ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods thinks we focus too much on the climate change-fighting tactic of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels.
“I think one of the challenges is the way the problem has been stated in the past is, ‘We need to get rid of fossil fuels and natural gas [and] crude [oil] and coal’,” Woods told Yahoo Finance during a recent interview. “And I think what we should stay focused on is, ‘We need to get rid of the emissions associated with the combustion of those things’.”
Gas goals
It’s forgivable that someone might find that message confusing, given Exxon’s recent actions on the emissions-reduction front. The world’s largest non-state-owned oil company is fighting to make sure climate activists can’t force shareholder votes on whether it should do more to curb its customers’ emissions. The effort just got two major endorsements, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Business Roundtable.
By ‘get rid of the emissions,’ Woods appears to be referring to the growing business of carbon-capture technology. Egged on by the Inflation Reduction Act, companies are rushing to find more ways to take the carbon that comes out of the smokestacks of the world and put it somewhere other than the air. Exxon is one of them.
“Our view is if the society wants to decarbonize, the way to do that is to focus on the source of the issue, which is emissions, and to focus on looking at carbon intensity and setting standards for carbon intensity, which the IRA did,” Woods told Yahoo. “And so it basically is technology-agnostic.”