Karma's Most Wanted #9: ExxonMobil

Knowledge, Profit, and the Cost Shift

By Matt Stone

ExxonMobil does not suffer from a lack of information. That excuse is gone. Its own internal research from the 1970s and 1980s modeled the relationship between fossil fuel combustion and rising global temperatures with notable accuracy.

A 2023 analysis published in Science reviewed those internal projections and found that between 63 percent and 83 percent accurately predicted subsequent warming. That is not a company stumbling around in the dark. That is a company with a working understanding of the long-term consequences of its core product. Once that fact is established, the rest of the story stops being an accident and starts becoming a sequence of choices.

From that point forward, ExxonMobil kept faith with the business model. It did not pivot away from extraction because the science was inconvenient. It did not reorganize itself around public protection because the numbers looked grim. It stayed loyal to oil, gas, refinement, and sale at global market prices.

In 2025, ExxonMobil reported $28.8 billion in earnings and returned $37.2 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. It also touted its highest annual upstream production in more than forty years. Those are not the numbers of a company cornered by conscience. Those are the numbers of a machine functioning smoothly according to its own incentives.

And the structure those incentives live inside matters just as much as the profits themselves. Oil is not priced locally. It is priced globally. The United States can drill enormous amounts of crude, export petroleum, and still leave its own citizens exposed to price spikes because the pricing mechanism was never built around public insulation.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration states plainly that crude oil is the largest component of the retail price of gasoline. In 2025, crude accounted for 51.4 percent of the average retail gasoline price. That means a war, a supply disruption, or a production cut far away can still punch straight through to the pump in a country producing mountains of its own oil. Domestic production does not break this system. It feeds into it.

That is where the bait and switch lives. After the energy crises of the 1970s, Americans were told a simple story. Produce more of our own energy and we will stop being so vulnerable. Ordinary people heard protection in that promise. They heard security. They heard that if the oil was ours, the pain would no longer be. What actually happened was narrower and much less generous.

Production rose. Imports fell. But the underlying pricing structure remained global. So the United States did part of what it said, but not the part people thought they were buying. The country increased output while leaving consumers inside the same exposure system. Production increased. Exposure remained. That is not a malfunction. That is the design.

ExxonMobil benefits from that design. It operates inside a structure where corporate performance and public welfare are not the same thing. When global crude prices rise, consumers get hit with higher gasoline prices while producers can post stronger revenues. That is not proof of some hidden plot. It is more American than that.

It is a visible system with incentives stacked in the wrong direction. The public gets volatility. The company gets market upside. Then someone in a suit tells you this is all just the unavoidable complexity of modern life, as if being robbed by design becomes respectable once the spreadsheet is detailed enough.

This is also why the question of public subsidy becomes so offensive. Oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, have long benefited from favorable tax treatment developed in an earlier policy era, including deductions tied to drilling and production. The original rationale was domestic development and strategic supply.

ExxonMobil today is not a fragile infant industry crawling toward viability. It is one of the largest and most profitable corporations on earth. A company posting nearly $29 billion in annual earnings does not need the public’s tax dollars. It needs fewer lobbyists, fewer excuses, and a public less willing to confuse private profitability with national necessity.

Trust is easier to dispose of than subsidy because the test is simpler. Trust requires some alignment between what an institution knows and what it tells the public when the stakes are enormous. Exxon’s internal climate research showed one thing. The broader political and public environment received years of uncertainty, delay, and caution tape wrapped around urgency. That pattern was not spontaneous.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute’s “Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan” defined “victory” partly in terms of average citizens and the media recognizing uncertainties in climate science. Exxon was among the companies represented in the wider industry effort around that plan. The objective was not to win a clean scientific argument. It was to shape public interpretation, slow policy response, and preserve operating room for the business model.

That is why the comparison to tobacco is not rhetorical excess. It is structural memory. In the 1950s, the tobacco industry developed a communications strategy built around uncertainty rather than direct refutation. The now famous internal line, “Doubt is our product,” captured the core lesson. You do not have to defeat the science. You only have to keep the public unsure long enough that regulation stalls and profits continue.

Internal tobacco documents later described the Tobacco Industry Research Committee as an industry “shield” and a “front” for public relations purposes. ExxonMobil did not invent that method. It inherited a culture that had already shown how profitable organized hesitation could be.

That also gives proper weight to Hill & Knowlton. They did not create human doubt. They helped turn it into a corporate operating method. They helped formalize a communications model in which uncertainty could be weaponized against consequence. That matters because once doubt became a repeatable strategy, it stopped belonging only to cigarettes. It became transferable.

It migrated to other industries facing serious evidence against profitable products. By the time climate science became politically dangerous to the fossil fuel business, the lesson was already sitting on the shelf. Do not try to erase reality. Just make reality inconvenient enough that nobody acts in time. Exxon’s conduct fits neatly inside that broader tradition.

And if all of that were not enough, there is the question of sympathy, which should be the easiest one to bury. Sympathy implies shared exposure to risk. ExxonMobil does not share the burden in anything like the same way as the public. The public gets the flooding, the heat, the higher insurance premiums, the infrastructure strain, the utility hikes, and the household volatility tied to fuel costs.

Exxon gets profits tied to commodity prices, shareholder returns, and the protection of scale. Yes, the company faces reputational and regulatory risks. That is not the same thing as a family watching the cost of fuel, groceries, insurance, and repairs climb while being told the market is simply speaking its wisdom. The costs are spread outward. The gains are concentrated upward. That asymmetry is not accidental. It is one of the main features of the system.

There is also a wider geopolitical point worth stating carefully. ExxonMobil did not cause modern uprisings in Iran. There is no credible evidence for that. But the broader oil order in which Exxon operates has long been entangled with political power and regime change.

After the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, Western oil interests, including predecessors of Exxon, benefited from the post-coup oil arrangement. That does not make Exxon the author of every later Iranian crisis. It does show that oil power, Western state power, and corporate access have often moved together in ways that reshaped entire countries while leaving the public to inherit the aftershocks.

The point is not conspiracy. The point is structure. The system does not need a corporation secretly engineering revolutions to show its influence. It only needs a record of who gained access, who gained leverage, and who paid the price.

So no, ExxonMobil does not warrant public trust. It had information and did not align its conduct with the public interest.

It does not warrant public subsidy.

It is too large, too profitable, and too entrenched to play the helpless patriot. And it certainly does not warrant public sympathy. Sympathy is for people trapped in the wreckage, not for the institution that saw the weather report early and kept selling us umbrellas with holes in them.

ExxonMobil is not merely a company with a controversial past. It is a case study in how a civilization can know better, profit anyway, and then ask the public to admire the discipline of the arrangement. It knew the risk. It stayed loyal to the model. It prospered inside a system that leaves consumers exposed and the public carrying much of the long-term cost.

Those are not allegations. They are observable conditions. And from those conditions the conclusion follows cleanly. ExxonMobil does not warrant public trust, public subsidy, or public sympathy. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded on terms that did not include the public.