Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., said yesterday that people will adapt to new living conditions that arise because of global warming and that engineers will find ways to work around a rise in sea levels or a disruption of agriculture. Tillerson also said that fearmongering, lazy journalists and an illiterate public complicate his job running the world's most closely watched oil company.

The remarks seemed to be a departure for the 60-year-old Tillerson, a deliberate, even-tempered and relaxed speaker who, since becoming CEO six years ago, has appeared to intentionally differentiate himself from Lee Raymond, his brusque, tempestuous predecessor. Most pointedly, Tillerson has abandoned a signature Raymond policy -- Exxon Mobil's funding of writers who challenged prevailing climate science with tracts that Raymond and other critics brandished as evidence that global warming was a hoax.

Tillerson struck new ground in seeming to embrace a mainstay of climate science's harshest critics -- that the public should accept that climate change is coming -- and appearing to ridicule those who in his view possibly stand in Exxon Mobil's way.

...

As he has previously, Tillerson, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said he accepts that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are "going to have an impact" and proceeded to question the credibility of predictive climate modeling. He said that, using today's science, no one can know what precisely "the future's going to be."

But Tillerson seemed to pivot on his public positioning by remarking that, whatever the consequences of global warming, "we believe those consequences are manageable." He seemed to suggest that the impacts may not be as extreme as some scientists forecast.

Full Report: http://eenews.net/public/energywire/2012/06/28/4