Heirs Demand Change at Exxon Mobil

In one corner we have state pension funds, labor unions, corporate-governance gadflies and those unlikeliest of revolutionaries: most of John D. Rockefeller's direct descendants. This motley crew is demanding that Exxon invest more in alternative fuels and separate the offices of company chairman and chief executive, letting incumbent Rex Tillerson get on with the grubby business of making money while installing an outsider chairman to think deep thoughts about renewable energy and the future of mankind. (I paraphrase.)

In the other corner are onetime Eagle Scout Tillerson and his loyal board members, who can't wait for the rebellious Rockefellers to get back to their sundry professional pursuits outside the oil industry. The men in charge are New Money all the way, probably own more of the company than their aristocratic adversaries and hope to wait out this insurrection behind a moat overflowing with cash.

Tillerson isn't quite as reactionary as predecessor Lee Raymond, who spent years dismissing global warming theories as hippie fantasies. On Tillerson's watch, Exxon has acknowledged that the phenomenon is real, and that emissions from fossil fuels are "one source" of the problem. The company is even willing to consider "putting policies in place that start us on a path to reduce emissions, while understanding the context of managing carbon emissions among other important world priorities, such as economic development, poverty eradication and public health." Just don't ask execs to sign off on Kyoto.

Still, Exxon stopped funding some advocacy groups hostile to the evidence of global warming when Tillerson took over two years ago, and last week revealed that it's cut off the cash to other skeptical outfits, including the Capital Research Center, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Frontiers of Freedom Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, and the Institute for Energy Research. According to a Greenpeace blog, that still leaves the company sponsoring 28 groups engaged in what the blogger calls "climate denial." Some people are just hard to please.

It's surprising that oil executives and environmentalists still get on as badly as they do. In the abstract, high oil prices are a boon to the environment, encouraging conservation and the perfection of renewable fuels, not as a result of shareholder advocacy but out of the good old profit motive. This is what the Greenpeace types have been calling for all along; they'd just have preferred to get here without cursing Tillerson every time they gas up the Volvo.

Commodity speculators, increasingly cast as the villains, are really just doing something that the government won't: anticipating future scarcity and doing something about it now, before it's too late. Better that demand for energy be curbed when there's enough of it around to meet our present needs than to wait until there's not enough to go around. Better high prices than gas lines and riots.

Speculation is a loaded word, weighted with the notion of a risky bet divorced from the economic reality. The idea that the harried commuter at the pump is paying a hefty premium to financial gamblers is understandably galling. But if I anticipate that growth in energy demand will outpace increases in supply and wish to hedge my household heating costs by purchasing a commodity ETF, is that undesirable speculation or sensible insurance? The more reckless act of speculation is the assertion that rapid price changes necessarily constitute a bubble.

Curiously, people who have no trouble whatsoever with speculators regulating demand and supply based on imperfect information often insist that similar uncertainty should paralyze public policy. The GAAP approach is to demand a cost-benefit analysis and not sign off until the return on investment has been justified. It's not clear to me that the Rockefellers are right in demanding that Exxon abandon this approach for the purported benefit of the company and mankind. What's clear is that government can't wait in defending common resources undervalued by the market, like clean air and a stable climate. Just because the cost of greenhouse emissions is hard to fix doesn't mean they shouldn't have a price. In shaping a market for such emissions, the government would, in effect, be guessing, just like all those crude oil traders. When looking ahead, guessing is usually the best we can do. It would be wrong not to try.

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