Year 3, Month 7, Day 11: Everything’s All Pacified, Just As You Ordered, Sir.

More on this a$$hole, this time from the Detroit Free Press:

NEW YORK — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling and energy dependence are overblown.

In a speech Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. Dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.

Tillerson blamed a public he called illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear.”

The oil executive questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact, and said that people would adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.

“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”

Just collateral damage, folks. Nothin’ to worry about. Sent June 30:

Given that his company has been a generous funder of climate-change denialism over the past several decades, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s recent claim that the public is “scientifically illiterate” sets a new standard in chutzpah. And given that his company has reaped enormous profits while abdicating its responsibility for hundreds of disastrous oil spills all over the world, his glib statement that the risks of drilling are “well-understood and can be mitigated” is breathtakingly arrogant.

But it is his insouciant assertion that humanity will “adapt” to climate change that is the most horrifying of all, as a moment’s consideration of the consequences of an “adaptation” transpiring in a geological instant rather than over many millennia will make clear. Breezily glossing over megadeaths and incalculable misery, Mr. Tillerson’s seemingly benign verb conceals a self-centered immorality that makes the robber barons of the gilded age seem like great humanitarians in comparison.

Evil.

Warren Senders