Oil giant Exxon Mobil’s CEO is urging Donald Trump not to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a historic climate treaty signed by almost every country in the world pledging to reduce emissions and reverse the damaging effects of climate change.
“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” CEO Darren Woods told The New York Times in a Tuesday interview at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. “Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government. I think he could take the same approach in this space.”
During his first stint in office, Trump officially withdrew the United States from the agreement in November 2020, just before losing reelection to now-President Joe Biden. But Biden reversed that decision hours after taking office in January 2021.
“We can no longer delay or do the bare minimum to address climate change,” Biden said in February 2021. “This is a global, existential crisis. And we’ll all suffer the consequences if we fail.”
But in his campaign to return to the White House, Trump said he would once again exit the agreement, even as 2024 has seen extreme weather events due to rising global temperatures in the hottest year on record.
Experts told The New York Times that reneging on the Paris accord again would have disastrous implications for the climate.
“We’re already not doing enough to meet the targets to avoid dangerous climate change, and we’re already seeing the consequences worldwide — more intense heat waves that kill people, more intense rainstorms of the kind we saw in Spain last week, more intense hurricanes,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, told the Times. “If Trump blows up Biden’s climate change regime, and we don’t get global climate under control, the prospect of a robust economic future with growth and economic opportunity for everyone — all of that shrivels away and becomes less and less likely."
Trump, for his part, is a climate denier who called climate change a "hoax" and said rising sea levels could be good because more people would have "oceanfront property."
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property,” Trump said in August during a conversation with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
When he takes office again, Trump wants to allow for more oil drilling and end the tax credits Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress created for people who purchase electric vehicles.
The fact that an oil company is telling Trump not to make a disastrous decision that would negatively impact the climate is almost hard to fathom.
However, Woods told CNBC on Tuesday that Exxon made investments in technologies to lower emissions, and that those investments are reliant on federal tax credits that Biden signed into law.
“There needs to be an incentive to reward those investments and generate a return,” Woods told CNBC. “If we find that those incentives dissipate or go away entirely, then that would definitely change our investment plans.”
Given that Trump told oil CEOs that if they gave him $1 billion for his campaign he'd do what they wanted, maybe the president-elect will actually listen.
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