Essay by Eric Worrall
Exxon CEO Darren Woods has incensed greens by suggesting end users are responsible for generating emissions.
Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures
Darren Woods tells Fortune consumers not willing to pay for clean-energy transition, prompting backlash from climate experts
The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.
As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon 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.
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.”
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“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school.
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Wagner said that Exxon was touting its ambition to slash the emissions of its own operations while also betting that the rest of the world won’t do the same, in order to continue selling oil.
“He can’t have it both ways in saying ‘we are an energy company’ but then basically ignoring the cheapest source of electricity in history as something Exxon should be investing in,” he said.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures
A video of CEO Darren Woods being interviewed by Fortune Magazine.
The “Dirty Secret” comments are made around 18:43. Woods also said that “Today’s technology will not solve this problem”, and emphasised the importance of getting the cost down, and the need for cost transparency with end users – and how important getting the cost down is for people’s willingness to pay for Net Zero.
Woods called for a carbon price (23:10 minutes).
30:55 “I will tell you today, there is not a viable market where consumers step in and are willing to pay a premium for low carbon products. That is the reality of what we face today. I can’t drive demand, and I can’t make consumers pay more for low carbon products”.
The big question – why are Greens so upset with what Exxon CEO Darren Woods said? Darren’s responses to questions in the video amounted to suggesting the government needs to do more to make low carbon options palatable, by putting a price on carbon, by supporting efforts to bring down the price of green solutions, or both.
I think what upset Greens is the Exxon CEO’s suggestion that Greens have to take personal responsibility for their piece of the Net Zero transition.
And of course, greens were likely upset by the Exxon CEOs suggestion that green energy is expensive – which contradicts Columbia Business School Gernot Wagner’s claim that Exxon is “ignoring [renewables] the cheapest source of electricity in history” – at least I presume he is talking about renewables.
Wagner’s inference that renewables are cheap is absurd.
Green energy is not cheap, it is hideously expensive. You just need to look at runaway energy prices in California and Europe, both champions of green energy, to know how expensive real world green energy is.
Even worse, the cost of energy in places like California and Europe is not a problem with implementation. Google admitted Net Zero is impossibly expensive in 2014, with an article published in Spectrum, about their failed attempt to discover an economically viable path to Net Zero. “Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.“. The Google team failed to find an economically viable path to replacing coal with renewables, even when they added science fiction assumptions to their models, like wind towers which erect themselves without human assistance. The Google study authors were not advocating giving up, they were just saying more or less the same as Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in the video above. Today’s green energy technology is not a viable solution to the world’s energy needs.
Can you think of a more woke, leftist, green leaning company than Google? If even Google say green energy with current technology cannot work, perhaps Google are also part of Wagner’s conspiracy of energy company capitalists who are plotting to reduce their own profits?
Blaming Exxon, weaving bizarre big oil conspiracy theories, and responding with fury to the suggestion that greens themselves have to take personal responsibility – well I guess we’re all used to seeing that from greens.
We are also used to seeing lots of hypocrisy from greens. Greens have not exactly been champions of the lifestyle choices they want to inflict on everyone else, somehow the special people usually give themselves a moral pass from the rules they want to inflict on the rest of us.
I don’t know if Gernot Wagner is personally a green hypocrite, but plenty of his fellow travellers are. I mean, how often have we seen greens jetting off to climate conferences and making pathetic excuses for why they should be allowed to fly, while demanding everyone else have their flights rationed for the sake of the planet?
Who can forget embarrassing failures of greens to follow their own policy prescriptions, like the German Green Party’s hilariously expensive failure to install a functioning heat pump in their own headquarters, despite demanding Germany immediately pass laws which make such heat pumps mandatory for office buildings?
If Greens want the rest of us to even consider following their lead, they need to start practicing what they preach, by showing us through personal example that Net Zero is viable and affordable, instead of blaming others like Exxon CEO Darren Woods for their own personal failure to transition to a greener lifestyle.
The reality is, if there were no demand for illicit drugs, both the cartels and street gangs, distributing locally, would quickly go broke. When there is a demand, someone will fill it. Therefore, the public has culpability for any and all problems created by their consumption. While the wholesale supplier has high visibility, they exist only because people want what they are selling.
“Therefore, the public has culpability for any and all problems created by their consumption.”
Interesting statement . . . does the pubic then also get the credit for the FACT that their consumption of fossil fuel-sourced energy directly raised the standards of living, ability to obtain a decent-paying job, available access to advanced medicines and medical care, available education opportunities, ability to widely travel the world, greatly increased life expectancy, etc., etc., for uncounted billions of humans around the planet over the last 200 or so years?
does the pubic then also get the credit
Sure, why not?
Yes. If the public had refused to use such products, then where would we be now? Still using whale-oil lamps and shovelling horse dung out of the streets.
In that situation, I think that the credit can be shared by both the supplier and the consumers whose support helped make it economic. If the early-adopters had rejected kerosene, the transition to ICE engines might not have happened. It is a partnership, just as there is a partnership between the cartels and the drug users. They depend on each other.
the politicians, the cartels, and the users. Without the things politicians have done, there would be no opportunity for the cartels.
