How Big Business Is Hedging Against the Apocalypse
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-exxon-renewable-energy.html
Source: By Jesse Barron, The New York Times.
Excerpt: Rex Tillerson ...explaining how the world worked...May 2015, in the middle of an oil-price crash, and Exxon Mobil’s earnings had fallen 46 percent compared with the same quarter the year before. But Tillerson, then Exxon’s chief executive, told his shareholders to be confident in the future. Oil and gas furnished billions of people, including the very poor, with cheap, reliable fuel — a fact not easily negated by a weak fiscal quarter. ...Later that morning, a Capuchin Franciscan friar rose to speak. ...Michael Crosby belonged to a tight circle of religious leaders who bought stock in public companies in the hope of exerting a moral influence on them. ...He submitted a motion to appoint a climate-change expert to Exxon’s board, ...he laid into Tillerson for having uttered “not one word or syllable” about climate change. ...Three years later, an Irishman named Declan Flanagan, chief executive of the renewables company Lincoln Clean Energy, was addressing his own shareholders in Copenhagen when he delivered a cryptic announcement. Lincoln, he said, was going to build a solar farm in the Permian Basin — the heart of West Texas oil country — with funding put up by a “blue-chip counterparty.” ...“That,” he said in his strong Irish accent, “is Exxon Mobil.” ...An unsettling fact of Wall Street today is that some of the same people who accurately predicted the housing bubble are now describing another bubble, whose collapse will make the financial crisis of 2008 look mild. ...Because the global economy depends on hydrocarbons, practically every asset in the world relates in some way to oil and gas. ...not only oil companies’ stock but practically everything else on the market looks falsely inflated....
Source: By Jesse Barron, The New York Times.
Excerpt: Rex Tillerson ...explaining how the world worked...May 2015, in the middle of an oil-price crash, and Exxon Mobil’s earnings had fallen 46 percent compared with the same quarter the year before. But Tillerson, then Exxon’s chief executive, told his shareholders to be confident in the future. Oil and gas furnished billions of people, including the very poor, with cheap, reliable fuel — a fact not easily negated by a weak fiscal quarter. ...Later that morning, a Capuchin Franciscan friar rose to speak. ...Michael Crosby belonged to a tight circle of religious leaders who bought stock in public companies in the hope of exerting a moral influence on them. ...He submitted a motion to appoint a climate-change expert to Exxon’s board, ...he laid into Tillerson for having uttered “not one word or syllable” about climate change. ...Three years later, an Irishman named Declan Flanagan, chief executive of the renewables company Lincoln Clean Energy, was addressing his own shareholders in Copenhagen when he delivered a cryptic announcement. Lincoln, he said, was going to build a solar farm in the Permian Basin — the heart of West Texas oil country — with funding put up by a “blue-chip counterparty.” ...“That,” he said in his strong Irish accent, “is Exxon Mobil.” ...An unsettling fact of Wall Street today is that some of the same people who accurately predicted the housing bubble are now describing another bubble, whose collapse will make the financial crisis of 2008 look mild. ...Because the global economy depends on hydrocarbons, practically every asset in the world relates in some way to oil and gas. ...not only oil companies’ stock but practically everything else on the market looks falsely inflated....