It shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re an oil and gas company, with gigantic investments in that space, a culture that supports it, knowledge to do it, politics solved for it, and a crap ton of inertia.
The expectation that they’d pivot is far less likely than likely. This isn’t a sector known for disruption outside of new ways to extract.
The insane thing about this is to me that Exxon did seem to have ideas about pivoting away from oil and gas in the 1970s[0]. They funded research that brought down the cost of solar panels five-fold and started manufacturing and selling their own panels[1], they developed the lithium-ion battery[2], and they created subsidiaries for servicing the nuclear power industry[3], among other things.
I’ve never understood the obstructionist position of these oil execs. If you want to make a shitload of money, why not push for development of some emerging industry like renewables where all the infrastructure has to be built up from nothing? That could be money you are getting paid to build it. Instead, now it’s money going to some other company.
Despite having all sorts of advantages (a head start and patents for batteries and renewable energy tech, robust research capabilities, etc.) and a literal roadmap of how climate change would play out, they realized that it was easier and less risky--for them, at least--to maintain the status quo. After all, once you've started a revolution, there's no guarantee that you'll keep control of it.
A long, slow transition that started in the 70s would have been, if not painless, then close enough to it that the pain was easily managed. Worries about stranded assets? By the time the transition was over, they'd have been near the end of their expected lifespans anyways. New, more nimble competitors popping up? They could just acquire them.
Lost revenue? Please. They convinced the world not to take action on climate change, and even managed to hoodwink one of the two major political parties in the US that climate change didn't even exist in the first place. Persuading politicians and the public to support mindbogglingly massive federal subsidies to fund the transition away from fossil fuels would have been easy in comparison. And probably cheaper, for that matter.
I mean, my god. I can just imagine the marketing and PR angle: The industry that chose to end itself to save humanity's future. We'd have shoveled money at them, and thanked them for the privilege.
Had they been willing, they could have pushed for an energy transition that, in the end, would have likely been as profitable or even more profitable than what they managed since they first understood just how catastrophic climate change would be. Instead, they chose to merely delay the inevitable. They'll still face the very consequences that scared them off of acting on climate change, only they'll be worse due to the shortened window of action.
The only difference is that the executives who first made that decision will likely not be around for it.
The first digital camera was (AFAIK) made by Kodak. The modern desktop computer was largely invented by Xerox. Both companies failed to follow through.
The idea is to become so big by selling oil that you are essentially paid/begged to create the new industry that solves the problem, thereby giving you first-mover advantage in the new era. The obstructionist stuff is a little bit performative for shareholders, but there will be an inflection point in their public attitudes. Unfortunately it'll be past the inflection point for favorable living conditions.
It’s not an either/or situation. Most of the Big Oil companies have significant investments in renewable power. It’s just that oil is insanely profitable, to a point which is hard to grasp so it dwarfs whatever else they do.
Private oil companies like Exxon are only about 10% of oil production. The biggies are the state oil companies, on which state wealth depends. They aren't going to give that up.
Funny but Exxon could become a ‘net zero’ company without fundamentally changing its business.
You see, companies get charged for the carbon they emit, not the carbon that their customers emit.
An oil refinery is an ideal place to implement carbon capture because it is a concentrated source of emissions and is already using technology such as amine strippers that one would use for carbon capture. Refineries burn a lot of fuel to produce hydrogen and process heat and those could be replaced with green hydrogen or pink hydrogen, heat could be derived from resistive heating, nuclear HTGR or adiabatic compression in turbines. What CO2 is produced can be pumped underground into saline aquifers.
The Biden administration is interested in subsidizing such development in the ‘Refinery Row” of the U.S. South and it is something they are equipped to succeed at because they have the geology, industrial concentration, skills and attitude to pull it off.
A net-zero Exxon would still have to decarbonize production and that is harder than the refinery but they could buy some offsets (or themselves implement with direct carbon capture, BECCS, etc.) It would be a lot cheaper than buying offsets for their customers but who knows they might sell those too.
They'd better be able to get credits for it! It would be pretty awful to charge for emissions whether they emit or not, because then they have no incentive to decrease emissions.
But giving them credits seems pointlessly complicated to me, compared to just saying "no emissions, no charge".
Stop making destruction of the ecosystem an economic externality? What's next, pricing human rights abuses to prevent US companies from profiting off of foreign slave labor?
I think you fail to realize how the profitability of this industry subsidizes a lot of issues that look to be crisises on their own. Plastics being too cheap to make so we don’t really do recycling or reducing to name one.
I find it interesting that people seem to think that storing CO2 under ground under high pressure for an unlimited amount of time is totally fine. "What could possibly go wrong?"
But at the same time somehow storing nuclear waste in specially designed containers sitting inside granite mountains is somehow extremely irresponsible and not an option?
Do most people actually realize what happens when that stored CO2 comes back up for whatever reason in x amount of years (all the way up to 100's of millions of years). I mean both the short term (everything in a certain radius that doesn't fly dies) as well as long term effects.
The irony is that people are forgetting where all that carbon came from in the first place, before plants captured it from the atmosphere!
Humans are contributing to climate change, but the climate had constantly changed throughout history. During the peak to the Roman empire, parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today. The climate cooling is one of the likely contributing factors behind the collapse of the Roman empire, as agricultural output fell as a result.
Climate change is bad for current human settlement and farming, as what is currently primar land for living and farming will change. Such a charge would have dangerous global economic and political consequences.
> parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today.
That's not a change in global average tempreture though, that's a local variation.
> but the climate had constantly changed throughout history.
'History' is written history, and no, global climatic parameters haven't changed in written history.
I believe you might be thinking of geological time - and yes, on long time scales climate has changed - and changed with cause just as a stone moves subject to force.
In this particular moment of time climate has started to change within the past century after remaining stable for tens of thousands of years and the root cause of that change is human activity changing the insulation properties of the atmosphere.
There is historical data which suggests that there has been two ice ages in the time of modern humans. The climate only appears to be stable when observed over a short timespan.
I don't think there is any doubt that human activity is contributing to climate change.
It's ironic that modern civilization and population numbers aren't possible without fossil fuels, but their use will ultimately cause it's demise.
Consider that during the first ice age, humans had not left Africa - and during the second ice age, much of North America and Europe were uninhabitable
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/12/exxon-clima...