foundation. she began her police officer picking cotton, like this old 1950 stuff in the cotton field and was the fifth member of a nine- -- had a big family. nine children. and she worked her way out of the cotton fields through literacy, began writing books. her hispanic coworkers, david murray says people left the cotton fields and the -- fruit-pickers because the chicanos were must faster. but she received -- sat san jose university and i wanted to say her fellow hispanic workers taught her spanish, and so she received a ma in spanish at san jose university.

her most famous book is called "marked by fire." and she has received the national book award, and wrote a number of children's books, and i was a contributor to her book about brown vs. board of education. the decision that came down ending school segregation. so, she was a very valued member of our organization and lived a long and productive life, and produced a number of books. so we're really going to miss her. we have lost three members of our organization since its inception. we mentioned andrew hope, who is very valued member of the organization. bob kelly, a great writer, sort

of like the langston hughes of the irish-american renaissance, who had his hands in all different communities. i wrote a novel called, "like canada" which i -- he said i know those people. so this culminated in a column my wife and i receiving from the tribe, and george carroll thomas. so, we all have lost members and are admitting new members that you mentioned. marlin james, and also want to mention our president, ali, who wrote the first major palestinian american play called "domestic crusaders" which began in my classroom at the university of california berkeley with 20 pages. when he graduated we said we're not finished with you. and in two years they produced

the classic known all over the world. he is the president of the organization and now is a regular at huffington post, and a piece on islam for the huffington post, and filipe herrera is the united states poet laureate so we have a very good group here, so we're going to miss joyce and we will be sure to protect her or preserve her legacy. [applause] >> so, again, before we depart for the reception, i just want to thank everyone for being so generous to bring yourselves to this space and celebration of the american book award, our winners this year and the before columbus foundation.

so, thank you, for sharing your time with us this afternoon. and, again, for the winners of the award, if you could please join me on stage, tennessee reed would like to take some photographs of you as a group. if you like. you feel like carrying it? [inaudible conversations] >> again, thank you. tennessee, i'm going to turn it over to you. you're the director now. you let folks now. okay. thank you. >> right now on booktv from 2012, author steve coll reports on ex-so son mobile's influence in foreign affairs and bringous this program in light of president-elect's trumps nomination of exxonmobil chairman and crowe rex tillerson to be secretary of state. >> hi, steve.

thank you for joining us at ward ward ward today and congratulations on what is quite an achievement. really enjoyed the book. it read like a novel. like nonfiction in places which i'm sure that as a writer you encountered some of that feeling as well. know as a reporter who has dealt with exxonmobil a good chunk of her career, how difficult it probably was to probe this company. so let's start there. why exxonmobil? how did you come to this subject? i know you were at getty oil in your career. why this company and how did it differ from your other subjects, like the bin ladens. >> guest: and it's an interesting -- to me it was an interesting journey because i started out as a business reporter on wall street when i was very young, and then i went abroad and worked more on international subjects, and after 9/11 i wrote about the

origin of the philadelphia attacks and -- 9/11 attacks and 20 years of american covert policy in afghanistan, and then after that was over i thought i want to keep writing about america and the world after 9/11. this sort of asymmetric strange groping that we had as a country to understand what the attacks were about what, they men to the united states, what our relationship with the middle east was and that led me to the bin ladens, a book intended to be about saud arabia and how complicated for the general russia of oil boomers that osama belongs to, could come of aim in the '70s when the kingdom was awash in wealth ask all had to buy identities in the world, and one of. the became a know notorious teat and tee thees moved to florida. that interested me itch wanted to write about oil and american power in the post 9/11 context. and so i started out actually

the project didn't again as a book about exxonmobil. began bass a book about oil and geopolitics. i wanted to take the prize, the back by urgen that inspired me, and update it. i sort of thought of the prize as a great work of nonfiction about the era of oil that was an era of expansion and dover discoveriy, and i want ode to write a book about global oil in the era of limits and constraints. so i started on the open framework and got six or eight mongooses into the research and i thought i need a subject, company, and once i came to that conclusion, then for an american audience i thought exxon -- exxonmobil was a choice. they were forced upon me in my thinking as a subject because i didn't know how closed they

