Exxon vs the world

The US supermajor is once again under the cosh for its stance on the climate

EXXONMOBIL is feeling the heat from all sides over its climate-change stance. US government prosecutors want to know what the company knew about fossil fuels’ role in climate change and when it knew it, while shareholders want to know how it’s planning for a post-Paris carbon-constrained world. The Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News published a series of stories last September detailing ExxonMobil’s decades-long history of studying the risks of rising greenhouse gases – studies that showed the oil major at the leading edge of climate science as early as the 1970s. Green activists jumped on the story, identifying an opening to attack their favourite Big Oil foil. The claim is that Exxon