We are talking about this on @TheEnergyGang important article on Thursday. I would love your thoughts? Like Exxon and the other oil companies, I wonder if all of us would have done something different if we were in their shoes. https://twitter.com/maxinejoselow/status/1320694685296373761

The next article from @maxinejoselow was even more amazing on sexism at GM: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-woman-warned-gm-about-warming-but-men-didnt-listen/

What I would love your help with is whether the choices of private companies were inevitable. These companies made amazing amounts of money on SUVs and Pickup trucks, quite a turn around from the 1980s when they were suffering from competition from foreign imports.

To be clear, there is never any excuse for sexism. That article stands on its own and while norms were different, it doesn't really excuse not elevating your best people. I am talking more about the corporate response to the truth about climate change.

What do we all expect from oil companies and automakers? Aren't they really just subject to government regulation? Government didn't want to regulate them. CAFE didn't really go up for years. Remember @BillClinton ran on raising CAFE and then chickened out for R&D instead.

Oil prices hit an all time low in 1999. Gasoline prices hit $1/gallon again. Remember in California there was a requirement of 2% of all car sales needing to be EVs. But there was no @Tesla, just an #EV1 from GM.

"California is backing away from a requirement that within two years 2 percent of all cars sold in the state be electrically powered. The move raises questions about similar mandates in New York and Massachusetts, both of which had pledged to follow California's lead." - NYT 1995

So in this example, policy was tried and failed. Certainly the automakers were against the policy from the start and tried to sabotage it, but people just didn't really want the EVs that were available during that time period.

I get the demonizing of these companies, but I simply am not sure that I would have something different in the 1970s and 1980s. I did try to do something different @bp_plc in 2003 and that made sense because the technology was ready.

They certainly deserve reprimand for the decades of disinformation, but I am trying to figure out if anyone was really any better. Tobacco, recycling, chemicals, how many others?

Maybe we all believe that capitalism works differently. I certainly have tried to model that behavior -- giving up potential shareholder profits and my own compensation for the good of all of my stakeholders. But do I expect those rules for everyone in business?

I think what I am ultimately saying, is that I am not that comfortable with cancel culture. I don't like what many of these corporate said and did in the past, but judging them on today's standards seems not quite right. But I understand, they certainly have ruined our planet.