The most epic (and literal) gaslighting of all time

Exxon--is it possible?--hits a new low

I’m listening to John Coltrane through my headphones as I type, in an effort to stay calm enough that I don’t just start sputtering. You might want to do likewise as you read.

Because last week the CEO of Exxon gave an interview that amounts to an attempt to pawn off the climate crisis on everyone else, and also to map out the road he sees ahead—a road that involves wasting huge amounts of money subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. Darren Woods was talking to Fortune magazine reporter Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray, who began by explaining that Exxon was a group of charming “Texas tough boys” before teeing up one of the classic softball questions of all time. Some people, he said, were thinking that perhaps Exxon wasn’t entirely “serious about addressing climate change. Tell me why they’re wrong.”

Well, Woods explains, Exxon is a molecule company, by which he means it’s interested in transforming molecules—’and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules’—to ‘address the needs of our society.’ What he’s saying, quite explicitly, is that Exxon is not an electron company, i.e. a company interested in building out wind or solar power. And when Fortune asks him why not, he lets slip the basic truth of our moment: “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders.”

For everyone who’s ever asked themselves, why isn’t Exxon (and Chevron and the rest) leading the charge to renewable energy, there’s the answer: you can make money doing it, but not as much as they’ve made traditionally. That’s because the sun and the wind deliver the energy for free, and all you need is some equipment to turn it into electrons. But Exxon controls the molecules—that’s what oil and gas reserves are. And that control means they can make outsize profits—as long as they can persuade the world to keep burning stuff.

And it’s the story of that persuasion where Woods’ words go from galling to really really gross. Because he explains to his nodding interlocutors that the world “waited too long” to start developing renewables. Or, in his particular brand of corporate speak: “we’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society.”

Just to recite the relevant history, as quickly as possible. Forty years ago, Exxon’s scientists learned all there was to know about climate change—they forecasted the temperature in 2020 with remarkable accuracy. And the company’s executives believed them—among other things they began building their drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting out which corners of the Arctic they would drill once it melted. What they didn’t do was tell the rest of us: instead, they helped erect a huge architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for three decades in a sterile battle about whether or not global warming was ‘real,’ a fight both sides knew the answer to from the outset. But one side was willing to lie.

Here’s Woods’ predecessor Lee Raymond speaking to a crucial Chinese petroleum congress right before the Kyoto treaty negotiations. After insisting that climate science was dubious at best, and saying he thought the earth was cooling, he added: “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”

What Woods is saying now is, he was wrong. It mattered a lot. It cost us huge swaths of our planet. We “waited too long.” But never mind, the important thing is that we made “above-average returns.”

To keep those returns coming, Exxon—working mostly through Senator Joe Manchin (D-Pollution)—larded the Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to be about electrons, with as many gifts as possible for molecules. That’s what the taxpayer money for carbon capture and other such schemes is all about: a way to keep burning stuff, at a moment when it would be cheaper to just let the sun burn. Remember: Exxon has trillions of dollars in oil and gas reserves. We no longer need it, but they need it—and they can game our political system to keep us using it.

(The fact that something can be too cheap is hard to grasp, but it’s the central insight of a fascinating new book, The Price is Wrong, due out next week from the political economist Brett Christophers. I’ll write more about it in the future but the basic point is that “we cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.” The alternative, of course, is to have government handle this basic survival task—but of course government too often remains in the hands of ‘the private sector.’)

Woods’ remarks aren’t the only example of this kind of shamelessness. The coal industry recently released an anti-renewable energy video, for instance, as part of its “Coal Hard Truth” campaign with the catchy title “Not So Fast.” “A global transition to renewable forms of energy is well underway, but are we moving too fast to a future filled with unknown compromises? What are the consequences of rushing to renewables?” The consequences of rushing to renewables are, we chop a degree or two off the eventual temperature of the earth, save millions of people a year who die from breathing the smoke from burning fossil fuels—and cost the coal industry money. Hence the video asking us to “hit pause.”

But it really has been, above all, the Exxon story start to finish. They were the biggest company on earth when we learned about climate change, and they have been the biggest single obstacle to change. The hard-hitting journalists at Fortune, before they got to asking him how he relaxes, queried Woods about “the core, you know, values or aspects of the [Exxon] culture that you feel like are really consistent?”

The thing that “brought me to this company is integrity,” Woods said. “Not just being honest and ethical, but being intellectually honest and saying the hard things.”

Thank God for John Coltrane. Our job is to stay calm enough to keep taking on these gentlemen with all we’ve got, till their political power is broken and we have a fighting chance.

In other energy and climate news

+Zeke Hausfather has a useful and succinct look at where the debate over geoengineering currently stands, with what strikes me as the most rational conclusion:

My own position on the issue remains relatively unchanged: its worth doing more research to have it as a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option for halting warming, but large-scale deployments today are a bad idea.

