A select few.

• Author: Bottari, Mary
• Position: Robber barons - Column

The robber barons era of the late nineteenth century and the robber baron era today have much in common. Both are marked by rapacious greed, devastating inequality, and callous disregard for the life of the working person. But there is a new factor in the equation. Today, the activities of some of the most powerful robber barons are jeopardizing the very fate of the planet.

Take ExxonMobil. With $420 billion in revenue in 2013, it is the largest fossil fuel company on the planet. Its extraordinary revenues and profits are subsidized by the U.S. tax payer to a massive degree--$600 million dollars annually, says the Center for American Progress. Yet Exxon's CEO, Rex W. Tillerson, considers himself the head of a "global" company, not an American company. Tillerson, whose compensation package is worth some $28 million, thinks climate change is "overblown." "It's an engineering problem with an engineering solution," he says, and people will just have to adapt.

Exxon has long been a leader in the effort to sow doubt in the minds of the public about climate change and climate science. Exxon has bankrolled trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, think tanks like the Heartland Institute, and PR firms and political operations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that are denying the problem, discrediting scientists, and derailing any legislative action to address the crisis. In 2013, federal regulators fined Exxon $2.6 million for its lousy pipeline construction that resulted in a major oil spill in an Arkansas suburb.

Piggybacking on the extraordinary profits and revenues of the big oil firms are the creatures of Wall Street, those hedge fund managers and big banks that...