Why big oil and gas firms might want the Paris agreement to survive

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ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods has urged president-elect Donald Trump to not take the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change. “We need a global system for managing emissions”, he said in an interview at the annual UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Though Woods’ words were unusually high profile and direct, some of his equivalents at rival fossil fuel firms have expressed similar sentiments.

On the face of it, big oil and gas firms – and ExxonMobil is one of the very biggest – are a surprise proponent of the Paris agreement, which seeks to defend ambitious targets on climate change. After all, these are the very organisations that have financially benefited from contributing to the crisis, and that fought for decades to kill the climate agenda. It’s hard to believe they’re now working for its survival.

Read more in The Conversation here

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