What Exxon Knew About Climate Change

But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Springtime for Grifters

As it happens, Mr. Carson lied. He has indeed been deeply involved with Mannatech, and has done a lot to help promote its merchandise. PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false, without qualification. But the Republican base doesn’t want to hear about it, and the candidate apparently believes, probably correctly, that he can simply brazen it out. These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

.. The report found that the bulk of the money these PACs raise ends up going to cover administrative costs and consultants’ fees, very little to their ostensible purpose. For example, only 14 percent of what the Tea Party Leadership Fund spends is “candidate focused.”

 

.. Current estimates say that Mr. Carson, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz together have the support of around 60 percent of Republican voters.

.. There was a time when Mr. Rubio’s insistence that $6 trillion in tax cuts would somehow pay for themselves would have marked him as deeply unserious, especially given the way his party has been harping on the evils of budget deficits.

.. But the Republican base doesn’t care what the mainstream media says. Indeed, after Wednesday’s debate the Internet was full of claims that John Harwood, one of the moderators, lied about Mr. Rubio’s tax plan. (He didn’t.)

Carly: From Secretary to CEO: “Sortof”

“It’s only in this country that you can go from being a secretary to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world,” she told Jimmy Fallon, on “The Tonight Show,” last week. “Wow,” Fallon said. “It’s unbelievable.” It’s also, as with much that Fiorina says, a little more complicated than that. In 1976, Cara Carleton Sneed graduated from Stanford, where her father had been a law professor. (He later served in the Nixon Administration and on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) She enrolled in law school at U.C.L.A. but dropped out. She worked briefly in a real-estate firm as a receptionist, then got married, moved to Italy for a while, and returned to attend business school in Maryland, after which, Stanford degree and M.B.A. in hand, she was hired as a management trainee at A. T. & T.

.. Some of the deals she closed were, in fact, unbelievable. In 1999, Lucent said that a little-known firm called PathNet would buy as much as two billion dollars’ worth of its equipment. As Fortunenoted later, PathNet’s annual revenues were only $1.6 million; Lucent would loan it money for the sale, which was unlikely to be repaid. But by the time such dubious accounting became public, leading to a collapse of Lucent’s stock, Fiorina, who was never accused of wrongdoing, had left for H.P., with a signing bonus worth sixty-eight million dollars and millions more in pay. When H.P. fired her, she got a twenty-million-dollar severance package, plus fifteen thousand dollars for career counselling. Only in this country, perhaps, could a C.E.O. receive compensation worth more than a hundred million dollars in six years, get fired, and use the money to enter politics.