Lucas Ropek
The CEO of ExxonMobil has a very surprising message for Donald Trump: Please, oh please do not pull us out of the Paris Climate Accords again.
Yes, you heard that right. Weird as it may sound, it appears that one of the top oil executives in the country is not pleased with Trump’s plans to withdraw the U.S. from the international agreement to reduce global CO2 emissions. “I don’t think the stops and starts are the right thing for businesses,” Darren Woods, Exxon’s CEO, said during a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “It is extremely inefficient. It creates a lot of uncertainty.”
In a subsequent interview with Politico, Woods said very much the same thing: “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would just make the longer term that much more challenging.”
On the one hand, it may seem bizarre to hear the head of one of the largest oil companies in the world siding with climate activists. On the other hand, you can see why he might be tired of all the flip-flopping.
The Paris Agreement went into effect in 2015 and was largely the work of the Obama administration. The agreement sought to compel its 194 participating nations to cut their CO2 emissions by a matter of degrees over several years. The ultimate goal was to lessen the likelihood that climate change kills us all. When he took office in 2016, Trump made it clear that he would pull the U.S. out of the agreement, having previously referred to climate change as a “hoax” concocted by the Chinese government. The actual withdrawal from the agreement did not take place for several years. The U.S. exit from the agreement took effect in November of 2020, during the final months of Trump’s presidency. Less than six months later, in February of 2021, the U.S. officially rejoined the agreement, at the behest of the Biden administration. Now, Trump has promised, once again, to pull us out of the agreement.
At the very least, all of this back and forth has to be pretty confusing for oil companies. An analyst interviewed by the Journal noted that oil companies have been “working very hard to lower their emissions, and the last thing they want is for all the rules and regulations to change again.”
Trump, as a political candidate, has always enjoyed a healthy amount of support from the oil and gas industry. In 2016, 2020, and 2024 the Trump campaign enjoyed a steady flow of contributions from energy companies and tycoons, and Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, came to the position after having spent ten years as ExxonMobil’s CEO. The duo parted ways unceremoniously in 2017, with Tillerson reportedly describing Trump as a “fucking moron” and Trump challenging Tillerson to compare IQs.
During his first term, Trump also aggressively rolled back droves of Obama-era environmental policies, gutting federal regulations in ways that hugely benefited oil and gas companies. Now that he’s headed back to the White House, it seems almost certain that Trump will do this again. Some of his top White House picks (such as Stephen Miller) are avowed Paris Agreement enemies. Project 2025, a policy agenda that has dense ties to Trump allies (but which Trump has personally disavowed) has sought to disrupt U.S.-based climate efforts. The incoming administration has also toyed with the idea of relocating the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters to someplace outside of Washington D.C., a move that one staffer has characterized as an attempt to “decapitate” the agency.