For Immediate Release:
January 26, 2016
In a new report released yesterday, ExxonMobil makes “predictions” about the global energy landscape in the next 25 years. Unsurprisingly, they predict that oil and gas will continue to dominate the energy market through 2040 and that oil use will actually grow by 25% during that time, ignoring both the massive growth of clean energy and the fact that the scenario they are predicting would be catastrophic for the climate.
“Exxon’s energy outlook envisions a future in which the world addresses the urgent realities of climate change while, miraculously, continuing to burn ever more oil and gas,” said Carroll Muffett, President, Center for International Environmental Law. “True to corporate form, it is a case-study in cognitive dissonance.”
“Exxon should focus on the investigations by two attorneys general into its climate denial operation rather than predicting an energy outlook that would plunge the world into catastrophic climate change,” said Naomi Ages, Climate Liability Project Lead with Greenpeace USA.
It is particularly egregious for Exxon to release such a report right now, as damning allegations of the company’s longstanding knowledge of climate change and attempts to cover it up emerge, and investigators begin inquiries into this deceit.
Releasing this energy outlook, as though they are objective observers, rather than an oil company that stands to make billions exploiting the climate denial that they themselves work to create, is just another example of Exxon’s dishonest attempts to trick the public into believing that we have no choice but to allow them and their friends in the fossil fuel industry to continue forcing us down a path towards climate disaster.
“After the revelations of the past year, it seems likely that any informed person would treat Exxon PR efforts as self-serving fibbing,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben.
“Yet another in the annual series from Exxon where they soberly explain that the world is going to burn, there is nothing you can do about it, because, numbers,” said Stephen Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International. “The strategy is pure PR, and the analysis is pure BS. Luckily, as we saw in Paris, millions of people and trillions of dollars of investment are already ignoring them.”
“ExxonMobil’s pathetic fight to extend our fossil fuel dependence for another generation, after decades of deceit about climate science, marks a new low in corporate disdain for our national interest and further reason for law enforcement to bring the corporation’s misconduct fully to light,” said Bradley M. Campbell, President of the Conservation Law Foundation.
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For more, see this recent blog from Oil Change International’s Lorne Stockman: “Exxon’s energy outlook PR stunt”
Contact:
Jamie Henn, jamie@350.org, 415-890-3350
David Turnbull, david@priceofoil.org, 202-316-3499
Cassady Sharp, csharp@greenpeace.org, 828-817-3328
Carroll Muffett, cmuffett@ciel.org. 202-425-2394