Maybe there’s a silver lining here: Witnessing this messaging pivot should make anyone who cares about the climate crisis—policymakers, especially—finally stop treating oil and gas executives as potential allies in the climate fight. Big Oil CEOs are making it easier than ever, that is, to see them clearly as the enemy. Last week, Shell followed the example set by BP and announced it would hold itself to a looser timeline to reduce its “carbon intensity,” i.e., the emissions from its drilling operations. Darren Woods, of Exxon, repeated a line he and his colleagues have become fond of in recent years. “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,’” he told Yahoo Finance this week. “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.’”
To point out the potentially obvious, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel producers have no remotely feasible plan to “get rid” of the emissions generated by the products they sell. The International Energy Agency estimates that the world will need to capture roughly one gigaton of carbon dioxide a year to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and keep temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. As Bloomberg’s Eric Roston and Leslie Kaufman have pointed out, that’s 26 times the amount of carbon dioxide currently being removed now. “After nearly 50 years of commercial use and more than $83 billion in investment by governments and corporations, there are only about 40 large-scale facilities that have CCS; altogether, they capture roughly 45 million tons of carbon annually, or about 0.1% of global emissions,” Roston and Kaufman explain.