were, how rick to report on. thought they would be a normal corporation and i also didn't understand that much about dis -- >> during the reporting the bp horizon was happening. did you think you picked the wrong company. >> guest: i had mixed feelings there must by a term for what journalists feel when other people suffer and you have an ending on your book. it wasn't exxonmobil's responsibility it did provide a kind of context to all bookend for the valdez spill which is an origin story for exxonmobil. a story they tell themselves, the story that they were scared straight by the valdez and reformed themselves in who they are, traces to the reforms that

started with that accident. so i thought the horizon -- deep water horizon accident could be a book end. when i was wrestling how to make the book -- i considered a dual narrative of exxonmobil and bp, my regret of deep water horizon i thought i should have done that but it would have been too much reporting. i had to concentrate on one corporation. >> host: targeting the become out with valdez and to be honest make it new. and then ending with the deep water horizon disaster in the gulf of mexico in april 2010. as a person that really delved into -- read a lot of the transcriptions from the exxon valdez incident. i did you see any parallels? i didn't cover valdez. i was young then. i did cover deep water horizon, and you're description of valdez

and exxon's response to it i saw -- almost seemed like bt took a page out of their play book. did you see that as you were seeing the coverage of bt? >> guest: definitely. definitely parallels. you could probably list even more than come to my behind but a few are that in the decade running up to valdez there are warning signs that exxon was not operating in a consistent manner in a way that would give you the highest possible reassurance that such a catastrophic accident could not take place. in enact in the decade before the valdez exxon caught 80,000 out of 180,000 employees. they re-organized their entire safety department, entire environmental depth, and at the fact that a tanker captain with a drinking problem, who had dui arrests was still in his job, making more than $100,000 a year in $1,989,

that's not the exxonmobil you expect today. so there were a series of warning signs that culminated in the accident. same with bp. i had the impression from the industry that bp's record as a weak operator and the texas city plant, osha record, the fact they basically had a culture and a strategy that emphasized financial engineering at the expense of operating discipline was pretty well known in at the industry and i came to the conclusion after talking to people for three or four years, if you had called up people in the oil industry on the morning of deep water horizon and said the following thing happened, whoa who do you think was operating that platformor, ha would have gotten the majority for bt. so that was there. the second parallel was the preparation for actually mitigating the disaster. in both cases there were a lot of paper plans saying we can

handle this and then the reality was they arnott able to do so. and then the kind of public relations narrative and learning howl to deal with all of the communities and traumas. i think probably bp had the benefit of 20 years of learning about corporate crisis management that exxon -- in those days, '89, the whole philosophy how you communicate and telling people you'll make it right. anyway. >> host: i think the aftermag strike mess more than what happened before. as recorder after the deep water horizon, bp gobbled up every expert on any kind of -- couldn't find a blowout expert to save your life. wasn't on bp's payroll. i think the control that

emanates through the book, i think emanated after bp in terms of controlling the message, controlling access to people independently, talk to reporters about what happened, and very technical subject, again. so you go everywhere in this book. you globe trot. and in the -- you also tackle numerous environmental issues, from global warm to the spill at sea by a tanker to leaky underground storage tanks, logses the bp calls them, and i covered in any early career in upstate firework, all with connections to the oil company because it's integrated and controlled oil from cradle to grave. how did you pick out then neck dotes, a company that goes back to standard oil days.

there's a treasure trove and it's difficult to pick out anecdotes. >> guest: i started out with a map. once i chose exxonmobil as a subject i basically leaked at the map where through own oil and gas and asked myself as a reporter, what kind of world is this? why are there they? and then -- why are they there. then i became interested in traveling across the map. they're a closed subject. they were not excited to learn i was doing this book. they didn't volunteer to be written about. they handled my inquiries in a professional way but they didn't really cooperate very much. i think maybe they would that relative to some projects they cooperated more than usual, but from the spiff perspective of the ambition of the book, everything they offered what limited. so had to go outside-in and i statedded with the map. this first year i traveled a

