New York – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp, used an alias email address while at the oil company to send and receive information related to climate change and other matters, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
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The attorney general’s office said in a letter on Monday that it found Tillerson had used an alias email address under the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker” from at least 2008 through 2015.
Wayne is Tillerson’s middle name.
The letter was sent to a New York state judge overseeing Schneiderman’s investigation into whether Exxon misled shareholders and the public about climate change.
In a statement on Monday, Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said, “The email address, [email protected], is part of the company’s email system and was put in place for secure and expedited communications between select senior company officials and the former chairman for a broad range of business-related topics.”
Jeffers said the company had provided 2.5 million pages of documents in response to a subpoena from Schneiderman’s office and would respond to the claims in the letter in court filings.
A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter.
The letter, seen by Reuters, said Exxon had not previously disclosed the alias account. It asked the judge to order Exxon to explain whether documents from the “Wayne Tracker” email and 34 additional accounts assigned to other Exxon executives and board members had been preserved.
The letter said that Exxon had produced some 60 documents bearing the “Wayne Tracker” email but never said it was used by Tillerson for relevant communications at Exxon.
It asked the court to order Exxon to identify whether any other email accounts were used by Tillerson.
“Exxon’s top executives, and in particular, Mr. Tillerson, have made multiple representations that are at the center of OAG’s (attorney general’s office) investigation of potentially false or misleading statements to investors and the public,” the letter said.
The case is People of the State of New York v PricewaterhouseCoopers and Exxon Mobil Corporation, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 451962/2016.
This climate change thing is something that I knew about as a teenager as early as the 1970’s simply by reading magazines in the library. The question was why it was happening and what, if anything, to do about it. In 2015 Scientific America wrote an investigative piece (available free on the internet) on Exxon research in the 1970’s:
> They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic … A year later he warned … that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act.
How many problems with the way this told? Start with a little arithmetic: 1977 plus “a year later” means the year 1978. Ten years after 1978 is 1988. That means by failing to have acted by 1988 we have already passed the point of no return, so we are doomed. Then why bother with any strategy?
Then the question of “Exxon needed to act”, apparently and no one else (as no one else is mentioned) – not China Russia, Africa etc.
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