Strange Bedfellows Unite to Pressure Oil Giants

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Strange Bedfellows Unite to Pressure Oil Giants
by Alison Raphael


WASHINGTON - Americans — from nonprofit groups to the Rockefeller family — are starting to fight back against the petroleum industry, which is earning record profits as consumers face spiraling gas prices.

Co-Op America, with around 70,000 members, has launched a campaign aimed at forcing ExxonMobil to invest more of its profits into exploring alternative energy sources, while another group seeks to change the priorities of the powerful American Petroleum Institute.

Ahead of this month’s ExxonMobil stockholders meeting, 66 of 78 adult heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded the company’s predecessor, Standard Oil, supported four resolutions aimed at making the oil giant hew a more environmentally friendly and forward-looking line.

Exxon saw a record $40.6 billion profit in 2007, and is headed in the same direction for 2008, earning over $10 billion during the first quarter. It plans to spend $25 billion on research and exploration of carbon-based fuels.

“We think a few of those billions should go towards looking to the future and the kind of energy we might need,” Neva Rockefeller Godwin, an economist and great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, stated at a May 1 press conference.

The unlikely alliance that sprung up to grab the attention of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at the May shareholder meeting also includes other institutional investors, such as state pension funds in California and Connecticut whose managers fear that the company’s refusal to look beyond carbon fuels could lead to its downfall.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/15/8976/