By Gordon Fulks

Unlike the government, businesses must respect reality or they will go bankrupt. 

The reality is that atmospheric CO2 is remarkably beneficial.  Exxon knows that the byproducts of burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and water, are more than completely benign.  They are essential.  All life on this planet comes from carbon dioxide and water.  If we combine those two ingredients, we get soda water.  But if we give them to a plant in the presence of sunlight, it will produce glucose and from that other sugars, starches, fats, proteins, and cellulose.  In other words, all life.

What about warming from the Greenhouse Effect?  CO2 is a greenhouse gas like water vapor.  But water vapor completely dominates that effect, so much that climate alarmists quietly assume that it will produce most of the warming from rising CO2 in the atmosphere.  But water vapor is self limiting, such that it does not produce catastrophic warming.

One important way that water vapor controls warming is through the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight back to space, before they can heat the ground.

The most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, John Clauser, thinks that clouds are the key to understanding our climate, not carbon dioxide.  I agree with him and would add the entire hydrological cycle to the negative feedbacks that keep our climate stable.

John Clauser has joined us as a Director of the CO2 Coalition to refute the vast nonsense coming from the scientifically illiterate.

Exxon should be commended for finally standing up to the climate idiots, just like John Clauser is doing.

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Exxon Says World Hitting Mythical “Net-Zero” by 2050 is Nonsense
May 19, 2023

Finally, at least one Big Oil company is willing to go on the record countering the mass insanity of the left. The left wants humanity to kill itself in order to achieve mythical “net zero” (no extra carbon emissions) by 2050. Leftist lunatics have tried to brainwash the world that if we don’t hit net zero (which is impossible), that’s it. Lights out. The world toasts, and we burn ourselves to a cinder. There is no hope for the future. Which is complete nonsense. Exxon said as much in an official statement to shareholders in an SEC filing.

Proxy adviser Glass Lewis told Exxon (and shareholders) the company should prepare for the end of the world-as in the use of fossil fuels will be completely phased out by 2050, leaving Exxon without a business if it doesn’t change its product lines. After picking themselves up off the floor from laughing so hard, Exxon told Glass Lewis, via a response in an SEC filing (below), they are (our words) smoking something funny.

“Glass Lewis apparently believes the likelihood of the IEA NZE scenario is well beyond what the IEA itself contends: that the world is not on the NZE path and that this is a very aggressive scenario,” Exxon said. “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.”

In other words, ain’t no way people are ready to go back to the Stone Age and never travel beyond five miles from their homes. Ain’t no way people will give up their iPhones. Ain’t no way folks will throw on an extra sweater or two or three in the winter to keep warm. There ain’t no way to actually manufacture cars light enough to run on batteries-without fossil fuels to make the plastic! It’s bizarre. And yet, that’s what the weenies at Glass Lewis say is going to happen.

Exxon Mobil Corp. said the prospect of the world reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is “highly unlikely” due to the drop in living standards that would come with such a scenario.

The Texas oil giant made the comments in a regulatory filing that argued against proxy adviser Glass Lewis’ view that the cost of phasing out oil and gas operations would be a material financial risk. The International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions scenario, which models a phaseout of most fossil fuels by 2050, has little bearing in reality, Exxon said.

“Glass Lewis apparently believes the likelihood of the IEA NZE scenario is well beyond what the IEA itself contends: that the world is not on the NZE path and that this is a very aggressive scenario,” Exxon said. “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.”

Climate pledges by governments would fall short of net zero by 2050 even if they were achieved, meaning there’s little chance of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to the IEA. Exxon has a net zero “ambition” by 2050 but is investing heavily in new projects - both fossil fuels and low carbon - that it believes will provide the flexibility to respond to multiple energy transition scenarios.

Exxon urged shareholders to reject a resolution, backed by Glass Lewis, that the company should produce a report at its annual meeting on May 31 on the cost of shutting oil and gas operations that no longer are needed.