Twenty five years ago, on this day, November 30, 1998, two of the Seven Sisters join at the hip.
1998 – Exxon and Mobil sign a USD$73.7 billion agreement to merge, thus creating ExxonMobil, the world’s largest company
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 366.8ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
Mobil had, by this time been doing “advertorials” and so on (see Herb Schmertz- https://marketingcraftsmanship.com/2013/07/05/the-herb-schmertz-era-when-public-relations-had-some-balls/
that the German provocateur and artist Hans Haacke had spoofed.
What I think we can learn from this is that Omnicorp is on the horizon, as per the Onion “Our Dumb Century”. These immensely powerful concentrated interests well, you can break them up and they recombine, recoalesce. It’s like that scene at the end of Terminator two (spoiler), where he’s been in the liquid nitrogen, they shoot him, he is destroyed. And then the pieces and Mercury start to come back together.
What happened next
Exxon continued to fund denialist groups (provoking the Royal Society into writing a public letter in 2006 telling them to knock it off), and is now getting sued for what it did to block action.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
That Hans Haacke/Bourdieu book “Free Exchange”
https://raphaeldelamer.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/bourdieu-pierre-haacke-hans-free-exchange.pdf