Summary: Rex Tillerson is known by those who track Big Oil as "T-Rex." As CEO of global giant ExxonMobil, he's and dominant industry predator of scientists and policy makers who call for regulations to restrict fossil fuel emissions that are causing climate change. While T-Rex is the first of the Exxon Horribillis species to admit that global warming is a scientific reality, he insists that it's not really a worry because humankind "will adapt to this." Rapidly-melting polar ice, rising oceans, more ferocious storms, spreading drought, and other catastrophic consequences of climate change are just the price of economic progress, he says. So, government should stay out of Exxon's way and focus instead on making people adapt to the pesky changes wrought by the industry's emissions. "It's an engineering problem," he explained, "and it has engineering solutions." Ironically, on the very day that Rex proclaimed the consequences of climate change to be "manageable," Colorado was burning down. Swept by climate-induced wildfires that are the worst in the state's recorded history, people died, families were devastated, and the economic and environmental losses are incalculable. It took nearly 1,300 wildfire fighters from all across America weeks to contain Colorado's blazes – and that was only one of a half-dozen states that were aflame at the same time. We can barely manage the fires we're now getting, much less the six-fold increase expected to come with more global warming. But ExxonMobil lost nothing in the fire, so all is well. And T-Rex has also "managed" to be unscorched. His $35 million a year paycheck puts him far away from the consequences of Exxon's do-nothing approach to the causes of climate change. Tillerson is getting so rich he could afford to air-condition hell – and I think he'd better start planning that project.
