Posted on 07/02/2012 10:31:14 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Fears about climate change are overblown and shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels should be considered an engineering problem, said the head of the world's largest oil refiner, ExxonMobil.
"The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say 'we just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's chief executive, said in a speech on Wednesday (June 27).
Tackling global poverty should have a higher international priority than reducing carbon emissions, because it would give billions of the world’s energy poor access to oil and gas supplies, in his view.
"They'd love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably," he said.
"You'd save millions upon millions of lives making fossil fuels available to parts of the world that don't have it," he added.
Tillerson proposed adapting to the effects of climate change through engineering methods, rather than attempting to prevent them by eliminating the use of fossil fuels.
Humans had long adapted to change, he said, and governments should thus create policies to cope with the Earth's rising temperatures.
"Changes to weather patterns that move crop rotation areas around—we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem and it has an engineering solution," Tillerson said in a presentation to the US Council on Foreign relations in New York.
Tillerson's remarks came five days after Rio+20 summit in which leaders aimed at setting up goals for sustainable development to help the very people the oil executive mentioned. …
(Excerpt) Read more at euractiv.com ...
Without fossil fuels, no industrial society. One goes from wood, to goal to oil and gas to provide energy. No other sources are economically efficient right now.
Climate does change (note: that doesn't mean humans have much effect on it). Adapting to that change is the difference between survival and extinction.
It is indeed an engineering problem, and without ready sources of energy, it gets much tougher to solve.
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