fair amount into the field where they operated, tried to understand their role in the world, sense of themselves as an independent, sovereign, how they operate on the ground, why are they in thews nighted countries, learn about replacement challenges, why equity oil in weak states evolved as part of their portfolioow and so on. then i came back to the united states expect i had a pretty good first draft sense of how they operate abroad but i need to concentrate on their z washington strategy and lobbying and political strategy. i then turned to the cools you use as a reporter to go outside-in, which is basically lawsuits lawsuits and disslows sures. filed free of information act for -- for the american work i looked at the lobbying. and i said, what are fallates

and in the summer of 2008 they were all over the single. it was the data that said there's goes to be something here, and then just to finish, on the lawsuit, they get sued by everybody over everything so it's a great tool of reporting to be able to look at civil litigation because in those cases, records and testimony are produced, even effect odd 'mobile's policy never to give interview. their executives have to testify i they choose to contest lawsuits. so they were truck struck to all stories and one i found was a gasoline spill in maryland where i realized, searching the litigation record, started with mtb and then fought my way down and finally realized there was huge trial record around what had been one of the largest gasoline spills in an area that dependes own fresh ground water supplies, through aquifers so a

dangerous spill. it had bon to trial and trial was over ask there was a massive record of testimony from exxonmobil executives and documents i went straight into the re-telling and downstream division of exxonmobil through the trial record in a way i never could have done through interviewing. opportunistic is the short answer. you just keep looking on the map and then see way to tell the story. >> host: what is interesting is despite how broad they are in terms of geography and subject matter, the lesson, i think, is the same, over and over again, which is -- i think it also comportses with the public's perception of exxon, the is which is company that is ridge ed, all powerful, that you don't want to mess with. so anything that you came across surprise you or kind of sit outside of the narrative? seems to me the book -- all the

stories come back to that in different ways. each one has a different kind of take on it but in the sum of its parts is the image of the company that comports with what everybody in their gut feels. >> guest: they are who they are and the reason that it's true across settings that the same kind of decisionmaking and the same kind of culture and insulatorrity, rigidity, they might say, focus, consistency, is present in indonesia and equatorial begin any and suburban maryland and the washington offices because they have constructed a global system, and global policies that are so unified and codified and distributed down all of their channels of operation, that i think more than any corporation i've ever encounters as a journalist, everyone who works there gets up in the morning and is read offering of the same

playbook. almost like a military operation or a sports team that is exceptionally well organized around the same playbook and they're self-conscious about the military metaphor. everyone is at the top grew up together. if you took the top 100 publicly traded corporations in the united states and you chose the top 40 jobs at the corporations and mooped who the people were you i would fine there would be significant numb of people who came from a come beating come, late rally, or came from another industry as a marketing specialist and okay. if we reforming ideas. so most corporations are informed by the top from some odd perspective. in exxonmobil, everybody comes up from college, graduate school, if you selected for management tracking you grow up together over 30 or 40 years iter it's like the marine corps you don't become a general

without having a successful career at ibm and then decide to wear two stars on sour your shoulders so whether it's a lawsuit in venezuela or civil war in indonesia or gasoline pill maryland, the stories all end the same way. >> host: right. >> guest: forceing their will. >> host: late in book, as a person that's covered energy and environment for as long is a have, this surprised me. you get into hydraulic frack fracturing which is all over the news. the interiores going to put out some rules for fracking on public lands. and you almost -- and you almost make the case that the corporate philosophy gave them a blind spot when it came to hydraulic fracturing. even more surprising because you make it an amazing point and i actually remember this, that rex

tillerson, as a young engineer at the company, actually was using the technique, and so do you think in that one case in the fracking case that corporate philosophy of let's manage our risks, make sure we make a certain return on what we do hinder them from tapping into this now huge gas boom, huge economic opportunity in the country with natural gas. >> guest: they're slow but often slow and then decisive. so they get to places late and then buy their way in, that's their pattern. never had a great reputation this greatest oil and gas discoverers. i'm shower they wins and a story they tell themselves about their successes in exploration but -- they have some but by and large, their strength is financial and operating strength so more cash than anybody else, more discipline about choosing opportunities and generally if they fail to discover something

