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record heat
Chevron CEO Pay Jumped to $26.5 Million During Hottest Year on Record
News of Mike Wirth's 2023 compensation came after March was deemed the 10th month in a row to be the hottest ever recorded.
Apr 10, 2024
The chief executive of the U.S. oil giant Chevron saw his pay jump by more than 12% in 2023 as continued emissions from fossil fuel corporations helped push global temperatures to record heights.
Citing a new securities filing, Reutersreported Wednesday that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth received $26.5 million in total compensation last year. Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the U.S. by revenue, reported $21.3 billion in profits in 2023—a haul it used to lavish shareholders with buybacks and dividends.
News of Wirth's 2023 compensation came a day after the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced that last month was the hottest March on record globally. The organization said March marked "the 10th month in a row that is the warmest on record for the respective month of the year."
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, said in a statement that "March 2024 continues the sequence of climate records toppling for both air temperature and ocean surface temperatures."
"Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions," Burgess stressed.
But oil giants like Chevron, the primary drivers of the global climate emergency, have been rolling back their already tepid climate commitments and buying up rival oil producers—a signal that the industry is bent on continuing to drill as much as possible despite increasingly dire warnings from scientists.
A Carbon Majors report released earlier this week found that Chevron is one of just 57 oil, gas, coal, and cement producers responsible for 80% of global CO2 emissions from those industries.
A separate analysis published last month by Global Witness estimated that the emissions of Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and BP could cause 11.5 million additional premature deaths around the world before the end of the century.
"In the past few months, ExxonMobil and Chevron have invested more than $100 billion into new oil and gas reserves," the human rights group noted. "BP and Shell weakened their climate pledges. And TotalEnergies plans to ramp up production in the next few years."
"Fossil fuel companies' systematic spreading of climate change denial, combined with lobbying, has slowed the transformation towards an energy system built on renewables," Global Witness added. "And yet, the supermajors are asking us to trust them, to allow them to be the ultimate arbiter, despite the massive profits they're making."
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'Omen of the Future': Off-The-Charts Hot Oceans Scare Scientists
After 2023 was the hottest year in human history, experts warn that 2024 "has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
Feb 27, 2024
While global policymakers continue to drag their feet on phasing out planet-heating fossil fuels, scientists around the world "are freaking out" about high ocean temperatures, as they toldThe New York Times in reporting published Tuesday.
A "super El Niño" has expectedly heated up the Pacific, but Times reporter David Gelles spoke with ocean experts from Miami to Cambridge to Sydney about record heat in the North Atlantic as well as conditions around the poles.
"The sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing," said Matthew England, a University of New South Wales professor who studies ocean currents. "The temperature's just going off the charts. It's like an omen of the future."
Rob Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey who watches polar ice levels, told the paper that "we're used to having a fairly good handle on things. But the impression at the moment is that things have gone further and faster than we expected. That's an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be."
\u2026for almost a year now,\u201d McNoldy said. \u201cIt\u2019s just astonishing. Like, it doesn\u2019t seem real.\u201d Across the unusually warm Atlantic, in Cambridge, England, @rdlarter , a marine scientist who tracks polar ice levels, is equally perplexed. \u201cIt\u2019s quite scary, partly because\u2026— (@)
Last week, Jeff Berardelli, WFLA's chief meteorologist and climate specialist, also highlighted the warm North Atlantic and that "all signs are pointing to a busy hurricane season" later this year.
Noting that in the middle of this month, sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were around 2°F higher than the 1990-2020 normal and nearly 3°F above the 1980s, Berardelli explained:
That may not sound like a lot, but consider this is averaged over the majority of the basin shown in the red outline in the image above. A deviation like that is unheard of... until now.
To put it into more relatable terms, considering what's been normal for the most recent 30 years, the statistical chance that any February day would be as warm as it is right now is 1-in-280,000. That's not a typo. This is according to University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy...
And that 1-in-280,000 is compared against a recent climate, which had already been warmed substantially by climate change. If you tried to compare it against a climate considered normal around the year 1900, the math would become nonsensical. Meaning an occurrence like this simply would not be possible.
McNoldy also stressed the shocking nature of current conditions to the Times, telling Gelles that "the North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now... It's just astonishing. Like, it doesn't seem real."
The new comments from McNoldy and other scientists come on the heels of various institutions and experts worldwide recently confirming that 2023 was the hottest year in human history. Research also showed that it was the warmest year on record for the oceans, which capture about 91% of excess heat from greenhouse gases.
As Common Dreamsreported last month, Adam Scaife, a principal fellow at the United Kingdom's Met Office, said that "it is striking that the temperature record for 2023 has broken the previous record set in 2016 by so much because the main effect of the current El Niño will come in 2024."
