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Today’s focus is all about the power of oil lobbying as ExxonMobil is ramping up its fight against the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence law, warning it will push businesses out of Europe.
The directive, adopted last year, forces companies to address human rights and environmental issues in their supply chains or face fines of at least 5% of global turnover.
Brussels has proposed easing the rules after pushback from businesses and leaders in France and Germany.
But CEO Darren Woods says that’s not enough and that he wants the law scrapped.
He’s raised the issue with United States President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials, who’ve flagged the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive, or CSDDD, in trade talks with the EU, adding to tensions between Washington and Brussels.
“We have slowly been pulling out of Europe,” Woods said, noting that the oil producer has sold, shut down or exited nearly 19 operations due to what he said was red tape impeding business.
“This is another piece of legislation that would accelerate that incentive, or warrant businesses to reduce their activity in Europe.”
The European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Exxon is pausing €100 million in European plastics recycling investments, saying draft EU rules on recycled content discriminate against using existing petrochemicals sites versus standalone facilities.
At issue is a draft law to calculate the recycled content based on the mass of waste going into the system and the mass of the output.
ExxonMobil says it significantly favours standalone technologies where the path from plastic waste to output is clearer and penalises more complex integrated facilities into which fossil feedstocks are fed.
WHAT TO WATCH​
NUMBER OF THE WEEK
$1.78 billion
That’s the price that rising temperatures are costing Bangladesh, with heat-related illnesses and productivity losses costing the economy that amount – about 0.4% of GDP – in 2024, according to a World Bank report.
CLIMATE LENS
This summer was Spain’s hottest since records began in 1961. It was 2.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1991-2020 average and surpassed the previous warmest summer recorded in 2022 by 0.1 degrees, state weather agency AEMET said.
Countries across the world have experienced record-breaking heat in recent years as global warming accelerates. Intense heat helped fan wildfires that burned through a record 1.03 million hectares across the European Union, according to data by the EU’s European Forest Fire Information System.