Scientists around the world agree that if we’re going to avoid the worst-case scenarios from climate change, the planet needs to reach “net zero” carbon emissions no later than 2050. The odds of that actually happening don’t look great. And Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, thinks he knows whom to blame: you.
Saying that it’s not on Big Oil to address climate change is gaslighting at its best.
That’s right, the leader of the largest oil and gas corporation in the United States — and the biggest in the world that isn’t state-owned — thinks that “people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it],” according to a recent interview he gave on Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast. You might think that Exxon — the third-largest company on the Fortune 500, with $36 billion in profits last year alone — can and should shoulder the costs, but its CEO says that consumers should “pay the price.” Saying that it’s not on Big Oil to address climate change is gaslighting at its best.
In fairness to Woods, he didn’t place the blame solely on consumers. “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” Woods said. “If you look at the policies [governments] are putting out, the cost is very implicit. It’s not an explicit cost.”
Instead, Woods said, there should be more transparency about what the costs of rolling back climate change will be and what the distribution of those costs will look like:
“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he went on. “So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”
Society is not currently on that path to 2050, in Woods’ view. “The policies that are being put in place aren’t aggressive enough, and…
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