Hot year for Exxon/Planet

Hot year for Exxon/Planet Houston, United States — ExxonMobil announces record company profits of US$32 billion in 2005. Meanwhile, NASA notes that 2005 was the hottest year on record for our warming planet.
While Exxon sees the billions rolling in faster and faster, evidence that global warming is gathering pace is rapidly piling up. While most oil companies are making huge profits, what Exxon does -- and doesn't do -- with those profits is what marks them out as the world's number one climate criminal.

It's pretty easy to see why Exxon is rich. Higher oil and gas prices, a friendly US administration which subsidises big oil and goes easy on taxes and fees, and the kind of fiscal conservatism that holds back compensation for environmental disasters like the Exxon Valdez. That $US 32 billion is the largest profit ever recorded by an American corporation.

-> see Memo

US Attorney General John Ashcroft has demanded an investigation into whether Cooney or other officials in the Bush administration solicited the Competitive Enterprise Institute's filing of the new lawsuit, as the memo certainly makes it appear. The Competitive Enterprise Institute received nearly a half million dollars in funding last year from Exxon/Mobil, the world's largest oil company...and
reveals great intimacy between CEI and (Bush Administration official Cooney) in their strategizing about ways to minimize the problem of global warming. It also suggests that CEQ (the Council of Environmental Quality) may have been directly involved in efforts to undermine the United States' official reports, as well as the authority of the EPA Administrator.

What is really going on here?

so much for US obligations under GCC Treaty...

from this:

Global Climate Change Treaty: The Kyoto Protocol Emissions Reductions. The United States would be obligated under the Protocol to a cumulative reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions of 7% below 1990 levels for three greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide), and below 1995 levels for the three man-made gases, averaged over the commitment period 2008 to 2012. The Protocol states that Annex I Parties are committed--individually or jointly--to ensuring that their aggregate anthropogenic carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of greenhouse gases do not exceed amounts assigned to each country in Annex B to the Protocol, "with a view to reducing their overall emissions of such gases by at least 5% below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012."

to this:

But the world's top polluter - the US - has not signed up to the treaty.

The US says the changes would be too costly to introduce and that the agreement is flawed... -> more

[edit on 1-2-2006 by NJE777]