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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

> The new shareholder resolution calls on the oil company to reduce its Scope 3 emissions or those that result from the use of its products

Exxon is supposed to reduce emissions from their customers using their products? How? If I buy Exxon gas and take it home and light it on fire in the back yard is an Exxon employee supposed to come and stop me?

There’s definitely a lot of things we can do to fight climate change but passing nonsensical shareholder resolutions demanding impossible things isn’t one them.

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I think everyone understands the necessity of oil & gas - but what's becoming clear is that some oil & gas companies are acting like tobacco companies have in the past - they're intentionally trying to discredit climate change research, minimise public awareness of their impacts, and other "bad" activities which are good for business, but bad for society.

There are oil & gas companies which are at least trying to change - Equinor in Norway, Engie in France. The common thread is that they're both at least partly state owned.

> The new shareholder resolution calls on the oil company to reduce its Scope 3 emissions or those that result from the use of its products.

There are multi pronged approaches to this, reducing C02 emissions.

* Exxon can invest more effort into effective carbon sequestration down wells, ala Gorgon (currently the largest such project on earth, albeit somewhat vaporware for now).

* pivot assets and engineering out of fossil fuels and into renewables, remaining an energy company but shifting out of whale oil.

* Developing better public transport in the parts of the world with greatest per capita FF usage to reduce that demand.

* etc.

Exxon Mobil Corp. has a market cap. of some 400 billion USD .. it's not as though they lack resources to pivot toward shareholder demands.

The first two are not what the resolution is asking for, which is to reduce emissions from customers using their product.

For the final one, why would you ask Exxon, a company that has 0 expertise in building public transportation systems, to suddenly pivot into an entirely new industry? Why would this be an effective strategy to get more public transportation built? Why not lobby the relevant city / state governments directly? Why not invest in any one of the companies that already build public transportation systems?

It's very clear that regardless of what resolution was put forward that the intent of the shareholder bloc supporting it is to reduce global carbon emissions from fossil fuel companies.

The first two directions (of many possibilities) go toward that end and would likely be supported by that shareholder block if put forward.

The last would put resources toward the reduction of per capita fossil fuel production, and use the resource of a fossil fuel extractor to do so.

> Why would this be an effective strategy to get more public transportation built?

Because, if carried forward, it achieves the desired end goal and uses the resources of a problematic company to do so.

For an activist block that wants change in energy creation it makes a great deal more sense to change bad behaviour than to leave that in play and invest elsewhere.

If you can imagine the mindset of activist investors you'll be able to answer these questions for yourself as you pose them - it's a useful technique to work on.

> the intent of the shareholder bloc supporting it is to reduce global carbon emissions from fossil fuel companies.

But that's why it makes no sense. The emissions caused by the customers are not emissions "from" fossil fuel companies. Exxon is not using the fossil fuels. If you want to reduce the emissions, talk to the customers. They're the ones who are doing the emitting.

It's like if Wal-Mart sold 500,000 tons of rice and you say that Wal-Mart ate all this rice. They didn't, the people who bought it did.

I suppose I could try to get into the activist mindset but it's painful to bang my head against a wall that hard and I'm worried about permanent damage.

You are acting like the demand side is all that matters. Using your analogy, Walmart can reduce their customers’ rice consumption by 50% by the simple act of only allowing 250,000 tons to appear on shelves.

And the people who were eating the other 250,000 tons of rice will do what? Lay down and starve to death?

Irrelevant question. I was using your imperfect analogy to demonstrate that Exxon can reduce customer oil consumption by reducing the amount of oil Exxon supplies.

Well, you failed

While I do appreciate your deep insight, I am missing a bit of nuance in your response. Perhaps you can help me understand why Exxon reducing its supply of oil would not reduce its customer’s consumption of its oil.

Let’s pretend you have a job. You drive 20 miles each way to go to work. When you need gas, you buy it at the Exxon station every 3 or 4 days. Suppose the Exxon station closes. What are you going to do? Quit your job, default on your mortgage and become homeless? No, you’re going to buy gas somewhere else. So, did Exxon reducing its production of gas reduce your gas consumption? Did it move your house closer to your job? Did it make your car more fuel efficient? No, it did nothing except maybe slightly inconvenience you.

Open an economics textbook and look up the phrase inelastic demand.

