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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures>
"The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame,
Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting
a backlash from climate experts.
As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top
contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an
interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily
responsible for the climate crisis.
The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too
expensive for consumers’ liking.
“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and
who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “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 said the world was “not on the path” to cut its planet-heating emissions
to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is imperative to avoid catastrophic
impacts of global heating. “When are people going to willing to pay for carbon
reduction?” said Woods, who has been Exxon’s chief executive since 2017.
“We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t
willing to spend the money to do that.”
Experts say Woods’s rhetoric is part of a larger attempt to skirt climate
accountability. No new major oil and gas infrastructure can be built if the
world is to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits but Exxon, along with
other major oil companies currently basking in record profits, is pushing ahead
with aggressive fossil-fuel expansion plans.
“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” said
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school.
“I hate to tell you, but you’re the chief executive of the largest publicly
traded oil company, you have influence, you make decisions that matter. Exxon
are at the mercy of markets but they are also shaping them, they are shaping
policy. So no, you can’t blame the public for the failure to fix climate
change.”
Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established
that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but
forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and
stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired
litigation against Exxon across the US.
“What they’re really trying to do is to whitewash their own history, to make it
invisible,” said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown
University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil-fuel
industry.
A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own role in the
climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
