An Open Response to Exxon's Rex Tillerson

“What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson asked the attendees of his company’s annual meeting on Wednesday, May 29, 2013. Tillerson went on to explain that the world’s two billion poor need fossil fuels in order to lift themselves out of poverty. 

Maybe Tillerson is genuinely concerned about the plight of the downtrodden, I don’t know. But I do know this:  Exxon raked in 41 billion dollars in profit selling fossil fuels last year. That’s a lot of zeroes. To get a sense of just how much money that is, stand up and spread your arms as wide as you can. Now say, “What am I doing? This has nothing to do with 41 billion dollars” and sit back down.

Is it possible that perhaps the humanity that Tillerson and his company are most concerned about helping are their shareholders? In his equation, on one hand there’s the planet and on the other – 41 billion dollars. That’s the logic of a Bond villain.

Unfortunately, it’s an all too pervasive logic in corporate America, this notion that a company’s sole responsibility is to its shareholders. Rather than swim against the tide, let’s drift along with it:

-          Shareholders are people

-          People live in communities

-          Communities are located in or near cities

-          Cities are in counties

-          Counties are parts of states

-          50 states make up our country

-          Almost 200 countries cover the planet

-          We all share one planet

Somewhere along the way our industrial titans seem to have forgotten the interconnectedness of it all.  Profit and good citizenship are not mutually exclusive, and neither are profit and environmental stewardship. What’s best for the shareholders inevitably is what’s best for the community, city, county, state, etc. Paying taxes and a living wage, keeping the air and the water clean, investing in infrastructure and long-term sustainable goals – that’s all stuff that ensures that people remain around and able to by your products.  It ain’t rocket science.

This is not a call for regulation, nor is it a condemnation of free market capitalism. Really this is nothing more than a simple observation that we -- the people, the shareholders, humanity -- are suffering due to a gross lack of basic ethics in the boardroom. We need our movers and shakers to start behaving like human beings rather than Bond characters.

So what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers? I don’t know, Rex, you tell me.