Looking at a couple of threads of threads on this topic, I think you are not only being intentionally obtuse, but insultingly condescending.

And yet you can’t articulate a single logical reason why reducing Exxon’s oil production will reduce demand for oil. Not even a hypothetical scenario of how it might work. Interesting.

1) Oil and gas extraction itself is very energy intensive and quite dirty. That could be improved.

2) Flaring is a pure loss of fossil carbon to the atmosphere and should be absolutely minimized. There's a local community near me with an ongoing complaint against Exxon for too much flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c6wk2ml6gwzt - on a dark night I can see it myself from 25 miles away.

3) Corporate lobbying can be pro-fossil or pro-renewable. Pro-fossil lobbying generally doesn't have a moral leg to stand on once climate change is taken into account, and they should stop doing it and stop making political donations to pro-climate-change politicians and PACs.

4) BP has a renewables division. Does Exxon?

Just a quick list of things that could be done. Like Philip Morris, they're going to have to acknowledge that their main product is inherently harmful and its use should be phased out.

None of those except maybe indirectly the lobbying meet what the resolution is asking for, which is that Exxon control how customers use their products.

Where is the full text of the resolution? It doesn't seem to be linked from anywhere obvious.

Like I say, the closest analogy is Philip Morris: the product is inherently harmful.

Exon could buy offset on behalf of their customer's expected emissions. (which I guess would indirectly increase the cost for their customers) .

or they could give discounts to their customers that show they have reduced their emissions through various initiatives , eg buying cleaner buses

Yes, that's a sample of one. YOU can/will do that. A government buying $50m worth of oil & gas for its needs (i.e. Army vehicles) won't be doing that. So unless you are willing to buy $50m then it doesn't matter how much oil & gas you burn in your background ($100 perhaps before the neighbors call the police and the FD on you?)

The fuel is meant to be consumed. Majority of the fuel purchased will end up being consumed a very certain way.

Now, how do manage the cost of this handling? I recently listened to some EU minister saying that "super markets include the cost of recycling in the price of the milk carton". I didn't know that when I buy something from a super market I pre-pay for the recycling - which made me feel stupid since we pay extra in admin-costs in our building for this - anyway such is life).

So back to the oil & gas. Let's assume that 99.9% of oil & gas will be consumed in the standard process. We can make an average calculation on the technology it will be consumed in (i.e. 50yo old bus vs new bus - different polluting outputs). With a certain (?) degree of confidence we can estimate the pollution that will be created. Is it absolute? No. Is it better than nothing?

Right, I picked a deliberately silly example. I just don't understand what these activists think Exxon is going to do. Do they think Exxon can dictate to the military how the military is allowed to use the fuel they buy? Because...uh...they can't. The military will buy fuel and do whatever it wants with it and Exxon can't do a thing about it.

> I didn't know that when I buy something from a super market I pre-pay for the recycling - which made me feel stupid since we pay extra in admin-costs in our building for this

You're probably paying for trash collection, not the recycling itself, and you're paying for the disposal of the non-recyclable trash.

It's not physically impossible. CCS and all that. They could even do it at the source, turn the oil into hydrogen and carbon and bury the latter. Whether it's economical is a different story.

By reducing the amount that they produce and sell?

Then someone else produces and sells it. Exxon doesn’t control market demand. If companies could control demand for their products then they would make infinite money by just controlling the demand to be as high as possible.

Then Follow This and other orgs will start looking into how to get voting power there, too.

Good luck getting a vote at Aramco or PDVSA or anything in Russia. They'll be laughed out of the room if they're lucky and probably murdered if they get too annoying.

Maybe. Then maybe they'll try some other tactic in those cases.

Either way Exxon totally has a way to reduce the emissions of their customers: by reducing their customers. They may go to other producers but this is hardly the only thing activists are trying. It's not an impossible request and could be a useful component of a larger strategy.

In addition, it would then increase the market prices, which in turn helps incentive lower emissions or greener cheaper alternatives

are you arguing that Exxon is powerless to reduce emissions from oil and gas?

What powers do you think they do or should have over how customers use their product? If Exxon is asked to immediately reduce your personal carbon emissions by say, 30%, what control do you think Exxon should have over your personal fossil fuel use to do that?

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