Global warming is Exxon’s fault? The Stop Esso campaign, a coproduction of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, doesn’t go that far. But it assigns Exxon part of the blame for the decision by U.S. President George W. Bush not to sign the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming, which called on industrialized nations to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Exxon has run advertisements criticizing the Kyoto accord, and the Stop Esso campaign says people connected to the company contributed more than $1 million to Bush’s Republicans during American elections last year. Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tindale singles out Exxon’s proprietors as “the world’s No. 1 global-warming villains.” Says campaign spokesman Rob Gueterbock: “They’re still denying a link between their fuels and global warming. That’s like the position that the tobacco industry was in a few decades ago, denying that their product led to cancer.”
The attack on Exxon–and Bush–is spreading. “There is a lot of anger in Europe about the way Bush said ’no’ unilaterally and stuck up two fingers to the rest of the world,” says Friends of the Earth’s Roger Higman. “Esso is seen to be one of the groups most responsible for his policy.” Last week 50 members of the British Parliament signed on in support of the Esso boycott. In Strasbourg, members of the European Parliament joined the campaign. “We are encouraging people to use the market, their purchasing power… to try and get action on climate change,” says Sarah Ludford, a British Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament. “I feel it is an entirely legitimate exercise to encourage citizens to boycott Exxon or Esso.”
So far, Exxon wasn’t backing down. “President Bush’s decision on Kyoto has opened the way for debate on more effective ways than Kyoto to address the challenge of climate change,” said an Esso statement. “The call for a boycott of Esso service stations can only be counterproductive,” the company said, warning that independent retailers could be hurt. Exxon maintains that carbon-dioxide emissions can best be reduced by new technologies, not by Kyoto’s officially mandated curbs. It also complains that Kyoto’s solutions are too expensive, imposing “significant economic costs on the developed world.”
One reason Brits are so upset is that their own oil companies take a different line. In recent years, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch/Shell, both of which support Kyoto, withdrew from membership in the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group opposed to the agreement. Both companies have shown a commitment to renewable energy sources; they continue to invest in solar power–something Exxon hasn’t done since the 1980s. And GCC spokesman Frank Maisano says European companies could not behave like their American counterparts even if they wanted to. “There are the differences in the American and European life-styles, as well as the different ways they work with governments,” he says. “European companies tend to go along with what the government has to say. American companies, when they don’t like something, stand up and shout about it.”
In Europe, environmentalists shout back, sometimes to great effect. In 1995, a Greenpeace-led campaign against Shell forced the company to drop plans to scuttle Brent Spar, a giant disused oil rig, in the North Sea. Global warming is a much bigger issue, and the Stop Esso campaigners are prepared for a long fight. “We’re talking years, not months,” says Gueterbock. The campaign’s next target: Esso’s industrial customers. The global talks on climate change, which broke down last fall, will resume in Bonn in July. If the activists have their way, the weather will be stormy.