+TIAA—the giant pension fund, mostly for college professors—has refused to divest from fossil fuels, and now reporting is focusing on its role in bankrolling deforestation and land-grabbing, especially in Brazil. From Grist:

Thanks in part to its investments in Brazilian farmland, TIAA has become one of the largest farmland investors in the world. Through its wholly owned subsidiary, Nuveen Natural Capital, the fund has accumulated some 3 million acres across 10 countries. It owns stakes in water-hungry almond and pistachio orchards in drought-stricken California, Macadamia nut farms and row crops in Australia, and vast swaths around the Mississippi Delta. But its investments in Brazil, where it manages 1 million acres, are some of its most controversial holdings.

Around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, TIAA and other investment funds started buying up farmland in Brazil, eventually honing in on the northern Cerrado, specifically Matopiba, where environmental protections are thin and land ownership is often in disputed. According to environmental organizations, academic researchers, satellite images, and media reports, many of the farms TIAA acquired are connected to land grabbing and deforestation. TIAA has regularly denied any knowledge of these practices, but emails and other leaked documents obtained from a data breach last year reportedly showed that as far back as 2010, TIAA was aware that some of the land it purchased was bought from people publicly accused of stealing it — groups like those that destroyed do Espirito Santo’s village of Bom Acerto. Despite an almost decades-long campaign by the Brazilian nonprofit The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, along with environmental advocacy groups like ActionAid and Friends of the Earth, to get TIAA and other foreign funds to divest from their Brazilian landholdings, TIAA continues to raise money to invest in the region.

+Some beautiful images from the World Food Programme of the Great Green Wall starting to grow in Senegal

Meanwhile, flood insurance may be coming for small farmers in other parts of Africa, where deluges now routinely destroy crops. According to Bloomberg

Parametric insurance, a niche but fast-growing form of indemnity, works differently from conventional insurance. It’s essentially a bet. Both parties agree to a trigger point — say, 3 inches of rain in an hour, at a specific location. If it rains 2.9 inches, there is no payout. But if the line is crossed, a full payout of a predetermined amount occurs rapidly. There is no loss adjustment process. Fast reimbursement can be critical for families trying to recover from a disaster, helping them avoid dislocation and hunger.

+Political chatter in California is focused on today’s primaries, especially the Senate race. (See Sammy Roth’s climate-focused coverage here). But pay attention as well to the drive to fund two historic bills that would force corporations to disclose their emissions. They’ve already been passed, but now the legislature—under tough corporate pressure—is not stepping up to fund their implementation. If you happen to know a California legislator:

SB 253 requires all U.S.-based corporations doing business in California that make over $1 billion in profit annually to publicly disclose their full carbon footprint. With this effort, California will lead the nation by setting the standard for corporate emissions disclosure and reporting.

SB 261 requires comprehensive and mandatory climate risk disclosures that are desperately needed at a statewide level to enable informed decision-making on the climate crisis’s systemic impacts on our economy.

+Important leadership from Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown and Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, who have introduced a bill to ban LNG exports to China

Since 2018, U.S. LNG exports have more than tripled to 14 billion cubic feet per day, making the United States the largest exporter of LNG in global history. Further, exports could rise another 48 billion cubic feet per day, almost three times more than today’s large volumes, when projects that are either under construction or fully permitted come online.

In 2021, 1.2 billion cubic feet per day of LNG were exported to China, making it the second largest destination for U.S. LNG at 12.7 percent of exports. Exports to China dropped in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, but China is locking up long-term LNG contracts from the U.S. for proposed projects. Exporting LNG is causing price instability and rising costs for American households and industries. A report by Energy Innovation found that approving pending LNG export terminals would increase natural gas costs for American households, businesses, and industry by 9 to 14% each year.

The Protecting American Households from Rising Energy Costs Act would increase American energy security and protect American consumers by ensuring that valuable national resources are not being exported to adversarial nations—helping to keep domestic prices stable and affordable for American households and businesses, while not locking us in to decades of fossil gas infrastructure that exacerbates climate chaos.

+Rock climber extraordinaire Alex Honnold is using his foundation to support local solar initiatives. A fine video, which I confess pleased me inordinately since it turned out one of my books was helpful in forming his thinking. Meanwhile, another video from the excellent folks at Yale’s Eye on the Storm, setting out the ongoing “zombie climate myths” that still need a stake through the heart

+The Inflation Reduction Act is about to yield $7 billion in funding for solar projects in low income areas

“This is the biggest low- and moderate-income solar investment in U.S. history,” Vero Bourg-Meyer, Clean Energy States Alliance senior project director, said. ​“It has the potential to be truly transformational.”

Inequity has been a long-standing issue when it comes to residential solar adoption. In 2022, the median income for a solar household was about $117,000 per year — or 70 percent higher than the U.S. median household income of $69,000, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Low-income households also spend a greater proportion of their income on energy bills: on average, 8.6 percent, or nearly three times higher than other households. That’s a burden rooftop solar or community solar could help alleviate.

To help close the solar-equity gap, the EPA plans to announce up to 60 awards next month to support Solar for All programs across the U.S. that would help participants save 20 percent or more on energy bills. States, territories, tribal governments, municipalities and eligible nonprofits submitted their applications last October. (EPA has not disclosed the total number of applications received, according to CESA.)