Can you provide an explanation of Exxon's behavior that is not driven by the incentive to deliver profits to their shareholders? I'd certainly be open to another way of understanding the situation, but this behavior is so common among corporations of their size, it seems like the simplest explanation to me.
Personally, I think the thing most people are angry about is the wild misalignment between the doctrine of shareholder primacy and the well-being of society overall. Exxon is governed by a board which is elected by its shareholders and has a fiduciary responsibility them. But its stakeholders are a much larger group of people. To be clear, I think that so-called "stakeholder capitalism" is a scam if there is no mechanism to enforce it.
Instead, I think you need an organizational form that incentivizes both efficient operation and the best interests of the people affected by its behavior. This seems to me an as-yet unsolved organizational optimization problem. Unfortunately, at the rate the climate is changing, we don't have the luxury of experimenting to find that form. Short-term, I think the best option for a company with such enormous impact is a government entity with at least tangential accountable to voters. To this end, I would prefer to see Exxon nationalized and forced to wind down their hydrocarbon extraction operations.
Wow, major kudos for a pretty imaginative and bold solution. I don't think it would work though. You'd end up with the biggest stakeholders in the fossil fuel industry, with the most to lose from it winding down, being the government and the tax payer. That's the mother of all conflicts of interest. Now the oil industry leadership aren't lobbying government, they are the government. Now all those oil industry workers you need to sack are government employees in civil service unions. What could possibly go wrong?
Use the freedoms that liberal democracy and capitalism give us to fight them back. Expose their corruption, counter-lobby our representatives, use the courts where laws are broken, vote. There is no magic bullet, corruption will always have to be fought. The question is which system gives us the best framework to fight it in. I say a system that respects individual freedoms.
I don't at all want to give the impression that I'm against liberal democracy or individual freedoms. I'm with you there. I'm just not convinced that they're as compatible with absolute private ownership of capital as they are billed to be. And I don't by any means think nationalization is some silver bullet or even the ideal strategy - just trying to think it through.
But setting that aside for the moment, it does seem that up to now, exposing corruption, counter-lobbying, and courts have been our primary tools for fighting back against the likes of Exxon. How is it going so far? It does not appear to have worked in time to avoid major catastrophe. Is there a limit to their effect? And when we talk about counter-lobbying and using courts, what outcome do we hope to achieve with a company like Exxon? Do we want them to pay for the externalities of climate change?
The reason we haven't solved climate change is just because it's an incredibly hard problem, and we just flat out don't have a political consensus and clear mandate from the people to take the sort of drastic and incredibly costly steps it would take. Changing direction like that is a political problem first and an economic problem second.
As for Exxon, they may be scumbags and need reigning in, but basically they are just a business providing a service. We all consume fossil fuels all the time, and we need someone to buy them from. The way to reduce fossil fuel dependency isn't to just kill the oil companies, we'd kill our economies with them. We need to wean ourselves off the poison. We need to stop being their customer, not blame the shop for selling us the goods we went to the shop to buy.
I'm not sure what you mean by absolute private ownership of capital. We don't have that in an absolute sense at all. We confiscate capital through taxation (which I'm fine with by the way), we regulate markets (which is a necessary function of government), the government controls the money supply and directly manipulates financial markets all the time as is needed. The government is a massive employer and huge spender in the economy. I'm a Brit actually, but all of that is true of every liberal democracy. Heck, I even support the NHS, I think it's far better than the US model. However capitalism is fundamentally about individual rights and freedoms, not absolute ones, but valuable ones. I'm a wishy-washy centrist, and proud of it.
Personally, I think the thing most people are angry about is the wild misalignment between the doctrine of shareholder primacy and the well-being of society overall. Exxon is governed by a board which is elected by its shareholders and has a fiduciary responsibility them. But its stakeholders are a much larger group of people. To be clear, I think that so-called "stakeholder capitalism" is a scam if there is no mechanism to enforce it.
Instead, I think you need an organizational form that incentivizes both efficient operation and the best interests of the people affected by its behavior. This seems to me an as-yet unsolved organizational optimization problem. Unfortunately, at the rate the climate is changing, we don't have the luxury of experimenting to find that form. Short-term, I think the best option for a company with such enormous impact is a government entity with at least tangential accountable to voters. To this end, I would prefer to see Exxon nationalized and forced to wind down their hydrocarbon extraction operations.