for themselves they can buy it. that's what they did with fracking. they trade to have a strategy, and it looked like a real opportunity, and they were going out and doing the kind of land gains and buying up leases, putting it together one patch at a time and trying to build something. but at their scale they need teed come in big. one thing that is interesting to me about fracking story -- now they're the largest producer of unconventional -- >> host: of course, knife you have $40 billion you can lay down you're the largest of almost anything. what is interesting -- i wonder what you think because i think of climate as a challenge of climate legislation, carbon pricing as an analogous tragic

strategic challenge where they dealt with resistance to their investment and thinking with a aaggressive strategy. frack is it not just a physical challenge, engineering challenge, it's a political challenges because they're an enormous amount of anxiety about these fracking techniques and environmental consequencees, land use cob -- consequences. unknowns, are you going to cause earthquakes. if exxonmobil becomes the poster child of a rigid, very corporate, very kind of stiff and profit-driven approach to these challenges, then they may strategically have a problem over time. can they actually adapt themselves to the kind of trust-building and political coalition build that will prove

durable or take the systems approach, our way or the highway, and sort of end up defeating themselves ins' respect in they could end up with a tougher public response to fracking than they would otherwise get if they were -- >> host: will they align themselves with the other companies that are doing it? have in some cases that they're the odd man out. they're kind of pursuing what they want to pursue and doing it their way and take nothing punches and make nothing excuses for it, which brings me -- i had a conversation this morning with allen jeffreys, you know the name way. the chief inspection for exxonmobil. i asked him about the book, and i want to get reaction to his reaction from you, which i think you'll find very exxonmobil exxonmobilesque. said how we see the book is telling the story of exxonmobil's commitment to safety and community.

it may not be a popular or fashionable, these conservative approaches, but we think these are good qualities of a company of this type. so i said to allen, that's how we are and take it. and he's like, that's what wore saying. so, obviously that does not surprise you in the course of this book. they have read it. i heard people who have poured through the book. what's your response. >> guest: i appreciate that he is dealing with it in profession al way. they basically -- about immediate use and journalist is, about political opposition, environmental groups, they basically stay in their channel and that's what he's doing. he's saying we are who we are. that's essentially their strategic position. sometimes we are who we are feels like a defensive crouch and that bees to the fracking question. can you really be -- have the sort of strengths of their operating system, which are

considerable. they're safety issue driven, focused on operating excellence and so forth. if we were co-dictators of sand and wanted someone to develop our oil, we wands the project to come on time, on budget and get paid, we would entertain their power point presentation because they have a record of project management that is good. where they get into trouble is where the extrapolate the operating systems into political affairs, the human factor -- >> host: things -- >> guest: are made up of communal, and social change, and their own record, for example, as a social entity themselves as a corporation on the promotion of women, on diversity, on responding to the kind of world that we live in, it's not great. he can say that these conservative values are out of fashion but we think they're

powerful. that's fine if you're talking about causing your team on safety at the workplace but they can really succeed with the strategy in a world where they're so closed to the changing social makeup of -- who is the educated work force in united states anymore? mostly women, it's more and more diverse, and if you work at exxonmobil and go home to your family thanksgiving dinner and you say, work at exxonmobil, and halve your cousins suck in their breath in disdain or worry, that's not a winning strategy over 30 years either. so, somehow this -- something has to give, i think. i'm not sure they think that, though. >> host: that's one of my questions. seems to me that kind of we are who we are and take it or leave it, we don't care what everybody else thinks about that, has that backfired on them? seems that could have been a

force to cultivate more distrust and distaste and happen make them public enemy under one at points in their history. >> guest: well, it's a great question and a kind of complicated one. thick one of my goals as a reporter was to try to understand as best i could and think about what is it like to be so unpopular? does it matter? they're sort of -- their default few is doesn't matter. just like allen's statement, we are who we are. but in truth i think there are consequences. part it talent recruitment and retention in the real world, a world of the arab spring generation. you can't get away with just being disdained by everyone and hole youring at the e technological and scientific edge. scientists are independent people. some may be willing to adapt to the economic reward a career at a plies like exxonmobil but not if it doesn't feel liking a open and changing place, a. b., if you only have one way of

living in the world and problems that -- and risk management are getting more and more diverse, you can't afford to go into communities that already have a presumption that you're evil. it shows up at jury trials. jess, they can appeal all these verdicts, billion dollar verdicts and get them knocked down to zero but do you want to go into every jury setting and know you have to overcome a presumption you're evil? i think there are consequences. and...

