DealBook Online Summit: Darren Woods of Exxon on the Energy Transition

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Darren W. Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, made the case for his company to play a role in helping the global economy transition to clean energy at the DealBook Online Summit on Wednesday.

“There are a lot of sectors of the economy which are critical to supporting modern life that aren’t easy to decarbonize, where we don’t have good solution,” Mr. Woods said in an interview with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Frankly, that’s where I think a company like Exxon Mobil can bring value,” he said, by finding ways to “bridge that gap between what’s needed today and what we want for tomorrow.”

Mr. Woods said he personally began to focus on climate change when he moved into an investor relations role at Exxon in 2001. “That became a much more explicit part of the job and the thinking,” he said.

As for the company’s public positioning on climate change, Mr. Woods argued it has been “pretty consistent” with the general understanding of the scientific community. He defended a 2000 advertisement that Exxon ran in The New York Times titled “Unsettled Science,” which said, among other things, that it was “impossible for scientists to attribute the recent small surface temperature increase to human causes.”

“If you read that article in its entirety and you to get to the bottom of it, basically it says enough is known today for companies and governments and people to start making changes to try to address the risk of climate change,” Mr. Woods said. He acknowledged, though, the headline “might be something that people can talk about and use as an example.” Exxon was one of the companies named in a congressional inquiry in September about climate disinformation, after a secret recording made public in July exposed an Exxon official saying that it used “shadow groups” to fight climate science.

Earlier this year, Exxon lost a bruising battle with Engine No. 1, an activist investor that pushed Exxon to do more to address climate change and won three board seats at the oil giant in a shareholder vote. Mr. Woods said the rebuke came amid “a confluence of events.” These included investors already questioning its strategy and the pandemic, “when the bottom dropped out of the market.”

Now, rapidly rising oil prices have bolstered Exxon’s fortunes. Some market watchers, including Blackstone’s chief executive, Stephen A. Schwarzman, have said rising prices are driven by the economy moving too quickly away from fossil fuels. Others believe price increases are a cyclical phenomenon that will eventually reverse. Mr. Woods said that the two factors are “one in the same.”

“Ultimately, moving from what is a very efficient and effective energy systems to something new, it’s going to carry a cost,” he said of the shift from fossil fuels to greener energy sources. “And the question is: Can we get that cost down?”

General Motors made more than 10 times as many cars as Tesla last year, and significantly more profit. Yet Tesla has a market value of about $1 trillion, more than 10 times that of G.M.

At the DealBook Online Summit on Wednesday, G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, said that didn’t bother her. She said she was confident that G.M. would eventually be rewarded in the stock market for its investment in electric vehicles.

“General Motors is so undervalued as we start this wonderful period we’re in because we invested over three, four years ago in electric vehicles,” Ms. Barra said.

Investors’ attraction to companies focused on electric vehicles was demonstrated anew on Wednesday when shares in Rivian — whose production so far is paltry — began trading at a valuation higher than G.M.’s.

G.M. is in the midst of a plan to spend $35 billion from 2020 to 2025 on electric vehicles and self-driving technology. The company plans to develop 20 new electric models for the United States market, overhaul its factories to churn them out, and produce battery packs in high volumes with its partner LG Electronics.

“We’ll have our own battery plant up and running next year,” she said. “So I’m excited to get all these vehicles out. I see this as a huge opportunity for General Motors to capture significantly more value.”

She noted that G.M. aimed to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. “We are full steam ahead,” she said. “We are full E.V. ahead.”

The first of the new generation of electric models will be a GMC Hummer pickup truck — Ms. Barra said she was on the list to buy one — as well as a Cadillac Lyriq, an electric sport utility vehicle that is next in the pipeline.

“I’m waiting for my Hummer,” she said. “I managed to get my name on the list.”

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I think as an international community with all of the different actors involved, governments, companies, international organizations, we have fallen short of the mark when it comes to distribution and especially when it comes to equitable distribution. How can it be that in the United States and Europe, we have vaccination rates that on average are probably somewhere around 60 percent? In Africa, it’s under 14 percent. That’s not only wrong, it’s a huge problem because we know this, we keep repeating it. But it’s important to remember this, as long as the virus is replicating somewhere, it’s going to be mutating.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday called for rich countries, pharmaceutical companies and others to “step up” to get the coronavirus vaccine to areas of the world that haven’t received many doses.

“How can it be that in the United States and Europe we have vaccination rates that on average are probably somewhere around 60 percent? In Africa, it is under 14 percent,” Mr. Blinken told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Online Summit. “It’s not only wrong. It’s a huge problem.”

He pointed the blame, at least partially, on pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer, that produce coronavirus vaccines. “They have performed miracles,” Mr. Blinken said. “When it comes to distribution, with all the different actors involved — governments, companies, international organizations — we have fallen short of the mark.”

