ExxonMobil is the world’s largest oil and gas corporation – its main ‘business lines’ involve producing a range of fuels for cars, planes and ships, as well the technologies surrounding the extraction and refining of these fuels.
ExxonMobil: Key Facts and Stats
- Registered in Texas, USA.
- Assets (2016) – $330 billion
- Revenue (2016) – $218 billion
- 75 000 employees globally
- The CEO from 2006 to 2016 was Rex Tillerson, until Donald Trump appointed him as the 69th Secretary of State, a position he formally took up in February 2017. Tillerson has a relatively modest Total Net Wealth of $245 million (although I simply CANNOT believe that’s an accurate figure.)
Criticisms of ExxonMobil
This video outlines a fairly basic criticism of Exxon’s dealings with the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea – which is the richest country in Africa in terms of GDP, but not in terms of social development, because although Exxon pump a lot of oil out of the country, pretty much all of the money from that oil revenue gets pumped into the hands of the ruling family. They’re so rich, that the Vice President (the president’s son) owns a $30 million dollar mansion in Malibu.
I posted about Equatorial Guinnea a while back – this post covers some of the figures surrounding oil extraction.
NB – Obiang is going on trial in Europe to investigate the obvious corruption that has led to his vast wealth, thanks to the French courts, no thanks to the TNC Exxon.
A second criticism of Exxon is that it could have effectively prevented climate change: its own internal memos show that the company proved the link between burning fossil fuels and global warming in the late 1970s, but then buried the research and instead funded climate change sceptics to spread doubt about man-made climate change, and cynically invested in areas such as the arctic which it thought global warming would open up for further oil extraction.
According to this Guardian article, Bill Mckibben argues that if only Exxon had been honest, we could have taken much early steps to avert global warming.
Further Sources of criticisms of Exxon…
Related Posts/ how to use this material
The most obvious use of the above information is to use it to evaluate the role of Transnational Corporations in Development, summaries of which are provided here:
- Arguments and evidence that transnational corporations promote development
- Arguments and evidence that transnational corporations harm developing countries
