Exxon’s Exodus

Why must it be true every penny they earn is through real work? They have earned a lot of tax breaks and free gov cash over the years to stabilize business. Maybe it’s all a weird web of savings and investing, years of inflating their wealth through word of mouth, making us believe they turn a profit. They fought to keep alternatives at bay through political and scientific manipulation. How do you know they even make money; have you looked through their books?

You’re trusting word of mouth without verification. You’re making their success a given.

The harms of a tobacco company are mostly limited to their users, especially since smoking bans have been implemented in restaurants and bars.

The harms of an oil company literally effect every human on earth. There is nothing I can do and nowhere I can go to avoid their harms. I'd consider Exxon among the worst of the worst, since they knew about climate change since the 70's and denied/buried the science.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

> Cheap energy from fossil fuels have done more to lift people around the globe out of crushing poverty than any company you think is above "unbelievably harming" the planet.

I would actually argue that cheap energy has been one of the dominant factors in _creating_ poverty in the first place. It seems extremely unlikely that we could sustain the current global population without cheap fossil fuels, and other modern technologies. This created extreme dependency and contingency. The ideology that cheap energy is an unalloyed good, lifting people from poverty, assumes that unfettered growth on human population is always a good thing. Also, who is deciding what poverty is? The north american indigenous people certainly do not seem to view modern life as progress.

With 7 billion people on earth, I speculate that the absolute amount of human suffering has never been higher than it is at this moment both in material and spiritual terms. How do we celebrate that there are "only" one billion people living in poverty when three hundred years ago, there weren't even one billion people alive? And we are now living with the potential for suffering and mass death on a scale that would never have been possible without these technologies.

All of this discussion also takes a completely anthrocentric perspective. If we consider that the suffering of animals, and perhaps even plants, has any meaning, it's hard to see modern life, facilitated by cheap fossil fuels, as anything less than a catastrophe. So, yeah, I am with the parent commenter.

This is worth noting:

> "One thing Woods didn’t cut was Exxon’s dividend, which is the third-largest in the S&P 500 and costs $15 billion a year. Employees recall the justification as basically this: A large portion of Exxon’s shareholder base comprised retail investors who relied on the dividend for income. “There might be many good business reasons to keep it, but don’t pretend to care about Grandma and her dividend when you’ve just fired thousands of employees,” says one former employee who quit in 2021 after more than a decade at Exxon."

This really points to a fundamental feature of the modern American economy - it is financialized to an unprecedented degree relative to the 20th century. The real power sits with the shareholders more than with industry.

This dividend issue also explains why the USA, which is also something of a petro-state (currently being the worlds largest fossil fuel producer since fracking took off), isn't really interested in developoing renewable energy. Renewable energy would destroy that whole market, and wouldn't replace those dividends.

This isn't too hard to understand, though some deliberately seem to avoid thinking about it. Renewable energy is mostly durable goods - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other storage systems. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels are a nice simple model - i.e., no fuel sales. This is offset a little bit by selling electricity over the power grid, and synthetic fuel production from air and water is another source of continual revenue (international jet travel requires this, in the absence of fossil fuels) - but make no mistake, those dividend payouts from continual sales at the pump over the lifetime of an internal-combustion vehicle will wither and die as renewable energy takes over.

All in all, I think that's why the Wall Street investment banks like Blackrock etc. are not moving investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables - all they'll see from that is a steep drop in profits.

Incidentally, this is not strictly a problem with investment capitalism - all countries that export fossil fuels face this economic dead end, be it socialist Venezuela, authoritarian Iran, capitalist America, etc. This is also why the main leaders in renewable manufacturing are places like China, Germany and Japan, which have no such resources (or only dirty coal).