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Climate change, Trump & Rex Tillerson
I’m reading Naomi Klein’s latest book, No is not enough. On climate change, I didn’t know before how long ago oil companies knew about the dangers. She says, on Exxon:
“… this company, it has now been documented, knew about climate change as far back as the seventies. According to a groundbreaking investigation by InsideClimate News (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Exxon did its own cutting-edge empirical research, taking CO 2 samples off its oil tankers and building state-of-the art climate models that predicted the coming changes such as sea-level rise. It also received warnings from its own senior scientists, including James Black who was categorical in his reports to his employer about the ‘general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.’ He also wrote that ‘man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.’ That was in 1978.“By the time Rex Tillerson took over the job of general manager of the central production division of Exxon USA, these facts had long been known in the company, including the uncomfortable one about how little time remained. Despite this, ExxonMobil has since then lavished more than $30 million on think tanks that systematically spread doubt through the press about the reality of climate science. Mobil (before its merger with Exxon) even took out its own full-page ads in the New York Times casting doubt on the science. ExxonMobil is currently under investigation by the attorneys general of New York, California, and Massachusetts for these alleged deceptions. Because of this campaign of misinformation, promoted by the entire fossil fuel sector, humanity lost key decades when we could have been taking the actions necessary to move to a clean economy—the same decades in which ExxonMobil and others opened up vast frontiers for oil and gas.”
On Trump today, she says:
“Within days of taking office, he pushed through the Dakota Access pipeline, cutting off an environmental review and against the powerful opposition of the Standing Rock Sioux. He’s cleared the way to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, which Obama rejected in part because of the climate impacts. He has issued an executive order to roll back Obama’s moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, and has already announced plans to expand oil and gas drilling on the Gulf Coast. He’s also killing Obama’s Clean Power Plan. And as the administration rubber-stamps new fossil fuel projects, they’re getting rid of all kinds of environmental regulations that made digging up and processing this carbon less profitable for companies like ExxonMobil.”
Our world is run by competing mafia. We need to get rid of them. Can there be a cross-border, grassroots movement that could do it? Don’t know. But it would need to be grassroots. In this corner of the vineyard, Labour MPs, for a start, certainly don’t seem to be interested. Unbelievably they have instead renewed their determination to undermine Jeremy and his team.
My pessimism was increased by the sight of Erdogan making a speech at the G20 meeting without interruption. Amnesty International’s Secretary-General (who was present at the conference) protested in interviews afterwards that Erdogan had imprisoned Gawd knows how many journalists, dissidents and several Amnesty workers in Turkey. The irony was that when Erdogan was a young mayor of Istanbul, I think 20 years ago, he was imprisoned by the then military government, and Amnesty had campaigned for his release! No wonder the spokesperson was cross!
The real protests were outside (where, in my opinion, Amnesty should have been too). But the conference was protected from them in a kind of shout-proof, bullet-proof, armour-plated bubble. The protesters were furious at the G20, their arrogance, their hypocrisy and their smugness.
Some of the protesters may have been naughty: I saw some broken windows and heard that some of them hurled bullets in slingshots at the police. But they weren’t nearly as naughty as the G20 leaders are in the normal course of events in their day jobs: supporting and arming dictators, making profits out of poverty, destroying workers’ rights, waging war after war, undermining human rights while pretending to defend them. And their bubble wasn’t just armour-plated – it was armed: their response to the slingshots was live bullets.
As for the protesters, they also lit some rather nice bonfires. Maybe we should get round one of those bonfires quite soon and work out what to do.
The Trump-May axis
I have just watched the news about Trump’s latest executive order – banning Muslims for 120 days and Syrians apparently permanently. Then on comes Theresa next to Turkey’s President Erdogan, failing to condemn Trump (“America’s immigration rules are a matter for America and the UK’s immigration rules are a matter for us”) and, after securing a £100m fighter deal with Turkey, failing to condemn Erdogan for locking up more journalists than China. Her latter failure defended by her spokesperson later, and on roughly the same grounds used in the Cold War era: Turkey is a valuable ally in the fight against _________ (fill in the gap).
By coincidence, and before I heard the Trump news and the news, basically from her own mouth, of Theresa’s support for him and Erdogan, I had just this afternoon read the late Harold Pinter’s description of his encounter with the US ambassador to Turkey in 1985. He had gone to Turkey with Arthur Miller on behalf of International PEN to investigate allegations of torture and persecution of Turkish writers. He wrote afterwards:
“We met dozens of writers. Those who had been tortured in prison were still trembling but they insisted on giving us a drink, pouring the shaking bottle into our glasses. One of the writers’ wives was mute. She had fainted and lost her power of speech when she had seen her husband in prison …Turkey at this time was a military dictatorship, fully endorsed by the United States.
“The US Ambassador, hearing of our presence … gave a dinner party at the US embassy in Ankara in honour of Arthur [and] they had to invite me too. [At the dinner Pinter had an argument with an embassy political councillor and then] Arthur rose to speak … He discussed the term democracy and asked why, as the United States was a democracy, it supported military dictatorships throughout the world, including the country we were in? ‘In Turkey,’ he said, ‘hundreds of people are in prison for their thoughts. This persecution is supported and subsidised by the United States. Where,’ he asked, ‘does that leave our understanding of democratic values?’ He was as clear as a bell. The Ambassador thanked him for his speech.”
A few minutes later, wrote Pinter,
“I saw the Ambassador and his aides bearing down on me. Why they weren’t bearing down on Arthur I don’t know. Perhaps he was too tall. The Ambassador said to me: ‘Mr Pinter, you don’t seem to understand the realities of the situation here. Don’t forget, the Russians are just over the border. You have to bear in mind the political reality, the diplomatic reality, the military reality.’ ‘The reality I’ve been referring to,’ I said, ‘is that of electric current on your genitals.’ The Ambassador drew himself, as they say, up to his full height and glared at me. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you are a guest in my house.’ He turned, as they also say, on his heel and his aides turned too. Arthur suddenly loomed up. ‘I think I’ve been thrown out,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you,’ Arthur said, without hesitation. Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller … was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
Theresa wasn’t thrown out. She fully endorsed Erdogan. No surprise. But what we need to find when faced with Trump in America and Theresa May over here is the courage to resist and the determined, unremitting, no-concessions clarity of argument of the Miller-Pinter partnership back then. All of us. Because if we can’t, the future doesn’t bear thinking about.
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