CEOs still arrogant in the face of climate disaster
Deciding which chief executive gave the most arrogant, regressive and defensive speech at the World Petroleum Congress is difficult, but Exxon Mobil’s Darren Woods and Saudi Aramco’s Amin Nasser top the list.
Nasser’s boss, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, will certainly be proud of his CEO’s imperious performance in Houston. Exxon’s board should fire Woods for his.
Try as he may, Woods did not appear on board with his new directors’ demand that Exxon tackle the climate crisis. He couldn’t finish one sentence acknowledging the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions without adding a “but” followed by a paragraph about “striking balance.”
“While the fight to mitigate the risk of climate change is vitally important, so is the work to meet the growing needs of people around the world,” Woods said, still hedging by calling it a risk. “The growth of emissions free energy is good for society and an objective our company supports, at the same time, as the world transitions to a lower energy system, it is critical to strike the right balance.”
Woods remains focused on oil and gas, even though tapping all the company’s reserves would threaten the global goal of zeroing-out carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. He dismissed proven zero-emission technologies while hyping his company’s unproven carboncapture initiatives.
Woods’s speech was weak sauce from a weak leader. If Exxon isn’t looking for a new CEO, it should start now.
Nasser, on the other hand, was forthright in his contempt for those demanding a phase
down of oil and gas consumption. He personified every negative stereotype about ruthless oil executives who look down on their hapless customers’ addiction to petroleum.
“The world is facing an ever more chaotic energy transition with certain highly unrealistic scenarios and assumptions about the future of energy clouding the picture,” Nasser said. “It is increasingly assumed that the entire world can run on alternatives. Most worrying of all is the assumption that the right energy transition strategy is this. It is not. It is flawed.”
Nasser then accused world leaders of duplicity: “A majority of key stakeholders agree with these realities as much as they believe in addressing climate change. We know this because they say so in black; they should say the same in public, too.”
Nasser answers to Prince Mohammed, whose security services kill, jail and torture dissidents. Now an international pariah, the heir to the Saudi throne knows oil is the only card he can play.
Other top oil executives, meanwhile, promised to meet their customers’ energy needs while drastically reducing reliance on carbon.
Chevron’s Mike Wirth and TotalEnergies Patrick Pouyanné repeated the tired cliches about needing affordable energy to lift 2 billion people out of poverty. (Big Oil only recently started caring about people who cannot afford to buy gasoline.) But they also offered specific plans for reinventing the energy supply chain.
Wirth contrasted with Woods in every way. Where Woods appeared uncomfortable, Wirth was confident. Where the Exxon boss seemed defensive about oil and gas, Chevron’s chief was optimistic about slowly abandoning them in accordance with this year’s Glasgow climate summit.
“As we saw in Glasgow, different countries are following different paths, all pointed toward global net-zero,” he said, differentiating his goals from Woods’. “In the same ways, industries and individual companies are taking a variety of approaches toward a lower carbon future, addressing different needs, making different investments, exploring different technologies, advancing different solutions.”
Chevron is focused on lowering and eventually eliminating carbon emissions from energy production, Wirth said. While Woods talked about capturing carbon released by oil and gas, Wirth promised to perfect alternative fuels that reduce carbon emissions.
During the international panel, Pouyanné followed Nasser with a clear, if unintentional, rebuke.
“Energy needs fundamentally to be reinvented as we have to build in the next decade, a new net-zero system,” he said. He listed a dozen ways TotalEnergies plans to reduce or capture carbon with the ultimate goal of eliminating the world’s need to burn fossil fuels.
All of the speeches come with caveats. Woods and Nasser would argue their modest goals are more honest that Wirth’s and Pouyanné’s bold promises.
Humanity, though, needs visionary business leaders committed to supplying reliable, affordable and clean energy. We don’t need unimaginative hacks looking for ways to keep pumping oil and gas with bolt-on technologies that benefit their business plans but not the planet.
Shareholders need innovative and creative leaders, too. Without them, incumbent corporations will sink into obscurity. Better to take a gamble and risk saving the world than watching the status quo devalue a great corporation into nothing.