Mr. Blinken’s statement came on the same day as the United States announced a deal with Johnson & Johnson to distribute more doses of its vaccine to lower-income countries, including many in Africa. As part of that effort, Mr. Blinken announced the launch of a new tracker that makes it easier to see where vaccine doses are distributed.

Mr. Blinken also said vaccine distribution could have benefited if pharmaceutical companies had shared their intellectual property, allowing the vaccine to be manufactured in other parts of the world. This week, The New York Times reported that Moderna and the U.S. government are in a dispute over who should own the patent underlying its vaccine, which stemmed from a four-year partnership between the company and the National Institutes of Health. “I think it is critical that we do that for the next time,” said Mr. Blinken. “We have to go from, in effect, loaner-ship to ownership, so that countries around the world have the capacity to produce what’s needed on a regional basis.”

On Tuesday, Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, also speaking at the DealBook Online Summit, said that it was unfair to blame his company for the vaccine’s uneven distribution. Bourla said Pfizer had made vaccine doses available to any nation that wanted them, but rich nations had been quicker to put in orders.

Nonetheless, Mr. Bourla said that he and Pfizer had learned lessons from the distribution of the vaccine. For the company’s antiviral pill to treat Covid-19, called Paxlovid, Pfizer is working on a system that isn’t just first-come, first-served, Mr. Bourla said, adding that the company hasn’t finalized its allocation strategy.

As the head of Citadel, the huge financial trading firm, Kenneth C. Griffin is deeply immersed in the markets. And what he worries about the most, he said at the DealBook Online Summit on Wednesday, is the effect that rising prices are having on markets and the economy.

On the same day that the latest inflation data showed prices rising 6.2 percent in October — the fastest pace since 1990 — Mr. Griffin said rising prices were no longer something that could be ignored. “The theory that this is transitory is starting to get long in the tooth,” he said.

That is also affecting the stock markets, which by Mr. Griffin’s reckoning have become “frothy,” primed to overreact, particularly in stocks like Tesla that have experienced high volatility.

“We are seeing a market that is showing signs of real frothiness, and we’ve got some pretty significant stock price moves on relatively small events,” he said. “I worry about that.”

That, he said, will weigh heavily on the Federal Reserve as it considers when to begin raising interest rates to combat inflation, and how quickly. Until now, he said, policymakers have been “far too generous in their stimulus” policies. “They have not been targeted enough,” he said

Other things on Mr. Griffin’s mind:

• The financier defended payment for order flow, in which market makers — such as Citadel Securities — pay online brokerages like Robinhood for the right to process their customers’ trades. While the practice has been criticized for potentially leading to conflicts of interest, Mr. Griffin said it has helped lead to lower trading costs for individual traders and opposed potential new regulations. “Are we going to go back to re-regulated markets and taking back the competition that has allowed Americans to save so much money when trading?” Doing so, he argued, would be “a tragedy.”

• Mr. Griffin, a billionaire, opposed raising taxes, saying it would discourage innovation in America, citing Tesla’s Elon Musk as an example. “We don’t want tax policy to drive great entrepreneurs like Elon out of their seats,” he said.

• He professed skepticism about the cryptocurrency industry’s promises, such as an ability to improve how we pay for things. “People are very focused in a world of new ideas and new creations. I love that part of America,” he said. “I worry that some of this passion has been misplaced when it comes cryptocurrencies.”

On Day 2 of the DealBook Online Summit, more leaders in business, policy and culture are set to speak with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin about consequential issues, from American foreign relations to the prospects for electric cars and how to fight misinformation. To catch up on the news from Day 1, browse our coverage here.

Here is today’s lineup (all times Eastern):

10:30 a.m.-11 a.m.

Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State

The nation’s top diplomat on what the “Biden doctrine” of foreign affairs means for America abroad.

11 a.m.-11:30 a.m.

Ken Griffin of Citadel

The billionaire founder of a hedge fund giant on the shifting market landscape, meme stocks and more.

11:30 a.m.-12 P.m.

Mary Barra of General Motors

The veteran auto executive (and incoming head of the Business Roundtable) on her company’s road map for electric vehicles.

12 P.m.-12:30 P.m.

Darren Woods of Exxon Mobil

The head of the country’s biggest oil producer defends his company’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

2 P.m.-2:30 P.m.

Dax Shepard and Monica Padman of the “Armchair Expert” podcast

The tables are turned on two accomplished interviewers, who explain the changing ways that stories are being told in the media today.

3 P.m.-3:30 P.m.

Maria Ressa of Rappler

The winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and veteran journalist on standing up to strongmen — and Big Tech.