That's the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a climate phenomenon that also has a cool phase called La Niña expected later this year. Still, Scaife warned that "the Met Office's 2024 temperature forecast shows this year has strong potential to be another record-breaking year."
Throughout the record-shattering 2023, experts also expressed alarm. After an April study showed that the ocean is heating up faster than previously thought, the BBCrevealed that some scientists declined to speak about it on the record, reporting that "one spoke of being 'extremely worried and completely stressed.'"
In July, when a buoy roughly 40 miles south of Miami recorded a sea surface temperature of 101.1°F just after a "100% coral mortality" event at a restoration site, Florida State University associate professor Mariana Fuentes toldNPR that "if you have several species that are being impacted at the same time by an increase in temperature, there's going to be a general collapse of the whole ecosystem."
The following month, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that the average daily global ocean surface temperature hit 69.7°F, and deputy director Samantha Burgess said, "The fact that we've seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean may get between now and next March."
"The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilize them and get them back to where they were," Burgess emphasized at the time.
Last year ended with a United Nations climate summit that scientists called "a tragedy for the planet," because the final deal out of the conference—led by an Emirati oil CEO—did not demand a global phaseout of fossil fuels.
Azerbaijan, which is set to host this year's U.N. conference in November, has similarly selected a former fossil fuel executive to lead the event. The country also plans to increase its gas production by a third during the next decade.
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Exxon's Climate Lie: 'No Corporation Has Ever Done Anything This Big or Bad'
The truth of Exxon’s complicity in global warming must to be told - how they knew about climate change decades ago but chose to help kill our planet
Oct 14, 2015
With Paris looming, I'm well aware that it's time to be hopeful, and I'm willing to try. Even amid the record heat and flooding of the present, there are good signs for the future in the rising climate movement and the falling cost of solar.
But before we get to past and present there's some past to be reckoned with, and before we get to hope there's some deep, blood-red anger.
In the last three weeks, two separate teams of journalists -- the Pulitzer-prize-winning reporters at the website Inside Climate News and another crew composed of Los Angeles Times veterans and up-and-comers at the Columbia Journalism School -- have begun publishing the results of a pair of independent investigations into ExxonMobil.
Though they draw on completely different archives, leaked documents, and interviews with ex-employees, they reach the same damning conclusion: Exxon knew all that there was to know about climate change decades ago, and instead of alerting the rest of us denied the science and obstructed the politics of global warming.
To be specific:
- By 1978, Exxon's senior scientists told top management that climate change was real, caused by man, and would raise global temperatures by 2-3C this century, which was pretty much spot-on.
- By the early 1980s, they'd validated these findings with shipborne measurements of CO2 (they outfitted a giant tanker with carbon sensors for a research voyage) and with computer models that showed precisely what was coming. As the head of one key lab at Exxon Research wrote to his superiors, there was "unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere".
- By the early 1990s, their researchers were studying the possibility of new exploration in the Arctic and were well aware that human-induced climate change was melting the poles. Indeed, they used that knowledge to plan their strategy, reporting that soon the Beaufort Sea would be ice-free as much as five months a year instead of the historic two. Greenhouse gases are rising "due to the burning of fossil fuels," a key Exxon researcher told an audience of engineers at a conference in 1991. "Nobody disputes this fact."
But, of course, Exxon did dispute that fact. Not inside the company, where they used their knowledge to buy oil leases in the areas they knew would melt, but outside, where they used their political and financial might to ensure no one took climate change seriously.
They helped organise campaigns to instil doubt, borrowing tactics and personnel from the tobacco industry's similar fight. They funded "institutes" devoted to outright climate denial. And at the highest levels, they did all they could to spread their lies.
To understand the treachery - the sheer, profound, and I think unparalleled evil - of Exxon, one must remember the timing. Global warming became a public topic in 1988, thanks to NASA scientist James Hansen - it's taken a quarter-century and counting for the world to take effective action. If at any point in that journey, Exxon - the largest oil company on Earth and most profitable enterprise in human history - had said: "Our own research shows that these scientists are right and that we are in a dangerous place," the faux debate would effectively have ended. That's all it would have taken; stripped of the cover provided by doubt, humanity would have gotten to work.
Instead, knowingly, they helped organise the most consequential lie in human history, and kept that lie going past the point where we can protect the poles, prevent the acidification of the oceans, or slow sea level rise enough to save the most vulnerable regions and cultures. Businesses always misbehave, but VW is the flea to Exxon's elephant. No corporation has ever done anything this big and this bad.
I'm aware that anger at this point does little good. I'm aware that all clever people will say "of course they did" or "we all use fossil fuels", as if either claim is meaningful. I'm aware that nothing much will happen to Exxon - I doubt they'll be tried in court or their executives sent to jail.
But nonetheless it seems crucial simply to say, for the record, the truth: this company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse. In its greed, Exxon helped -- more than any other institution -- to kill our planet.
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