We’ve had a vote on Brexit and narrowly skipped Grexit. Will 2017 be the year of Rexit, when a Texan oil baron takes an axe to global agreements on climate change? Some fear that Rex Tillerson may try to do just that.
To environmental campaigners, ExxonMobil, the company Mr Tillerson has led for 11 years and has worked for since 1975, occupies a special place. For most of his career, the world’s biggest listed oil major refused to acknowledge the risks of climate change and funded groups that promoted scepticism. Recently, Exxon has mollified its stance. It now accepts the science, but still refuses to join efforts by other big western oil companies, the likes of BP, Total and Shell, to push alternatives to fossil fuels. Nevertheless, the biggest remaining chunk of the giant Standard Oil empire now faces a tangled web of litigation linked to its record on the issue.
If confirmed as secretary of state, wrangles over whether Exxon may or may not have misled investors over climate change will no longer be Mr Tillerson’s problem but that of his successor. But what of his policies as America’s diplomat-in-chief? And what will the 64-year-old’s appointment mean for the Paris climate accord, the 195-nation deal finally struck last December, after 20 years of tortuous negotiation?
Unlike Lee Raymond, his predecessor at ExxonMobil, Mr Tillerson cannot be labelled an outright climate change denier. His position is surprisingly nuanced and is worth considering before leaping to conclusions about how the issue may be handled by the state department under his watch. “I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact,” he said in 2012. “It’ll have a warming impact.”
Where Mr Tillerson’s views are controversial are on the impact of rising carbon emissions and the speed with which they could affect the climate. He has suggested, for example, that sea levels will be “manageable”, a view that many scientists would reject. He also has argued that the solution may lie in developing new technology to strip carbon from the atmosphere, rather than the consensus that it would be better to avoid releasing it in the first place.
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“We will adapt to this,” he has said. “It’s an engineering problem.” This idea of “geo-engineering” a solution to the world’s warming climate is vintage ExxonMobil. Mr Tillerson is, after all, an engineer at heart and a product of a powerful culture. Within the industry, Exxon is universally admired and yet loathed for its uncompromising style. In many ways, it operates more like a military machine than a normal company, one reason why Mr Tillerson may find that he has more in common with Mr Trump’s generals than with colleagues at the state department. So looking for an engineering fix to a problem, however big, reflects the company’s DNA.
With Mr Tillerson directing his old colleagues from Washington, the hunt for a technological fix, whether by building machines to suck carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or by firing aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, may be something we hear more about. Many people would feel that this is the wrong approach.
In any case, Mr Tillerson may struggle to simply unpick the Paris Accord, even if he wants to. President-elect Donald Trump has said that he wants to cancel it, but the accord decrees that any country wanting to pull out after joining up has to wait four years. That means that, in theory, the earliest date for withdrawal is November 4, 2020, coincidentally around the time of the next US presidential election. So Rexit, if it happens, may have to wait until then.
Robin Pagnamenta is Deputy Business Editor of The Times