ExxonannouncedWednesday that a third newfangled member has been appoint to the companionship ’s board , follow a hebdomad of vote counting after the company was catch by surprise by ashareholder insurrectionlast calendar week led by activist investor Engine No . 1 . The new board member , Alexander “ Andy ” Karsner , currentlyworks as a “ Space Cowboy ” for X , Alphabet ’s famous moonshot company . Not whole sure what a “ Space Cowboy ” does , but it sounds exciting !
The othertwo Engine No . 1 circuit board membersare honorable newsworthiness only because Exxon has been so bad at managing its finances and making any strides at all towards thinking about a low - C future . While you may hear “ activistic investor ” and conjure up a sure Greenpeace - y paradigm , both the other raw picks , Gregory Goff and Kaisa Hietala , mostly have experience working with oil and gas company . ( Goff , in particular , seems stanchly in the camp of keeping the fogey fuel status quo and once apparentlyannounced“I am the best oil executive director in the world ” to a bunch of Wall Street character gather at a chophouse . )
Compared to these two , Karsner definitely has bona fides that make us palpate a niggling more promising about Exxon ’s future tense . While being a “ Space Cowboy ” ( “ Senior Strategist ” come out to be his prescribed title at X ) is one of his current fishgig , Karsner forge as the helper escritoire for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during the last years of George W. Bush administration . He went on to work on a bunch of Silicon Valley and vim worldly concern - adjacent ventures , include forming the energy chemical group at Emerson Collective , Laurene Powell Jobs ’s half - nonprofit , half - venture capital engine . Karsner was a principal negotiator at external mood lecture in Bali in 2007 and served on the board of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as well as the board of Conservation International . Thomas Friedman , the New York Times columnist who is a Big Climate Guy , apparently knows Karsner , andwrote some glow extolment of himin his pillar on the Exxon suffrage , calling him ” tough as nails and green as weed . ” All sounds great !
Photo: Richard Drew (AP)
Per Karsner’sLinkedIn(which is impressively , and appropriately , exhausting ) , he was also a director and appendage of the control board at the Gas Technology Institute for eight long time ; he also was a phallus of the National Petroleum Institute between 2009 and 2018 . It ’s clear Karsner has spent a lot of time make for with crude and gas companies . Since he ’s joining the board of Exxon , this is admittedly a good point to have on a resume , but it ’s also a sign he ’s not getting invited to an Extinction Rebellion group meeting anytime soon .
speculation capitalist ( or , if you ’d care , Space Cowboys ) like Karsner have atendency to put gunstock in exciting new technologiesand ideas like carbon paper seizure . Friedman , ever the techno - optimist , notes that Karsner and the other Engine No . 1 - backed board members require Exxon to become a “ more diversified energy ship’s company . That means not only invest more in future carbon capture , battery , and other renewables , but also using its engineering prowess to invent that future — while it still has an income stream from oil and gas . ”
It is worth note , though , that many of X ’s publicly - declare moonshot renewable projects take and originate during Karsner ’s tenure , like makingwind projects out of kitesorfuel out of brine , have failed ; Wiredreportsthat the company “ once in earnest debated laying a gargantuan copper closed chain around the North Pole to generate electricity from the Earth ’s magnetic field . ”
There are also a plethora of dispirited - technical school strategies like just stopping oil colour and accelerator exploration that could set out us on that way of life ASAP . And romanticize technofixes ignores the fact that a lot of technology needed to decarbonize the human beings already exists , we just need a regulatory structure that prioritise instal it rather than trusting Big Oil to save up us .
Exxon , if you ’ll recall , lagsfar behind even other oil companiesin induct in renewables or making plan to lower emission . It ’s hard to have faith a company that so furiously put energy into deny clime skill for decades and has stubbornly indicated it will keep up new geographic expedition to suddenly heed the siren call of a grim - carbon paper hereafter .
The good affair for the planet would be if Exxon just died , not transmute into a techno - futuristic capitalist sozzled dream . That ’s not going to materialize anytime presently , so on some level at least , I ’m glad Karsner is coming aboard . It remains to be watch what he and the other three members are expire to do with their prison term there , and if a Space Cowboy can rein in one of the world ’s biggest defiler .
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