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THE LIE OF THE TIGER

Profile
ExxonMobil is the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, with 2004 revenues of $291.3 billion and net earnings of $25.3 billion. Based in Houston, Texas, the company supplies refined petroleum products to 42,000 service stations in 118 countries. Between 1882 and 2002, ExxonMobil’s products and operations gave rise to 4.7-5.3 percent of global manmade carbon dioxide emissions.

Rhetoric
“Energy and the environment,” reads the bold headline of a recent ExxonMobil advertisement appearing in national newspapers and magazines: “On one hand, the world demands more and more energy. On the other, it demands less and less environmental impact…. That’s why, for decades, we have consistently led the industry in research and technology. And why we’re now making the largest investment ever in independent climate and energy research.”

A television spot featuring a tea kettle describes the company’s use of cogeneration, which harnesses steam from power plants to fuel the refinery process. ExxonMobil has a cogeneration capacity of 3,300 megawatts: “it stops a lot of greenhouse gas emissions; in fact, it’s like taking one million cars off the world’s roads.

On the public relations front, company spokespeople state that ExxonMobil supports “environmentally responsible development.” In an interview published on the ExxonMobil Web site, CEO Lee Raymond challenges the oil industry’s negative environmental reputation, explaining, “People may not understand how much money the private sector and governments everywhere have put into trying to improve the environment. It’s a pretty remarkable success story.”

Reality
ExxonMobil’s “largest investment ever in independent climate and energy research” amounts to $100 million over 10 years awarded to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP). There are two problems with exploiting GCEP as proof of the company’s environmental commitment. First, perspective:

• when Mr. Raymond announced ExxonMobil’s GCEP gift on November 20, 2002, a Wednesday, by the weekend its largesse was more than recouped in profit;
• today, the company’s fossil-fuel development portfolio accounts for $80 billion in net investment;
• and, among ExxonMobil’s competitors, Shell since 1999 has spent roughly $1.5 billion on building its renewables business, and BP has laid out over $500 million since 2000 on solar wind – yet those investments don’t count as “independent” because Shell and BP put their own scientists to work.

ExxonMobil don't know renewables from a hole in the ground.

Second, GCEP has focused its research more on “smokestack” solutions to fossil-fuel combustion – such as carbon sequestration, which captures and then buries emissions from oil rigs and other sources, perhaps for good, perhaps not – than on technologies, like solar energy, that hasten the inevitable coming of the carbon-free economy.

GCEP’s priorities are in keeping with ExxonMobil’s claims that as global energy demand increases by half in the next few decades, fossil fuels will continue to account for close to virtually all of supply. As for solar and wind, according to Mr. Raymond, “25 years, from now, even with [a 10 percent growth rate], they will still be less than 1 percent.”

“Playing to Our Strengths,” the title of an article in a recent issue of The Lamp, ExxonMobil’s newsletter, aptly describes the company’s framing of the world’s energy future.

There are, of course, alternative visions. To start with, wind and photovoltaics are consistently growing from 25 to 30 percent per year worldwide – far exceeding, and therefore discrediting, ExxonMobil’s projection. With strategic government programs in place, the economic and environmental advantages of clean energy could spread quicker still. Currently, 2.3 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewables. A study from U.S. PIRG concluded that a 20 percent renewable energy standard by 2020 would increase gross domestic product by $11.1 billion, and save consumers $8.9 billion on natural gas costs. The Union of Concerned Scientists found that if the United States adopted a 20 percent renewable standard for electricity by 2020, consumers would save $49 billion from lower energy prices, and power plant carbon emissions would drop 15 percent below business-as-usual levels.

Alas, business-as-usual is ExxonMobil’s comfort zone. For more than 15 years, the company has waged war on multiple fronts against science, including the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and policies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, that acknowledge human-induced global warming. In the U.S., ExxonMobil’s federal lobbying budget ($8 million in 2004) has been used to manipulate taxpayer funded studies, and even to request – successfully, no less – the ouster of the head of the IPCC. In June, after former oil industry lobbyist Phil Clooney resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality after the New York Times exposed his weakening of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, he was soon hired by ExxonMobil.

Mother Jones magazine recently traced nearly $9 million of ExxonMobil’s corporate contributions made between 2000 and 2003 to “more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe.” Among them: the American Enterprise Institute ($960,000), which last year gave the heading of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” to an article about global warming; the Hoover Foundation ($140,000), publisher of “Happiness is a Warm Planet”; and the Heartland Institute, where Michael Crichton, author of the anti-environmentalist novel State of Fear, has been compared favorably to mother of American environmentalism Rachel Carson and original muckraker Upton Sinclair.

In light of ExxonMobil’s so-called ‘skepticism’ – negligence, incoherence, charade, are substitutes that come quickly to mind – it’s a wonder the company cares to feature energy-savers like cogeneration in its ads. If a problem doesn’t exist, why fix it? At least until ExxonMobil comes to terms with that dilemma, its environmental ethic will appear disingenuous at best.

Recommendation
On July 12, a coalition of major environmental and progressive groups, representing more than 6 million members, called for a consumer, investor and employee boycott of ExxonMobil. The Exxpose Exxon campaign encourages ExxonMobil to stop lobbying to open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration; pay outstanding damages due to victims of the 1989 Valdez oil spill; withdraw funding from groups arguing against the existence of global warming in the face of widespread scientific consensus; and increase investment in renewable energy and fuel efficiency.

Already, the boycott has elicited a concerned letter to Mr. Raymond from a coalition of ExxonMobil shareholders, led by environmentally-responsible mutual-fund company Green Century Capital Management and the Province of St. Joseph of the Capuchin order. The letter invites the CEO to address the boycott "creatively, quickly and responsibly" in order to "repair its sagging reputation among its worldwide customers."

The Green Life endorses Exxpose Exxon’s goals.

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