>> guest: exxon's distinct because they're always on the list. and they're always in the top five. the companies in the '50s that were number one or number two, u.s. steel, they don't exist anymore. >> host: right. >> guest: you look today, apple and exxonmobil are one and two, ten years ago it was exxonmobil and walmart, microsoft is always in the mix, but you look out 50 years further, which one is still likely to be around? apple or exxon? it is striking both how completely different and how similar apple is to exxonmobil. i walked away thinking what a country. only the united states could produce both apple and

exxonmobil, because on the one hand, you know, apple is a completely california-bred, creative, '60s -- >> host: black turtle neck -- [laughter] >> guest: in the book, isaacson reports that steve jobs used to go into interviews and ask serious job candidates if they had ever done lsd in the hopes the answer had been yes. [laughter] exxonmobil, please, take this cup and provide us -- [laughter] so on the one hand they're very, very different, and on the other hand, there are these similarities. they're both closed systems, both driven by a desire to control their environment. i mean, steve jobs desperately wanted to control every element of the customer's experience, every element of the design. and they both were not good partners, they didn't really believe in partnership. they just, you know, they believed in the advantages of total control. and that makes them secretive because it's really the secrecy that follows the desire for

control, not secrecy as an end in itself. and so it's fascinating. the other point about exxonmobil and its unpopularity that cake to think about -- they came to think about over time is most big, industrialized economies, they all have big statement oil companies. france, mexico, bp, and, yes, in the industrialized west, most of those states have privatized them. but even bp and royal dutch were partially state owned as recently as the 980s. but -- 1980s. exxonmobil is our state-owned oil company. they're a much more coherent expression of our national energy policy than anything the federal government does, that's for sure. and they're just as powerful relative to the state as totale is to france and yet even more so. it lives in opposition to the state in which it resides. rex tillerson recently told

scouting magazine that his favorite book is atlas shrugged by ayn rand. it suggests an attitude of sort of skepticism, let's say generously, toward the government that is peculiar. now, the equivalent company in france or italy or even in britain would be, they would have all gone to the same universities as the president of the united states, they would be be buddies, there would be an interlocking sense of world view and maybe even as with totale, they would work arm in this arm with the french government abroad in order to secure interests and so forth. but, you know, this country, we're skeptical of our government, and the last irony is we're also skeptical of concentrated power. so here in exxonmobil is an institution with enormous concentrated power whose chief executive reads a book that is basically about the dangers of concentrated power -- >> host: right. >> guest: -- and celebrates it. [laughter] we're a funny country. >> host: one of the things that

came up i think is really interesting and goes to what you just about their influence of washington. it's actually really fascinating because out of one side of their mouth, they say they really don't want to play ball, and yet they're playing ball harder than some others in some cases because they have direct lines, for instance, during the lee raymond days and dick cheney, call on washington when it helps them in their business interests to get them out of geopolitical conflicts. but one of the things that's interesting is it talks in here about politicians getting it wrong. i found the page number, and it's even more apt today. yeah, here it is. so this is a quote from tillerson. the probably in free market -- the global market for free emergency provides an effective means of providing u.s. energy security. this is their theory, as long as you get more oil and you put it in the bathtub and we have more supply. in the global market the national supply is of little relevance.

