Blame people for their oil-guzzling

One of the great things about being the boss of a giant oil conglomerate is that you sound slick to your own ears, no matter what words you spill. When ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, in a Fortune interview last week, said, ‘We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.’ Ergo, the public is to blame for still showing little intention of moving away from gobbling petro dishes. This is much like blaming people, not the easy availability of guns in the US, for gun crime – ‘If they moved to knives, America would indeed have had gun control.’ Or, as a climate economist put it, ‘It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems.’

But let’s take Woods’ claim seriously for a minute. He is right, for instance, in (kinda) pointing to the fact that the real challenge – even for non-Big Oil execs – is to nudge people away from fossil fuels, and that nudge is almost totally price-pointed. But Exxon exxetera would be as likely to like people moving away from oil and gas to air and sunshine as Big Tobacco would like folks to move from cigarettes to agarbatti. So, keeping RE prices up – and, thereby, tut-tutting people not paying that exxtra for non-fossil fuel – may be a quiet prayer for Woods and his neck of the fuel forest. What next? Let them eat diesel cakes?