Darren Woods is wrong. The past matters
It’s how we inherited the crises of the present — and an indication of where we’ll go without accountability.
Emily Sanders is senior reporter at ExxonKnews.
An interview with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods is making waves this week. For a good portion of a nearly 45-minute conversation with Fortune CEO Alan Murray and reporter Michal Lev-Ram, Woods blamed governments and consumers in various ways for the global climate crisis, explaining that “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions.”
As the world hurdles past critical thresholds of warming and climate disasters get more frequent and deadly, communities are indeed paying the price — in more ways than one. According to Woods, whose company is one of the largest emitters in history, that’s because society has “waited too long” to invest in solutions to start reducing emissions.
That’s a rather ahistorical view of how we got to this place, and Woods wants to keep it that way. When asked about Exxon’s legacy of climate denial — that is, the company’s well-documented campaigns to deceive the public and policymakers about the dangers caused by its products, which successfully undermined climate action for decades — he claimed it doesn’t matter anymore.
“That was 30 years ago,” Woods said. “Today the world has moved on, the understanding of this challenge has moved on, and where we are today is, how can we contribute to a solution set, not debate the past.”
The past, of course, does matter. From our present-day laws and how they were made, to our rights and who decided them, to the wars we fight and fund and the very contours of society, of course past actions of powerful entities matter — powerful corporations especially. The sugarcane industry catalyzed the colonization of the Americas and brought enslaved people from Africa to mass-produce a product that’s now disproportionately harming public health in Black communities. The U.S. United Fruit Company orchestrated a coup in Guatemala, leading to military dictatorship, civil war, and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. The lead paint and asbestos industries poisoned generations of children in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, further fracturing race and class divides. The list goes on, and Exxon’s history of climate deception is one of the most powerful examples there is — the oil giant has fueled, and continues to fuel, one of the greatest crises humanity and the planet have ever faced.
In 1997, U.S.Senator Chuck Hagel helped lead a resolution opposing ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, a major international agreement to limit greenhouse gasses. Decades later, Hagel told PBS Frontline that he was manipulated by oil companies like Exxon that downplayed climate science they knew was sound. “What we now know about some of these large oil companies’ positions … they lied. And yes, I was misled,” Hagel said.
When asked if society would be in a better place to confront climate change had the industry warned the public about the dangers of fossil fuels, Hagel said “it would have created a whole different climate, a whole different political environment. I think it would have changed everything.”
It’s because of the success of Exxon and other fossil fuel majors’ deception (along with an apparent lack of preparation before this interview) that the editor-in-chief at Fortune claimed that “stopping the sale of oil and gas is not going to be good for the world at this point in history” and a reporter praised Woods for promoting “positivity and constructive conversations between private sector and government.” And it’s because we haven’t yet fully reckoned with that past (though efforts to do so are growing exponentially) that Exxon is able, still unchallenged by too many members of the media, to continue deceiving the public today.
Here are just a few of the glaring omissions, misleading statements, and outright lies Woods got away with in this interview:
What Woods says: The reason the world is not on track to reach net zero by 2050 is that consumers aren’t willing to pay for the energy transition that Exxon has the tools to provide. “We have opportunities to make fuel with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that, businesses aren’t willing to spend it.”
Reality: In the words of mind-boggled experts and advocates since the interview aired, Woods is rather boldly “gaslighting” the public while his company lobbies and funds campaigns against meaningful climate policy, doubles down on oil and gas production, and hauls in multi-billion dollar profits from its fossil fuel business each year. Exxon, by Woods’ own admission, is rapidly expanding oil and gas production, even after experts have warned that investment in new oil and gas projects must stop for the world to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
As Guardian reporter Dharna Noor points out, a 2021 analysis by researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran found that Exxon has for decades used public messaging to blame consumers for emissions while minimizing its role in fueling the climate crisis.
What Woods says: “We’ve committed to get to net zero in our Permian operation, where we’re rapidly growing production, to demonstrate that in a world of growing production that you can reduce your own emissions.”
Reality: Fossil fuels are the primary cause of climate change. Reducing the intensity of fossil fuel emissions doesn’t actually matter if you’re producing more of them and planning to continue to do so. This is like saying it’s healthy to smoke a pack of “low-tar” cigarettes a day.
What Woods says: We need a price on carbon to “get the markets to work” in the energy transition space.
Reality: Exxon uses its support for a carbon tax to distract from real emissions reductions and doesn’t think it will ever pass, according to a former Exxon lobbyist who was filmed saying so.
What Woods says: A “broader set of solutions” is needed to lower emissions – including carbon capture and storage, biofuels, and hydrogen. “We’re focused on areas where there aren’t solutions, where we’re going to help decarbonize hard-to-decarbonize industries where today they don’t have readily available solutions.”
Reality: Exxon dropped its algae biofuels research last year after spending years and millions of dollars promoting it as a climate solution. Now it’s heading in the same direction with carbon capture, even after the International Energy Agency said that the fossil fuel industry needs to “[let] go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.” Climate change isn’t a technological puzzle to be solved at some point down the line: the solutions to it already exist. Exxon just won’t fund them, because, as Woods said during this interview, they wouldn’t provide “above average returns” for investors.
What Woods says: Exxon’s lawsuit against activist shareholder groups seeking to shut down proposals for the company to reduce its Scope 3 emissions (a vast majority of the industry’s total emissions) has “nothing to do with the environment or ESG.”
Reality: Woods goes on to complain that these groups want Exxon to stop selling oil and gas, “and that’s basically what we do as a business.” He claims Scope 3 emissions are “essentially the emissions of our customers.”
While actively rattling off misinformation to his interviewers, Woods says Exxon is all about “integrity.” When asked about Exxon’s consistent, core values, he claims the company prioritizes “not just being honest and ethical, but being intellectually honest and saying the hard things.”
That’s in direct contrast to the mounting evidence of Exxon’s historic and ongoing climate lies, for which the company faces lawsuits by dozens of municipalities, states, and tribal governments. Whether Darren Woods is able to convince the world to forget the company’s past at this precarious moment — and believe its version of the present — remains to be seen.
He is correct and the law suites are nonsense…. The corporations should not have to react to anything other than government legislation that are cast into law…. And we will find that NetZero will be removed from the future options once the voters are forced to trade prosperity and its lack against ineffective and highly expensive climate change action.