Hacker News Reader

I'm talking about a long term view.

If they had started investing back then, they'd likely be in a better position today and going forward. A leader in future fuels instead of clinging onto fossil fuels, which is definitively short sighted.

View on HN

Exxon is worth $293 billion right now. Its earnings over the past N decades are probably worth more. For that money, you could buy alternative energy providers outright. You could buy Siemens (~$50 billion), who, in addition to transportation and other lines of businesses, have a big renewables business, and are among the world leaders in nuclear ... or, well, they were, until 2011, when they abandoned that line of business entirely.

There is no financial case to be made here whatsoever.

I don't disagree, but Exxon might have had the cachet, especially in the 1980s, to speed up decreasing the carbon intensity of the economy. The entire energy sector is now <= 5% the size of the entire S&P, down from 18%, so it's unclear if energy companies still have that level of cachet.

Now, going forward, in 2020, there might be a different calculus. Usually, the market cap/stock price of a company reflects future cash flow. For an E&P company, much of Exxon's valuation comes from the cash flow expectation on its oil reserves. That's problematic if some of those oil reserves are in effect stranded assets. Certainly not all will likely, but say, things like the tar sands? It very well could be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com