A whike ago i saved a pretty interesting comment I feel is relevant here:

The last time I posted something about Exxon in this use group I go kicked. It's sad the level of sour discontent that expresses itself any time that a person says anything outside of the mainstream. However, here goes. The tone of the comments is founded on a crude cynicism, that a company will only advance opinions that exactly support its immediate interests. That is, of course, what a hundred movies have taught: life is a crude plot line, with heroes and villains, the latter explicable through single issue motivation. Reality - and here thirty years of experience in the energy industry is speaking - is that the greatest enemy of the energy industry is uncertainty. You place your bets for 25-45 years, during which time governments come and go, opinions shift and technologies alter. Any serious company spends a great deal of time thinking about these issues. Shell, my former employer, maintains a formal scenario process, at one time employing over a hundred senior people dedicated solely to this. It paid for itself hundreds of times over. Climate and emissions are a central issue for all energy companies. The problem is how to gain commercial traction in a world that is entirely defined by state actions. Outsiders are inclined to celebrate price parity between renewables and conventional energy sources, forgetting that the conventional fuels carry huge tax burdens and the renewables, if not actually subsidised, do not. Oil, for example, is taxed at the well head and again at sale: perhaps 2% of the integrated well-to-tank return goes to the company, 20% to general costs and the rest to assorted states. That's a choice that societies have made. Firms live with it as a stable outcome. What is utterly destabilising is a mandate to reduce emissions - that is, move to a much more expensive platform, in which net revenues are entirely dependent on state will - and then have the state make flip-flops about this. The state, if it is to be credible and not paralyse actions, has to take a position and stick to it, avoiding surprises. For example, the CAFE vehicle emissions standards have been a stabilising force for the car industry. Fleet efficiency standards similarly give targets to which the industry has to aspire. If those were to be abandoned after tens of billions had been spent, the industry would be rightly angry. I have no inside track on Exxon's dialogue about energy transitions. In common with all majors, it is seeking gas where it can as this looks to be the transitional fuel of the mid-century. It has been experimenting with electricity sales for two decades, and knowing how to operate in the electricity market is essential to renewables, almost all of which upgrade low value energy sources into electricity. Its disadvantage is its US focus, because energy demand growth will be concentrated in emerging markets for the next forty years. The old industrial countries are less and less interesting to energy companies, as a result of intense regulation coupled to intense regulatory uncertainty, coupled to low to reducing demand growth. How to find desirable ways to deliver energy to emerging economies is a conundrum that nobody has answered. Paris was, though and to some extent, a step in the right direction.