Bad mouthing China for producing the energy intensive products that a modern society requires has always been laughingly ridiculous.
The things under consideration, from China or anywhere else, are not products that a modern society requires. leaving FF out of the dialogue.
“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,”
Do drug lords go around forcing people to use drugs? Or do people use them by choice?
Tony_G,
If you have the misfortune to be close to the drug problem, you might conclude that once a person is hooked, actions are remote from people and their advice. The drug controls the mind, with or without people doing forcing. Geoff S
Darren Woods meant to say that end consumers of his products should be given credit for their emissions that are enriching the biosphere and improving life on Earth.
I just love that someone finally has the guts to stand up & say “The emperor has no clothes!” This should have happened 2 decades ago before this whole climate change spun out of control. Better late than never.
“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school.”
If there were no drug users there’d be no drug lords.
Why don’t all those who protest to “Just Stop Oil” voluntarily stop using fossil fuel (and things made from them) themselves?
Hawaii should be suing it’s citizens, not Chevron.
Here is a suggestion to Exxon CEO Darren Woods and all the oil companies, coal electric generators, natural gas electric generators, and all the other not named “fossil” fuel energy producers….
Turn off the generators. Stop shipping oil, gasoline, and petroleum based products.
Of course agriculture, transportation, foundries, cell phones, internet, clothing manufacturers, etc., etc., etc., need to be included.
Shut it all down for a day. Or for a week. Whatever.
Let the people see what can happen if the “Just Stop Oil” and Net Zero activists get all they wish for.
Just common sense: Be careful what you wish for – you may get it.
And a special not to Saint Greta: Stop wearing clothing. You are covering yourself in oil.
EVs are only any good as urban second car runabouts for households with offstreet parking and charging-
Our US electric car road trip charging disaster and what it means for Australia (msn.com)
Otherwise it’s hybrid ICE as the only sensible choice for largely urban dwellers increasingly without that luxury as public charging will never keep up with forced EV demand.
I have no problems with non-plug hybrid ICE with electric drive… (except maybe, a slight worry about the Lithium battery).
Railway locomotives have been using FF power units with electric drive for a long time, very successfully.
The unmentioned big difference being, of course, that unlike “non-plug hybrid ICEs with electric drive”, none of those railway locomotives used a battery for any purpose other than starting the locomotive’s fossil fuel ICE.
What I want to know is, where does ExxonMobil find such an IDIOT to be their CEO?!
THERE IS NO “PROBLEM!” The “cost” is NOT THE ISSUE, since their non-solution to the imaginary problem WOULDN’T DO A THING ABOUT IT – even IF it was real!
A competent ExxonMobil CEO shouldn’t be pandering to the “climate” bullshit, he should be pulling back the curtain to show it for the farce it is.
Do remember that there is an election every 4 years, coming in Nov 2024. While it is impossible to predict who the next President meeting with you will be, it is part of the task for the CEO to make sure that he will be invited to another meeting, not blackballed for something he said.
Because they advocate a green lifestyle without actually adopting one, the greens are inadvertently admitting that Net Zero is unattainable. The majority of the population recognized the facts about Net Zero long ago and that’s the reason it has few intentions of making big lifestyle changes to attempt to reach an unrealistic goal.
I thank those who made this video possible and I endorse the broad thrust of what Darren Woods said.
There are several important principles of the conduct of society embedded in his words. Of course, there has to be indirect mention of ideologies like communism versus the free market, for his scope is global.
It is encouraging to hear his commitment to generating funds for a clean environment and his spending of dollars to help that.
Some people old and experienced enough have long observed that it is expensive to maintain a manicured world; that matters needing a better approach – such as raw industrial discharges into rivers – have long been on the wish list of the corporations doing it, while waiting for the time when they have enough money to do it. This has been happening.
It has been happening whether or not counties had an Environment Protection Agency. The EPA is a Johnny-Come-Lately to the party, making regulations to enforce cleanups before they could be afforded, simply by writing regulations on paper at a low cost to them.
In the context of this Woods talk, those who are calling for decarbonisation and a carbon transition are not necessary to the effort, because they tend to dictate from their low-expenditure armchairs what is needed, rather than when will society be able to afford this, or if it is really needed
I spent decades in the heat of opening the fist large uranium mine in Australia. We were exposed to rather degrading abuse just for being in uranium, as if it was some anti-social disease. When the abuse was examined, it lacked knowledge, intellect, logic and reason. That is the hallark of domestic activism. A major example was the requirement to fill in two large open pits once the open cut mining had exhausted the easy resources. They could have been left to fill with water, to make lovely lakes in otherwise drab surroundings, as we miners advocated from the start. The cost of backfilling would have been better spent on the usual wish list of better medical services, better education of our children, etc.
Woods does not want part of that misallocation of public spending on his watch. Geoff S
Great! When will you start to pay the price for generating your own emissions, which according to Darren Woods is your responsibility?
Toldyouso,
I have no concept of having to pay penalty money to others who are doing the same daily things that I do.
Geoff S
These people are all non compos mentis. If anyone is to be paid, the people generating the CO2 should be compensated for the immense benefit to all living creatures they’re providing.