Rex Tillerson is the Chairman and CEO of the world's largest oil and gas company, ExxonMobil. According to Forbes Magazine, Exxon is the most profitable publicly traded company in world history -- generating more than $1.6 trillion in revenue between 2009-2012.
Exxon is so notorious in its climate denial funding that Greenpeace created ExxonSecrets, a website to record the oil giant's activities to discredit climate science.
According to ExxonSecrets, Exxon gave more than $22 million in funding to climate skeptics between 1998 and 2010. These organizations have been at the forefront of eliminating environmental regulations, passing state legislation mandating climate change denial be taught in schools, and spreading misinformation about climate science.
Under Tillerson, Exxon said it would stop funding nine groups campaigning against climate change. The company, however, still funds 28 other organizations disputing climate science.
Tillerson was the Chairman of the American Petroleum Institute (API) from 2007 to 2009. The API is the American oil and gas industry's chief lobbying arm. In 2012, the American Petroleum Institute spent more than $7 million lobbying Congress. The API has a penchant for influencing government officials and public opinion through astroturf campaigns and front groups.
Perhaps the best example of the organization's anti-science activity occurred in 2009, when a federal bill to address climate change was making its way through Congress and the Senate. During this critical government debate, API launched a nation-wide astroturf campaign against the climate legislation.
Tillerson is also a board member of the Business Roundtable, another organization which lobbies against climate action.
In 2012, during a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson was asked about the climate crisis. He responded by saying:
"I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact. The -- how large it is is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are."
Tillerson asserts climate models are limited in predicting, with any accuracy, what the future will look like. Although he considers climate change a great challenge, Tillerson says there's more pressing priorities the human race needs to deal with.
"There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity. They need electricity they can count on, that they can afford. They need fuel to cook their food on that's not animal dung. There are more people's health being dramatically affected because they could -- they don't even have access to fossil fuels to burn. They'd love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably, and their quality of health and the health of their children and their future would rise immeasurably. You'd save millions upon millions of lives by making fossil fuels more available to a lot of the part of the world that doesn't have it, and do it in the most efficient ways, using the most efficient technologies we have today."
According to Forbes, Tillerson's total compensation from Exxon in 2011 was $34.9 million. In 2013, he received a 6% raise, pushing his annual salary to $2.72 million along with a bonus of $4.59 million and 225,000 shares of stock.
