An immovable obstacle to action on climate change

If you had to pick one company in America as the ultimate corporate villain, you might be hard pressed to find a better candidate than ExxonMobil. At a time of soaring petrol prices and growing public anger over the cost of filling up cars and trucks, ExxonMobil is not only making money hand over fist at an increasing rate – it is actually making more money than any other oil company in the world.

The company’s top officers and stockholders are, naturally, delighted. But just about everyone else these days seems to be hopping mad. The company was successfully sued last year by petrol station owners who alleged they were being overcharged.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, spit blood at the very mention of the name ExxonMobil for a variety of reasons – the company’s willingness to spend millions of dollars to refute the significance or even the existence of global warming, and the role of energy companies in exacerbating it; its extraordinary lobbying, more energetic than any of its rivals’, to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas exploration; and its continuing refusal to make good on its full compensation payments to the victims of the 1988 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Watchdogs of good corporate governance have been raising eyebrows for years at the compensation collected by ExxonMobil’s top officers. Lee Raymond has been a particular object of public opprobrium for some time. Last November, he testified before Congress that America’s soaring petrol prices were caused by “global supply and demand” and promised that ExxonMobil was assuming its share of the pain. “We’re all in this together,” he told congressmen. That, though, was before it emerged that ExxonMobil made a record-breaking $36bn (