Bill, you’ve said that the decision to withdraw is the greatest success of the
“denial machine” that the fossil fuel industry launched 30 years ago.
Could you elaborate on that?
Sure, sure.
We now know, from great investigative reporting, that the fossil fuel industry knew everything
there was to know about climate change in the 1980s.
Exxon was the biggest company on Earth.
They had great scientists.
Their product was carbon.
Of course they were going to study it.
And their scientists told them, with uncanny accuracy, what the temperature and the CO2
concentration would be in 2019.
Understanding that this was a threat to the world, but also a threat to their business,
they took the second more seriously than the first and began this decade-long process of
climate — decades-long of climate denial and delay and obfuscation, setting in motion
all these kind of fake think tanks and so on and so forth.
That’s what came to a head with this withdrawal from Paris.
It was the ultimate conclusion of all that work at disinformation.
From one point of view, it was extremely successful: The fossil fuel industry had its most profitable
years in the last three decades.
On the other hand, we’re now missing half the sea ice in the summer Arctic.
The Great Barrier Reef is half-dead.
You know, the oceans are 30% more acidic.
California is on fire more weeks than not.
We’re in deep, deep trouble.
And the idea that we’re just going to put our hands over our eyes, over our ears or
over our mouth at this point is about as depressing as it’s possible to get.
Bill, I wanted to ask you about the response of corporate America, specifically the automobile
makers, General Motors, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler.
They’ve sided now with President Trump in his continuing battle with California over
auto emission standards.
Your take on that?
It is shortsighted in the extreme.
They’re playing the same game as everybody else, trying to get another year or two out
of their business model, which at the moment is selling people ever bigger SUVs, and so
they’ve been willing to side with the Trump administration to try and make sure we don’t
really do anything about fuel economy.
It’s obviously shortsighted.
It’s obvious that they’re opening up the door even wider for the Europeans, for Tesla
Motors, for all the people who are actually working on the next generation of mobility,
not to mention the people who are working on bike paths and bus lanes.
But the problem is not that we won’t get there eventually, Juan.
The problem is that this is a time test.
Look, the scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a year ago, in their
last report, pretty much gave us a deadline.
They said that if we hadn’t made fundamental transformations in our energy economy by 2030,
then our chances of meeting even the modest targets we set at Paris were essentially nil.
That means we don’t have four-year presidential terms to waste.
It means we don’t have five-year product development cycles to waste.
It means everybody has to be going as hard as they can right now.
And yet, corporate America is divided, Bill, and if you can talk about this?
On the one hand, you have General Motors, Toyota, Fiat Chrysler siding with the Trump
administration against California.
But then you have this slew of other automakers, including Ford, Honda and Volkswagen, which
have sided with California’s right to set pollution limits.
Why this division?
Well, it pretty much reflects who’s most scared of Trump and who’s furthest along
in coming up with cars that can meet emission requirements.
Look, all the automakers know better.
They were all embarked on a course of lower emissions since the Obama administration.
General Motors, Toyota, those people are just trying to suck up some more gravy for a few
more years.
And it’s a disgrace.
But the same disgrace is happening in the utility industry.
It’s happening in agribusiness.
It’s happening everywhere where everyone is trying to maintain their business model
just a little while longer.
That just a little while longer are the years that will break the climate system of the
planet.