Good morning.
Fortune’s first Impact Initiative got underway in Atlanta yesterday, bringing together top executives responsible for ESG from many of the world’s largest corporations. My task for the day was to conduct an odd trio of interviews on the conference stage, with billionaire basketball team owner Tony Ressler, rapper “Killer Mike” Render, and Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub. All three were fascinating, but since I have limited space here, I’ll focus this morning on Hollub, who by speaking her mind has managed to anger both sides in the climate debate. Environmentalists don’t like her because she believes oil production will have to be part of the global energy picture for decades to come. Here’s what she said on that yesterday:
“A lot of models are showing that even by 2040, if you tried to do your best in terms of building renewables and other alternatives, the demand for oil would still be around 60 to 70 million barrels. We’re at 100 million today. Unfortunately, if you don't invest in the oil industry, by then the supply would be 27. So when we talk about a just transition, we have to remember that there are places around the world that have tremendous oil and gas resources. But if they can't develop those, they're the ones that will get left behind, and they're the ones that will suffer.”
Yet Hollub also believes the world faces a serious climate crisis. And her response has been to make major investments in carbon capture technology, which she believes play to her company’s engineering strengths and can make a major contribution to solving the problem. To critics who say it’s just an effort to “greenwash” the company’s oil business, she responds:
“We would not be sending $1.2 billion for a greenwashing campaign. I can assure you of that…The way we look at it is this is not something that we have the choice to do or not. It's something that we feel like we should do and need to do to help the world.”
I asked her what advice she would give to other U.S. companies trying to navigate the polarized U.S. political environment.
“It’s the most challenging that I've ever seen in my career. But I would say take the best moments you can get. I love President Biden's commitment to try to reduce emissions and try to get us in a better place with respect to climate. And the IRA bill, that was amazing. It’s going to be very helpful in advancing our technologies. So we are trying to work with the Democrats on that…And then we work with the Republicans on other things around making sure that we don't shut down the oil industry in the United States, because we don't want to do what Europe did.”
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Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
