ExxonMobil Very Sad You Did Climate Change. Also: Suing People Who Don't Want Climate Change.
Oil giants only pawns in game of global warning. Ah, Mongo! Ah, humanity!
Darren Woods, the CEO of petrogiant Exxon Mobil, is very disappointed with You People for taking decades to even start doing something about the global warming caused by burning fossil fuels. Shame on you. You know, it’s really your fault that the world is unlikely to meet its Paris climate agreement goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, because for some reason you have all been dragging your feet.
In an interview with Fortune last week, Woods explained that consumers need to get their shit together and pay for the energy transition, no matter how much it costs.
“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it. […] The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”
Woods just wants to know when people will finally come to their senses and take some responsibility for climate change, huh? “When are people going to be willing to pay for carbon reduction?” he asked, adding that oil companies “have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”
Shame on them!
You people should really think about why you didn’t take serious action to transition away from fossil fuels when the world’s scientists started warning of the crisis in the late 1980s. It’s also entirely your fault that the four biggest publicly-traded oil companies brought in roughly $2 trillion in profits since 1990, to say nothing of the money accumulated by state-owned producers across the world.
Your inaction couldn’t possibly be related to the abundantly documented efforts of Exxon in particular to quash its own scientists’ research, going back to the 1970s, showing that continued fossil fuel use would lead to catastrophic warming in coming decades. Nor the millions of dollars Exxon and other oil companies spent funding fake science to raise doubt about the reality of human-caused global heating. Seriously, why didn’t Americans just toss out all the petro-funded politicians like Sen. James Inhofe, who gleefully tossed a snowball in the Senate to prove it was still cold in winter? Darren Woods is shocked at your gullibility.
As recently as 2021, you also probably should have stopped Mr. Woods from lying to Congress about his company’s history of funding climate denial, darn you. And why didn’t you dumb non-millionaires match the oil industry’s lobbying and litigation aimed at undermining Joe Biden’s climate program either?
Despite Woods’s disappointment in all of us for not reining him in, there are still plenty of unkind meanies who accused him of shirking his own industry’s responsibility for the climate crisis, like Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt (Wonkette subsidy link, and if anything is Required Reading here, that’d be on the list), who also cowrote a 2021 analysis of how Exxon obfuscated its part in the climate crisis:
“The playbook is this: sell consumers a product that you know is dangerous, while publicly denying or downplaying those dangers. Then, when the dangers are no longer deniable, deny responsibility and blame the consumer. […]
“For decades, they told us that the science was too uncertain to justify action, that it was premature to act, and that we could and should wait and see how things developed,” said Oreskes. “Now the CEO says: oh dear, we’ve waited too long. If this isn’t gaslighting, I don’t know what is.”
And indeed, Woods said in the Fortune interview that the world “waited too long” to develop cleaner energy sources, but that even so, Exxon “recognized the need to decarbonize,” and said the company even supports a carbon tax, OK?
Just everyone please ignore the Exxon lobbyist behind the curtain who openly bragged in 2021 about how “supporting” a carbon tax was great public relations, since it would never pass in Congress.
As for proven clean energy technology like wind, solar, and storage, which are becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, Woods explained that it’s nice and all, but just not an Exxon kind of thing, because the company doesn’t “see the ability to generate above-average returns for investors.”
“We recognize a need for that. We just don’t see that as an appropriate use of ExxonMobil’s capabilities,” he added.
Here, would you like some algae fuel to power jets? Oh, sorry, Exxon dropped that research too, after advertising for years that it would save the world.
In related news, while it faces dozens of lawsuits over its climate lies going back decades, ExxonMobil is also punching back with a lawsuit against investors who bought Exxon stock with the goal of influencing the company’s climate policy.
Investors in publicly-traded companies like ExxonMobil try to shape corporate policies by filing shareholder proposals that are voted on at annual meetings. ExxonMobil says it's fed up with a pair of investor groups that it claims are abusing the system by filing similar proposals year after year in an effort to micromanage its business. […]
How dare the little people think that just by owning part of the company, they have some sort of say in how it’s run!
ExxonMobil is going after two investor groups, Arjuna Capital and Follow This, that have repeatedly introduced proposals calling for the company to
cut emissions faster from its own operations and from its supply chain, including the pollution that's created when customers burn its oil and natural gas. That indirect pollution, known as Scope 3 emissions, accounts for 90% of ExxonMobil's carbon footprint, according to Arjuna and Follow This.
After the company sued them in federal court in Texas in January, the investor groups withdrew the proposal and promised not to resubmit it, but the company is continuing the legal action to teach ‘em not to mess with their betters. ExxonMobil wants the Securities and Exchange Commission to crack down on pesky investors who keep resubmitting proposals the management doesn’t like.
In that Fortune interview, Woods explained that Exxon is there to make money for people who believe in drilling, drilling, and drilling, not people who think it should switch to something that isn’t making the planet uninhabitable:
“We want to cater to the shareholders who are real investors, who have an interest in seeing this company succeed in generating return on their investments,” he said. “We don’t feel a responsibility to activists that hijack that process … and frankly, abuse it to advance an ideology.”
Don’t the peons understand that they aren’t allowed to touch the levers of power just by buying access to those levers? Shame on them!
Now what do you people have to say for yourselves? You owe a big apology to Mr. Woods for making him accept a 52 percent salary increase in 2022, with a total compensation package of $35.9 million for the year. Now make it snappy and buy a big gas-guzzling pickup.
Or even better, organize and demand climate action. Only by putting Darren Woods out of business can we truly make him happy.
PREVIOUSLY, IN THESE RATFUCKERS.
[Guardian / NPR / AP / Photo (cropped): Gary Leavens, Creative Commons License 2.0 ]
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Today is a good day for all of us whose autocorrect never figured out that we meant a senator, not a movie theater.
Updated the closing graf to make it more hopey-changey:
"Or even better, organize and demand climate action. Only by putting Darren Woods out of business can we truly make him happy."