Making Putin’s Day: The Fossil Fuel Industry Who Defended Greenwashing and the Clean Power Generation Decay Bill

On Sept. 28, the German cabinet approved two decrees to prolong the operation of large hard coal-fired power generation plants and bring them back into service in March at the latest.

“The fossil fuel industry has of late been involved in extensive “greenwashing”—misleading claims in advertisements, particularly on social media, claiming or suggesting that they are “Paris aligned,” and that they are committed to meaningful solutions,” Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor who has studied the fossil fuel industry’s rebuke of climate science, told CNN. “Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue.”

As a Goldman Sachs newsletter in April put it: “How much future production have we lost because of all the delays in investment decisions on new oil and gas projects? The answer is 10 million barrels per day of oil, which is the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s daily production and three million barrels per day of oil equivalent in liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is more than the equivalent of Qatar’s daily production. If we’d kept delaying new investment decisions in oil and gas since 2014, we would have seen a new Saudi Arabia and a newQatar.

America can theoretically take care of most of its own needs for oil and gas today, but we do not have enough to meet Europe’s requirements as it transitions to a decarbonized future.

These companies know that their pledges are not enough and that they should prioritize profits over the costs of climate change. “It’s time for the fossil fuel industry to stop lying to the American people and finally take serious steps to reduce emissions and address the global climate crisis they helped create.”

Tlaib then told Dimon that any students who had student loans and bank accounts with JPMorgan should retaliate by closing their accounts. It is certain that this kind of juvenile moral preening by Tlaib made Putin’s day. She’s nowhere nearly as bad as the G.O.P. senators who were inspired for years by ExxonMobil lies that climate change is a hoax, and then used that to block our transition to clean energy. But Tlaib still made Putin’s day.

Last week, when the whole G.O.P. came together to kill the bill, it lifted Putin even more.

The 2016-2017 ExxonMobil-Chervron Strategy Slide: An Employee’s View of BP and Chevron

ExxonMobil saw its earnings start to decline from a peak earlier in the year but they still reported a full-year record profit.

Exxon gave 30 million dollars to shareholders last year, while Chevron paid more than $22 billion. Exxon and Chevron plan to increase production in the same year.

Mr. Biden has been sensitive to gas prices, an important barometer for the public mood. As the price at the pump hit record highs over the summer, the president’s approval rating slid to new lows, but as gas costs came down over the following three months, his own numbers improved. Likewise, according to polls, the rise and fall of gas prices is directly inverse to public feelings about whether the country is heading down the right or wrong track.

Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, is so attentive to the fluctuations that he checks the average price every day and often posts messages on Twitter pointing out when it dips further.

If you fill your tank this weekend, you will see one of the cheapest Saturdays of the year. “Gas prices continue to drop nationally,” he added on Monday morning.

Carolyn Maloney, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN that the industry has no plans to clean up its act and that it is continuing to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come.

For example, lawmakers reported, BP has stated it strives to “be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner,” but the committee found internal BP documents that show the company’s recent plans do not align with the company’s public comments.

In a July 2017 email between several of the company’s high-level officials about whether to invest in curbing emissions from one of its gas projects off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, BP’s vice president of engineering stated that BP had “no obligation to minimize GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” and that the company should only “minimize GHG emissions where it makes commercial sense,” as required by code or if it fits into a regional strategy.

The strategy slide, which was presented to the Board of Directors by the CEO, says that “Chevron sees traditional energy business competitors retreating from oil and gas” and that the company is going to continue to invest in fossil fuels.

An employee of a company that’s now a part of a British energy group said in an email in 2016 that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, noting, “we wait for the rules to come out, we don’t.”

Democratic lawmakers had hoped the committee’s hearings would be the fossil fuel industry’s “Big Tobacco” moment — a nod to the famous 1994 hearings when tobacco CEOs insisted that cigarettes were not addictive, triggering accusations of perjury and federal investigations.

What can be done about that? On December 12th, I spoke with the chair of the subcommittee about Climate Action after the Inflation Reduction Act and the continued intransigence of Big Oil.

Democratic lawmakers said the oil and gas industry obstructed their investigation throughout the more than year-long process. Many of their requests for internal documents were heavily redacted by the companies which did not specify why they were withholding the information.

EXCLUSIVE REVENDICITATIONS DEVELOPED MONTHLY EARNINGS AND DISTRIBUTIONS

The company earned adjusted income of $13 billion in the quarter, down from the record earning of $18.6 billion in the third quarter, but it was still higher than the year-ago quarter. That was better than the forecast made by Refinitiv.

The company was helped by the rising prices of oil after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But oil prices have been coming down from the peak reached in June, and are now down to pre-invasion levels.

CEO Darren Woods defended the company’s investments in production, saying the company’s North American refineries had their greatest output ever, and that it had its highest global refinery production since 2012.

“Our results clearly benefited from a favorable market,” said Woods. “But, to take full advantage of the undersupplied market our work began years ago, well before the pandemic when we chose to invest counter-cyclically. We leaned in when others didn’t. Through the Pandemic, we continued with these investments.

The company returned a total of $29.8 billion to shareholders, with the majority of it coming from dividends and share repurchases.

Spending on exploration is more than the spending on capital spending. It ended the year with $28.6 billion of cash on hand, a 336% increase from the beginning of the year. And it repaid $7 billion in debt.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/business/exxonmobil-earnings/index.html

How much profit is too much profit for an oil company? An investor’s battle against the Exxon Board of Directors and CEO David Goliath

The full-year results come to an average profit of $1,874 per second. Since it takes about two minutes to pump 20 gallons of gas, that means that in the time it takes to fill a nearly empty tank of a full-size SUV or pickup, ExxonMobil earned about $225,000, on average.

Shares of ExxonMobil were slightly lower in premarket trading initially after the report, perhaps on investor disappointment that no new share repurchase program was announced. After the opening, shares were slightly higher.

The high profits have also revived perennial conversations about how much profit is too much profit for an oil company — especially as urgency over the need to slow climate change is mounting around the world.

In 2020, when the pandemic triggered a crash in oil prices, energy companies took huge losses. Exxon recorded its first unprofitable year in decades, recording a loss of $22 billion. It was dropped from the index.

A tiny upstart investor group called Engine No. 1 challenged Exxon’s management, accusing the company of not moving fast enough to adjust to a world preparing to reduce its use of oil.

David won the battle with Engine No. There were 3 Exxon board members. But Goliath isn’t going anywhere.

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Energy and Oil, and the Energy Impact of Windfall Taxes on Oil and Gas Companies in the Light of Russia’s Cold War

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was central to the rise in crude oil prices last year. Europe has imposed windfall taxes on energy companies, clawing back 33% of “surplus profits” from oil and gas companies to redistribute to households.

California is considering a windfall tax. President Biden has warnedoil companies that they will face a higher tax on their excess profits if they don’t invest their windfall earnings in more production. But it’s unclear whether the administration can follow through on such a threat.

There are investors and they are not complaining. They continue to pressure companies to return more profits to investors and spend relatively less of it on drilling.