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Exxon Mobil has no more doubts on warming
Kristen Hays, Houston Chronicle
Big Oil behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp. has dropped any pretense of questioning whether global warming is real. Now the company is seeking to position itself as an active player in efforts to lower greenhouse gases.
“The appropriate debate isn’t on whether climate is changing, but rather should be on what we should be doing about it,” Kenneth Cohen, Exxon’s vice president of public affairs, told reporters on a conference call Thursday.
…Cohen’s statements appeared to be the most definitive yet in the company’s effort to show Exxon cares about climate change and wants to do something about it.
It’s a far cry from former CEO Lee Raymond’s rigid stance on the issue in the late 1990s, when he questioned science that linked fossil fuels to global warming. Raymond acknowledged in a 2000 speech that climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions was a “legitimate concern.”
Upon succeeding Raymond as CEO last year, Rex Tillerson labeled climate change a serious issue. He later said the company needed to soften its public image and better explain its stance on global warming.
“They certainly have mellowed somewhat,” said Art Smith, chairman and CEO of John S. Herold, an energy research and consulting firm. “They took a pretty hard stance that everyone else was wrong about this.”
(9 Feb 2007)
World’s largest oil firm chief touts research to make fossil fuels ‘cleaner’
Alvin Powell, Harvard News Office
The head of the world’s largest oil company said that renewable sources can’t meet the world’s growing energy needs so research dollars should be aimed at both developing renewable sources and at making fossil fuels cleaner.
Abdallah S. Jum’ah, president and chief executive officer of the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., also known as Saudi Aramco, said that expected growth in the industrialized world coupled with a growing global population and industrialization of the developing world will significantly increase global energy needs over the next 25 years.
Though renewable energy sources are expected to meet more of the world’s energy needs than they do today, the increase is expected to be minor, just about 1 percent of the global energy supply. That means the bulk of the world’s energy needs, roughly 85 percent, will continue to be met by fossil fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas, Jum’ah said.
“The immediate future looks a lot like the present and the past,” Jum’ah said.
(8 Feb 2007)
Big Oil cautious about clean-energy spending
Critics want more from firms earning billions
David R. Baker, SF Chronicle
To most people, a half-billion-dollar investment in biofuel research looks like serious money.
That’s the amount oil giant BP said last week it will spend to create an alternative energy research center with UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The research center represents the latest example of Big Oil pumping cash into the search for new sources of power. BP, in addition to the new Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, plans to spend $8 billion over 10 years on its own alternative energy effort, which includes building solar cells and wind farms.
But, for BP and other oil companies reaping record profits, research on new energy sources is far from their biggest investment.
…Many renewable-energy advocates say that, for now, oil company commitment to alternative energy remains relatively small.
“While the rhetoric is promising, in the end, they’re still oil and gas guys,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at the Public Citizen watchdog group.
The companies counter that they don’t want to dump money into technologies that may not pan out.
Donald Paul, who oversees alternative energy programs at Chevron Corp., said the infrastructure needed to mass produce and distribute any type of fuel takes years to develop, and millions, if not billions, of dollars to build.
(9 Feb 2007)
