"For decades, ExxonMobil argued consumers, not oil giants, should take responsibility for fossil fuel pollution. It’s now backing Carbon Measures’ accounting scheme, which moves pollution “liabilities” to buyers’ books."
"“Pollution is everybody’s business,” Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian affiliate, wrote in a 1970 report, “because essentially all of it results from the activities of men working to satisfy the needs and desires of men.”
Fast forward over a half century and Imperial’s old argument is taking a new form. Today, ExxonMobil is seeking to upend how carbon emissions are accounted for — by changing the rules of the game.
An ExxonMobil-backed initiative, Carbon Measures, is pushing to reshape how the world does the math on climate change. Their system, outside analysts point out, leaves consumers holding the bag.
Meanwhile, ExxonMobil also is waging a legal war against moves to entrench the system most companies currently use to report their greenhouse gas emissions, arguing it creates a “policy of stigmatization” of Big Oil.
The way the Carbon Measures coalition, a group with 23 member companies including energy, finance, and industry heavyweights, wants to run the numbers, critics say, all liabilities for fossil fuel emissions would flow away from suppliers and towards customers — to each individual person. The buck would stop not at the top, but at the very bottom, landing on each and every consumer and dispersing responsibility as widely as possible."
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