Here are the amendments to the Democratic Party’s platform addressing the environment:

…..Democrats are committed to closing the Halliburton loophole [referring to the exemption given companies in 2005 legislation that allowed them not to disclose the chemicals they used during hydraulic fracturing] that stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate hydraulic fracturing, and ensuring tough safeguards are in place, including Safe Drinking Water provisions, to protect local water supplies. We believe hydraulic fracturing should not take place where states and local communities oppose it. We will reduce methane emissions from all oil and gas production and transportation by at least 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2025 through common-sense standards for both new and existing sources and by repairing and replacing thousands of miles of leaky pipes. This will both protect our climate and create thousands of good-paying jobs.

…..Democrats believe that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities, and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help meet our climate goals. Democrats believe that climate change is too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science, and support using every tool available to reduce emissions now.

…..We will streamline federal permits to accelerate the construction of new transmission lines to get low-cost renewable energy to market, and incentivize wind, solar and other renewable energy over the development of new natural gas power plants.

…..We support President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. As we continue working to reduce carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, we must ensure federal actions don’t “significantly exacerbate” global warming. We support a comprehensive approach that insures all federal decisions going forward contribute to solving, not significantly exacerbating climate change.

…..Democrats believe that our commitment to meeting the climate challenge must also be reflected in the infrastructure investments we make. We need to make our existing infrastructure safer and cleaner and build the new infrastructure necessary to power our clean energy future. To create good-paying middle class jobs that can’t be outsourced, Democrats support high labor standards in clean energy infrastructure, and the right to form or join a union, whether in renewable power or advanced vehicle manufacturing. During the clean energy transition, we will insure landowners, communities of color and tribal nations are at the table.

The key changes in the language include support for implementing carbon pricing, something that Hillary Clinton had avoided stating in articulating her climate change action plans.  And the other significant change as described in Sanders’ comment above is the end of the Obama bridging strategy to use natural gas after coal and before renewables. It has been this policy that to date has allowed the United States to reduce its overall carbon emissions. But now the Democrats intend to forego it and push ahead with renewables principally.

Well now the proverbial “sh–t has hit the fan” for the oil giant with all manner of organizations and Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, calling for a U.S. probe into Exxon. The other Democratic candidate of consequence, Bernie Sanders, has sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney General calling for a task force to investigate the company. The “what did they know and when did they know it” questions need answers although the 1981 email memo pretty much answers both questions.

Joining Clinton and Sanders are nearly 50 environmental, civil rights and indigenous people’s groups. It is not so much the “what they knew” that has put off all of these people. It is the question that when they knew it, why did they fund climate denial groups such as the Heartland Institute? Why did their chairman, Rex Tillerson, at the May 27, 2015 annual shareholder’s meeting, tell his investors that climate change science is “not that good.”

Clinton at a New Hampshire town hall meeting is captured on video and posted to Twitter stating “there is a lot of evidence that they [referring to ExxonMobil] misled…..” One Senator in a speech to Congress describes the action of ExxonMobil as a  “deliberate smokescreen.”

In a jointly-signed letter sent to the U.S. Attorney General ExxonMobil is compared to tobacco companies whose scientists knew for decades that smoking their products had health consequences, yet the companies mounted external campaigns to discredit independent third-party science that had uncovered the same evidence.

ExxonMobil stopped directly funding the Heartland Institute in 2008 according to investigative reporting done by the Los Angeles Times. The decision came about because of some shareholder complaints as well as those coming from scientific organizations studying global warming. But instead the company gave money to third parties who then funneled it to the Heartland and other climate change denial groups.

And as for Tillerson’s negative remarks about climate change science, it was Exxon from the early 1970s that put money into climate change research. Exxon scientists created global circulation models working in cooperation with NASA and the Canadian Climate Centre. And it was a senior ice researcher for Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, that stated at a conference in 1991 that greenhouse gases are rising “due to the burning of fossil fuels….nobody disputes this fact.” That is nobody but ExxonMobil’s own chairman and its board.