ExxonMobil spent millions in financing think tanks to produce climate denying research to skew the public discourse around climate. Now it lobbies against environmental regulatory frameworks.
ExxonMobil is the largest investor-owned energy company and the seventh largest company in the world by revenue. Headquartered in the US, it is only out-earned in its sector by Saudi Aramco, CNPC, and Sinopec, all state-owned enterprises in countries where democracy does not exist. However, this difference in its ownership model does not mean that Exxon behaves better than its competitors.
Perhaps the greatest example of Exxon’s disinterest in democratic deliberation was its corporate commitment of nearly four decades to conceal from the public its own internal evidence that climate change was real, accelerating, and driven by fossil fuel use while simultaneously financing far-right think tanks in the US and Europe to inject climate scepticism and denialism into the public discourse.
While it altered its public position on climate change years ago, Exxon continues to lobby against meaningful climate policy and still promotes fossil fuel and plastics use to the detriment of communities around the world. It benefits from another entry on our list, Meta, by spreading right-wing propaganda in favour of fossil fuels. It finances the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has led efforts to pressure the US Supreme Court to throw out climate change lawsuits seeking damages from Exxon and its competitors.
The company’s lobbying goes well beyond national politics and extends deep into international governmental gatherings including COP, where it is fronted by groups who use their seats at the table to discourage and delay meaningful policy shifts that address the real impacts and causes of the climate crisis and create industry-friendly policies – such as carbon markets – that enable their paymasters to continue polluting with impunity.
Exxon’s association with the far-right does not stop at policy and propaganda. While Indonesia was ruled by the authoritarian Suharto regime, infamous for killings of trade unionists and other groups, Exxon is alleged to have financed Indonesian military units who engaged in myriad human rights abuses including torture over the course of years. In Chad, it allegedly collaborated with dictator Idriss Déby, to help him back out of a development deal and use the country’s oil revenues to buy weapons. Amnesty International recently cited the company for its continued involvement in jet fuel supply chains for the ruling military junta in Myanmar.
It is no surprise then that ExxonMobil also resists democracy at work. Bloomberg describes the company as “famous for its top-down, buttoned-up, authoritarian culture, where employees rarely challenge their superiors…” In Nigeria, it refused to honour its contracts with its private security workers and tried to deny their employment status before settling in 2018. In 2022, it locked out union members from its Beaumont, Texas, refinery for nearly a year and tried to decertify the union. This year, it announced layoffs in France affecting thousands of jobs over the objections of trade unions, and pushed trading floor workers in Belgium to the brink of strike.