it's not as important as energy simply made wherever it's most economic. >> guest: right. >> host: yet exxonmobil has carried that mention for a long time. >> guest: right. >> host: it goes back to raymond, it went in to tillerson. they're obviously communicating it to a lot of their republican allies, you make that point that their lobbying is heavily skewed to the republicans out of the party. yet that's not the message you're hearing from politicians today. >> guest: right. >> host: you're hearing a very almost resource-nationalist to u.s. domestic energy production a la venezuela. >> guest: and exxonmobil's not too embarrassed to join in that. >> host: right, right. so i guess it's kind of shocking to me, and i'm asking for an explanation here. how can this all-powerful company with huge influence not have changed that political discourse to make it actually more adhere to the facts of how global oil market works? >> guest: yeah. >> host: and also engage in it, as you say. >> guest: yeah. well, i think they've had

influence on sort of elites in the united states, educating, they've carried out this very intense education campaign to try to the bring what they informed influentials in government and media into their conversation about how the global oil markets actually work. but most politicians don't have time or interest to study in depth these kind of complexities. and one of the executives i interviewed told me that one of the world leaders who understood it best, how the global oil markets really are integrated and liquid and nationalism -- though it can be relevant, is not what it seems, energy-independence -- was tony blair. and this executive was talking to tony blair, and he said, you know, you're one of the few people who runs a government who actually understands how the oil markets work, isn't that a shame. and blair supposedly said you really wouldn't all the other politicians to know because then they'd think they could do something about it.

[laughter] >> host: that sticks in my mind. that's what's happening in washington right now in both parties. >> guest: right. >> host: both parties are trying to get a handle and show that they're reacting to gasoline prices when, in effect, they have little power over prices. >> guest: right. the question of what does energy independence mean, even though the way it's used in political campaigns is frustrating because it's so sort of divorced from the actual subject matter. but there's a real subject there that's important and interesting, and it's changing. and exxonmobil's position in the quest for energy independence is also changing. because basically, while it's true that being a net exporter or a net importer of oil is not really the right way to think about energy security because everybody's a price taker, doesn't matter whether you're selling or buying, the price is a global price, that's not true of natural gas which is more regionally priced.

and there's been some evolution toward a global, integrated gas market, but we're not there yet. and so in the united states, if we have onshore natural gas that's really cheap for a long period of time, that could make a big difference to the economy. it could reduce our cost of manufacturing, it could change our energy mix in a way that's favorable in response to climate change. and while, you know, being a net importer or a net exporter may not matter in some of the way politicians talk about it, it does matter to our balance of trade, to the amount of dollars net-net that we send abroad to unfriendly regime versus those we keep at home to reinvest. so if we do shift toward more energy independence as it's called, whether we call it nationalistic language or economic language, there will be advantages. they're just not the same, they're not the advantages that politicians often describe. >> host: one of the other current events i was thinking about in reading this book was

going backing to the days of lee raymond, i thought that was a brilliant chapter. exxon has kind of shunned alternatives, for good reason. they're an oil company. their business is oil, so, you know, they don't want to really hear about hydrogen for cars or, you know, electric cars, what have you. and they also, you made an excellent point which is one of my frustrations as an energy reporter which is how people mix the energy side of production with transportation. right. but i couldn't help think there's pieces in the book where lee raymond talks into the ear of alan greenspan, and alan greenspan is on the hill and basically saying lee raymond's speech. >> guest: right. >> host: if on solyndra, which is the solar company that has grabbed headlines and failed finish. >> guest: right. >> host: -- if big oil is behind that given their animosity towards kind of renewables and the subsidies renewables require, do you see any evidence

of that? >> guest: is it the government making this bad loan -- >> host: not making the bad loan, but fan the flames of criticism when the loan went bad. >> guest: yeah. i think the american petroleum institute, they're a spun-up communications machine that seizes every opportunity, and their political allies did the same thing. but, yeah, i mean, i think the underlying question about alternatives in exxonmobil is, it's, you know, they're a corporation, they can pursue whatever business strategy they want. the question is as a country do we want to create subsidies and incentives for a shift to alternatives of the sort that the loan program that ended up with solyndra provided, and why would we? so if you look at it, we've been talking about how everybody in the country shares an interest in the lowest cost energy possible consistent with a sustainable environment. that's the dilemma, right? >> host: right. >> guest: so you want the lowest

