Dive Brief:
- ExxonMobil is urging President-elect Donald Trump not to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement again, as he pledged to do during his recent reelection campaign.
- A spokesperson for the energy giant confirmed its position in emailed comments to ESG Dive Tuesday, after the Wall Street Journal first reported Exxon CEO Darren Woods advocated for Trump to remain committed to the global climate accord at a COP29 event on Tuesday.
- “A second U.S. exit from the Paris Climate Agreement will have profound implications for the United States’ efforts to reduce its own emissions and for international efforts to combat climate change,” the Exxon spokesperson told ESG Dive.
Dive Insight:
Trump withdrew from the 2015 Paris Agreement during his first administration, and pledged to do so again during his most recent reelection campaign. Prior to Trump’s first exit from the climate treaty, Exxon urged Trump’s then-nascent White House to reconsider pulling the U.S. out of the agreement to no avail.
Exxon, the largest U.S.-based public oil and gas company by revenue and market cap, applauded President Joe Biden for rejoining the agreement in 2021 and re-affirmed the company’s own commitment to its climate goals.
“We advocate for policy that accounts for security, affordability, reliability and environmental stewardship — not drastic changes that could hinder the progress being made today,” the Exxon spokesperson said Tuesday.
Exxon’s CEO told the Journal in an interview that the business community finds it unhelpful “to have the pendulum swing back and forth as administrations change.”
“I don’t think the stops and starts are the right thing for businesses,” Woods reportedly said. “It is extremely inefficient. It creates a lot of uncertainty.”
In addition to pulling out of the Paris Agreement, Trump has pledged to “unleash U.S. energy dominance” and “drill, baby, drill.”
Trump nominated former House Rep. Lee Zeldin to be the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, where Zeldin will lead a deregulatory agenda, according to a Monday statement shared by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump has also pledged to claw back and repeal as much of the clean energy funding in the Inflation Reduction Act — Biden’s landmark climate action legislation — as possible. Further, it looks increasingly likely that Republicans will hold the power of unified government come January.
Exxon has benefited from some of those initiatives and credits, including receiving $331 million from the Department of Energy for a carbon reduction project at a Texas plant.
Outside of receiving direct funding from the Biden administration, the company has also pursued projects more broadly that it hopes will allow it to achieve net-zero status across its scope 1 and scope 2 operations by 2050.
Over the summer, Exxon announced a partnership with industrial gasses and services provider Air Liquide to receive the chemical feedstocks for low-carbon hydrogen production. More recently, the energy giant announced it had signed a deal with the state of Texas for the largest offshore carbon dioxide storage site in the U.S.
Exxon’s caution about the effects of a second U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement comes as a recent analysis by BloombergNEF found that, currently, the pace of the U.S. energy transition is aligned with a global temperature rise of 2.6 degrees Celsius — above the Paris Agreement goal of keeping temperature rise “well below 2 degrees Celsius.” The same analysis found that the U.S. is on track to cut just 22% of its emissions by 2030, less than half of the emissions cuts required to meet the Paris Agreement goal of halving the nation’s emissions — based on a 2005 baseline — by the end of the decade.
