The announcement was light on details and the pledge excluded the vast majority of the emissions for which the company is responsible.
ExxonMobil is not the only oil company to make questionable claims about climate change.
And new net-zero pledges conspicuously serve a PR purpose – allowing a company to paint itself in a positive light at a time when public scrutiny on corporate climate records is increasing.
There are legitimate criticisms and drawbacks to the net-zero concept, but, in general, the targets are intended to galvanize government, corporations, and the general public to slash emissions over time to somewhere close to zero.
And last year, the International Energy Agency argued that the 2050 net-zero emissions pathway would require an immediate end to new fossil fuel projects, with existing production phased out slowly in the years ahead.
Big polluters like ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, have 2050 net-zero targets, while some corporations outside of fossil fuels have even more aggressive targets.
The United Nations-backed Race to Zero campaign, which seeks to rally support for net-zero commitments, has signed up pledges from over 5,000 businesses, 400 large investors, 1,000 universities, and more than 1,000 city and regional governments.
“There is not a lot of uniformity and very little regulation at the international or domestic level, which can lead to claims of greenwashing,” Lisa Benjamin, a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, told Sierra.
The indirect emissions related to those operations, such as from its electricity use or from employees traveling for business, are Scope 2.
Scope 3 emissions mostly relate to pollution released by consumers at the other end of the business chain.
Roughly 80 percent of ExxonMobil’s emissions comes from the burning of the oil and gas it produces, markets, sells.
Exxon and other oil companies could plug methane leaks, electrify some their operations, and, at some point perhaps, use carbon capture.
“It’s like, ‘Great you can get a first down from the 20 to the 30-yard line.
But what about the pollution that comes from millions of cars added to roadways every year? On this front, at least, the major automakers are making bigger strides than the oil industry.
Meanwhile, GM, Ford, and nine other major automakers signed an agreement in December 2021 to aim for selling 100 percent zero emissions cars by 2040.
The steel industry, at least, is very enthusiastic about the future prospects of “green steel,” which replaces coal with hydrogen and renewable energy.
In order to stabilize the climate, the world needs to slash emissions as close to zero as possible.
Carbon offsets are a complicated topic, and offsets are plagued with a long list of problems. Ensuring that a specific project genuinely removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is difficult, the accounting is complex, and the lifespan of a tree-planting endeavor, for example, is uncertain.
Bloomberg Green reported last year on the effort by French oil giant Total to offset the emissions from a cargo of liquefied natural gas it shipped from Australia to China.
If you are buying carbon credits instead of directly reducing emissions, that can be a problem,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, wrote to Sierra in an email.
He said offsets should be thought of as an additional way to cut emissions, not as something a company can do in lieu of making reductions.
He added that net-zero is better thought of as a global goal, rather than one that should be pursued by individual actors.
Many companies are serious about achieving net-zero emissions, and “feel an urgency to address climate change, which is a good thing,” Broekhoff said.
JBS promised to invest $1 billion in an undefined “net zero” program, but suggested it would consist of offsets and carbon capture.
The oil and gas industry is probably the most infamous for this strategy of predatory delay.
“The time between now and 2030 is absolutely critical for reducing emissions on the order of 50 percent,” Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Sierra.
Executives from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce appeared before a House Oversight Committee hearing last year, in which Congress was looking into the oil industry’s history of climate denial.
At the same time, API and other corporate lobbying groups in which the oil industry is represented, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, spent millions of dollars over the past year on PR and lobbying to kill President Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which would have included roughly $550 billion in investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles.
The oil industry has “co-opted” language such as “Paris-aligned” and are trying to do that with “net-zero,” while continuing to drill for oil and gas, Mulvey said.
In the lead up to the international climate change negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland last year, countries updated their climate plans, and many offered up their own commitments to reach net-zero by 2050.
Saudi Arabia, a country that is often considered to be synonymous with oil, said it would aim for net-zero by 2060.
Too often, climate negotiations are long on rhetoric and short on action, and net-zero claims can easily fall in that category.
But one big difference between a claim from an oil company and one from a government is that the country-level commitments by default include the Scope 3 emissions – the emissions stemming from the combustion of fossil fuels – at least within their borders.
So, Saudi oil burned in, say, China is not an emissions problem for Saudi Arabia; that oil consumption is calculated as Chinese emissions.
Moreover, countries have much stronger incentives to actually slash the use of fossil fuels, ranging from improved public health, reduced fiscal pressure, improved national security objectives, and leading the way on new technologies.
Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change, and international politics.
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