Same Planet, Different Worlds

World 1: Koala scorched in Australia due to massive fires according to a 2019 YouTube by The Sun with over 47 million views. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) noted, "Nearly 6,382 koalas are estimated to have perished during the 2019/2020 bushfires, nearly 15% of the population." My June 5, 2023 post linked a July 28, 2020 bbc.com article, "Australia's fires 'killed or harmed three billion animals.'" I also noted the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome in which over "one billion marine intertidal animals may have perished along the shores of the Salish Sea" according University of British Columbia researcher Chris Harley; and estimated nearly eleven billion snow crab that likely died from one or more heat-related reasons off Alaska from 2018 to 2021 according to Molly Olmstead's October 21, 2022 article at slate.com. The climate madness continues with over 160 dead elephants in Zimbabwe reported in January 2024, due to drought according to The Zimbabwe Parks & Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks) cited by Tawanda Karombo in a January 17, 2024 article in The Guardian.

World 2: Exxon CEO Darren Woods, cited in a February 27, 2024 Fortune article by Jane Thier and reported in a March 4, 2024 article in The Guardian by Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman, said, “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”  In other words, koalas, marine intertidal animals, snow crab, elephants, and billions of humans at this rate be damned, Exxon's obscene profits are simply not negotiable!"

In The Guardian article by Noor and Milman, Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, responded to Woods, "It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems." The article also quoted Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, "For decades, they told us that the science was too uncertain to justify action, that it was premature to act, and that we could and should wait and see how things developed. Now the CEO says: oh dear, we’ve waited too long. If this isn’t gaslighting, I don’t know what is.” She added, "The playbook is this: sell consumers a product that you know is dangerous, while publicly denying or downplaying those dangers. Then, when the dangers are no longer deniable, deny responsibility and blame the consumer.”

The situation is laughable for its logic, and tragic for global implications. My December 14, 2023 post "130 nations at Cop28 [called] for a fossil fuel phase-out" but Big Oil and Major Oil-Producing Nations Said No included an imagined COP 300 about 272 years from now:

Big Oil Company Press Release at COP300

We understand
there are only
10 million humans left.

We’re not sorry.
This was war,
and we won.

So what if most
everything on Earth
must die?

We underwent
extensive blame
and denial therapy.

Reader,
you and your children
are the problem.

It’s not our fault
oil kills people
and nonhumans.

We’re not responsible
for anything
but making money.

We’re not saints.
We own politicians
and corporations.

Remember your
ancestors elected them,
and bought our products.

I didn't expect many parts of my poem to sadly come true in 2024.

The 2014 documentary film Merchants of Doubt, based on a book by Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has this scene about one minute long explaining how Exxon and other Big Oil firms sold delayed climate action far beyond what is reasonable. In the scene, Bob Inglis, a former U.S. representative from South Carolina, says about those resisting climate science, "The whole way I've created my life is wrong? You're saying I shouldn't have this house in the suburb. I shouldn't be driving this car where I take my kids to soccer. And you're not going to tell me to live the way that you want me to live. And along comes some people with sowing some doubt, and it's pretty effective because I'm looking for that answer. I want it to be that the science is not real." I greatly respect Christian Republican Bob Inglis for his courage accepting ice core evidence from Antarctica, and coral bleaching rates at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. A February 22, 2017 article from australiainstitute.org cites Adam Morton in a Fairfax interview and Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast showing "How the Gospel helped Republican Bob Inglis to champion climate action."

Legal penalties for Darren Woods, and others at Exxon, could include having to watch "World 1: Koala scorched in Australia" ten times without looking away.