ExxonMobilsaurus Carnifex doubles down on oil

Fossil fuel dinosaur ExxonMobil decided yesterday to boldly look back to the 19th century and double-down on the energy source we love to hate: oil:

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest refiner, said the transition away from oil-derived fuels is probably 100 years away.

Petroleum-based fuels including gasoline and diesel, as well as hydrocarbons such as coal and natural gas, will remain the dominant sources of energy for factories, offices, homes and cars for decades because there are no viable alternatives, Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told reporters today after Exxon Mobil’s annual shareholders meeting in Dallas.

Not only that, but they closed the door on anything with even a whiff of clean energy and climate-friendliness:

Initiatives to develop low-carbon alternatives to gasoline, to adopt pollution-reduction goals and to allow nonbinding shareholder votes on executive pay also failed.

I wish I could say I'm surprised but I can't. Not after ExxonMobil spent $9.3 million trying to water down the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill -- more than twice what greens spent trying to strengthen and support it. Only slightly more surprising is that ExxonMobil's CEO also doubled down on an ostrich-like, bury-your-head-in-the-sand attitude towards climate change:

Tillerson, 57, said lawmakers are hurrying to restrict greenhouse gases when many scientific questions surrounding the global warming issue remain unresolved.

“The point of conflict that I find more often than not are the projections that some make regarding how serious the problem may become and at what pace of acceleration it may occur,” Tillerson told investors at the shareholders meeting. “All of those models have deficiencies in the way they’re constructed and the assumptions that go into the models and the limitations of the data.”

Translation: We're going to keep questioning the scientific consensus so we can stall the inevitable switch to clean energy as long as possible and suck the very last drop of oil our of the ground and keep reaping obscene profits -- then leave the next generations holding the bag while we spend said profits in our climate-controlled pods well above the rising sea levels.

But beyond the intellectual dishonesty and greed, the whole vibe emanating from this shareholders' meeting strikes me as old and sad. ExxonMobil is a parchment company in a world yearning for printing presses; a horse-drawn carriage firm in a world focused on sports cars; a telegraph conglomerate in a Twitter world. In short, it's a dirty oil company in a world that's rushing towards renewables.

At least when dinosaurs became extinct, they had a good excuse: they never saw the asteroid coming.* What's ExxonMobil's excuse?

* Also, the average dinosaur had a brain the size of a walnut, so they couldn't adapt to the new planetary conditions. Again, what's ExxonMobil's excuse?