timbers to block the proposed water tower, and they’re not alone. Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R) and his wife are the lead plaintiffs in the suit. Armey’s impressive track record includes a stint as chairman of Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks, a D.C.-based nonprofit committed to “helping activists fight for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.”

The Cross Timbers case has been going on since 2012, and was recently sent back to the district court after a ruling reversal by an appellate judge, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Tillersons, Armeys, and their co-plaintiffs argue that they were promised that utility construction would not come near their homes. Cross Timbers’ position has been that, as a public utility, they can build wherever they goddamn please.

Tillerson’s primary concern seems to lie in damage to the aesthetics and privacy of the property in which, as he repeatedly reminded the audience at a Bartonville town meeting in November, he’s invested millions of hard-fracked dollars. We might focus more on the danger of water contamination that tends to accompany fracking infrastructure, for which XTO Energy currently faces criminal charges in Pennsylvania. But, hey – you do you, Rex!

UPDATE: Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) has released a statement kindly inviting Tillerson to an exciting new club:

“I would like to officially welcome Rex to the ‘Society of Citizens Really Enraged When Encircled by Drilling’ (SCREWED). This select group of everyday citizens has been fighting for years to protect their property values, the health of their local communities, and the environment. We are thrilled to have the CEO of a major international oil and gas corporation join our quickly multiplying ranks.”

Read the rest of Polis’ statement here.


Source
Exxon CEO Joins Suit Citing Fracking Concerns, The Wall Street Journal

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Fracking infrastructure? Not in my backyard, says Exxon CEO

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So much for the Grinch: Exxon CEO gets much-deserved raise

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2012

So much for the Grinch: Exxon CEO gets much-deserved raise

By Philip Bump

Tillerson demonstrates the size of the gold nugget he plans to buy.

Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, got a raise. On Jan. 1, 2013, Tillerson will earn a base salary of $2.71 million, according to Reuters — a 5 percent raise. He will also get a bonus this year of $4.59 million. He also got 225,000 shares of stock, worth, as of writing, about $19.7 million (though there are restrictions on how he can sell it). Exxon’s stock is up 3.26 percent so far this year.

Some other interesting facts and figures!

The average wage for an American in 2011 was about $43,000 — meaning it takes 168 people to equal Tillerson’s compensation package. Excluding the stock.
ExxonMobil earned $9.57 billion in profits in the third quarter of 2012.
Corporate profits hit an all-time high in the third quarter of $1.75 trillion. Wages as a percent of GDP hit an all-time low.
Year-to-date temperatures for 2012 in the United States are 3.4 degrees F higher than the 20th century average — 6 percent higher.
Sea levels are rising 60 percent faster than we expected.
The company gave $1 million to Sandy relief. Rex Tillerson earned that in bonus by March 18.

Source

Exxon CEO Tillerson to see bonus, salary go higher, Reuters

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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So much for the Grinch: Exxon CEO gets much-deserved raise

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