Exxon’s Never-Ending Big Dig Flooding the Earth With Fossil Fuels

Exxon’s Never-Ending Big Dig
Flooding the Earth With Fossil Fuels
By Bill McKibben
Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history.  And that’s just the beginning.  As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now -- entirely legally -- is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.
Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176105/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_it's_not_just_what_exxon_did%2C_it's_what_it's_doing/#more