From Watts Up With That?

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.

…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.