Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has prompted a backlash from climate experts after he claimed that the world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame.
Exxon, the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, 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.
But 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 that 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.”
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Experts have said that 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.”
Over the past decade, troves of internal documents and analyses have 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,” Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil-fuel industry said.
A 2021 analysis also demonstrated that Exxon had downplayed its own role in the climate crisis for decades in public-facing messaging.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
