It’s a sad state of affairs when the CEO of multinational oil and gas corporation Exxon Mobil calls on president-elect Donald Trump not to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.
As the New York Times reports, oil baron Darren Woods warned that doing so would greatly weaken our global efforts to curb carbon emissions — a grim irony, given the fact that he represents one of the biggest contributors to global warming in the world.
Trump has threatened to pull out of the Paris Agreement yet again and has vowed to “drill, baby, drill,” while dismantling the Green New Deal, an environmental protection plan he’s called the “green new scam.”
“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” Woods told the NYT while attending the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) in Azerbaijan, a dubious summit that claims to be about climate change but primarily appears to facilitate business meetings among oil and gas executives.
“Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government,” he added. “I think he could take the same approach in this space.”
Woods took aim at the government’s failure to create enough incentives for oil and gas companies to transition to renewable sources of energy.
“The government role is extremely important and one that they haven’t been successfully fulfilling, quite frankly,” he told the NYT.
The CEO argued that Trump’s infamously unpredictable way of governing could end up harming oil and gas companies — not help them by allowing them to drill for oil in more places and loosen environmental rules.
“I don’t think the stops and starts are the right thing for businesses,” Woods told the Wall Street Journal. “It is extremely inefficient. It creates a lot of uncertainty.”
Trump’s threats to dismantle environmental regulations could set the United States back significantly in the global fight against global warming, a reality even the oil industry has grasped.
Despite its repeated efforts to promise an eventual transition to green energy, Exxon Mobil was found to be the biggest investor-owned contributor to emissions in a database of 122 polluters put together by the Carbon Majors Database earlier this year.
Nonetheless, the company is expected to spend around $3 billion this year on developing alternatives to fossil fuels, according to the NYT.
But with Trump in the Oval Office, major polluters like Exxon Mobil could find themselves on an even longer leash, a worrying possibility given the precariousness of the ongoing climate crisis.
Scientists have found that the prognosis is grimmer than ever before: the Earth is racing towards a point of no return if climate change continues on its current trajectory — a reality that Trump seemingly doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp.
More on Trump and the environment: As Trump Prepares to Slash Environmental Protections, 48 of the 50 States Are Facing Droughts