cost energy, but you also want to achieve your environmental goals. now, we may not define those the same way, but if you talk about a rapid and costly lift from cheap coal and -- shift from cheap coal and oil and gas to more expensive but cleaner renewables, you better have a god will be to do that. -- good reason to do that. so if you believe as i do, i find 97% of mainstream climate scientists and their warnings and findings entirely convincing. so if you believe that, now you have a reason to endure short-term costs for long-term gain. but if you want to try to convince the public that there's no risk, then the case gets much harder which is why exxonmobil's resistance to the basic findings of climate science after kyoto was so pernicious and so damaging, because there is a residue of doubt in the public about the validity of climate science and the climate threat. and scientists tell us there shouldn't be such doubt.

now, why is there? well, these interested parties funded a campaign, a communications campaign to plant that doubt. now, of course, the american people are adults, they're entitled to their own opinion, but that campaign clearly was influential. >> host: right. and also -- we'll talk about that, because i thought that was a really interesting part of the book. i don't want to put words in your mouth, but to me it read almost as if exxon invented that strategy, that exxon was a company that really was in the business of planting this scientific doubt, you know, funding research which is great. i loved that part with the noaa scientists on the beaches of the prince william sound 12 years after the spill, and they're being tagged by a yacht of exxonmobil-hired scientists who want to know what they're up to and criticize their methods eventually, kind of cast out on the science showing that the oil was still there after all the years. >> guest: right. >> host: and that tactic now

seems rampant in our political culture. as a reporter that pays attention to this closely, you're now seeing it, you know, where the science of climate change, you know, is a theory, it's a theory by many, many people, and it's a valid theory, now you're seeing it in areas that were almost lock solid. there's politicians now on the floor talking about the linkage between smog and asthma. >> guest: right. >> host: there's people that are questioning the cost benefit analysis of the epa when it drafts regulations. >> guest: right. >> host: do you, i mean, do you look at exxon's kind of track record on that and be like, hey, exxon is responsible for that kind of, that kind of tactic? because it seems now it's a very common one. like, let's not talk about the regulations, let's just attack the subject the regulations are trying to address. >> guest: right. no, i think that they have a responsibility for some of that and that they really were a distinctive investor in that specific strategy after kyoto. because because, look, when the

kyoto accords were signed, there was a lot of opposition to them in the united states and in the industrialized world on economic grounds, on fairness grounds. some of it was about as the science really, you know, that urgent that we these to impose these costs on ourselves, but there were a lot of different groups that opposed kyoto for those economic and fairness reasons. but exxonmobil was very unusual, in my judgment, in the aggression that they brought to the science part of the campaign. really funding groups whose principal activity was to communicate as non-scientists a narrative of doubt about what was emerging as mainstream climate science. and that is, i'm afraid, you know, a tactic that is more and more present where science and public policy intersect. and it's dangerous, because our whole progress as, you know, an industrialized democracy depends on an honest argument about

science and, you know, the public good. >> host: right. >> guest: and if we're going to have especially in these fractured media times, you know, a completely polluted argument where the public, even the public trying to act in good faith isn't sure who to believe about what, we're going to end up damaging our society. >> host: right. now, this book makes clear that exxon is almost an impenetrable fortress as a company. but when you get to climate change, and i'm biased here because i'm a climate junkie, it really seems that this really scares them. there's this great -- until then there was only one unexpected development, one black swan intervention that could shift the curve of rising global oil demand which, obviously, exxon enjoys. those are my words. a decision by governments to limit greenhouse gas emissions by heavily taxing or capping the use of carbon-based fuels. i mean, is that a fair estimation? i mean, this -- that issue,

because of what it could do to the oil -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- is what really, really kind of had them shaking in their boots. >> guest: i think it got their attention. i think it was a combination of how it was a rare existential threat. the reason we were talking about before. they had overcome the previous systematic threats to oil production in the world which were spills and environmental damage and the seepage of oil into water and drinking supplies and air pollution. all of that had been more or less brought into a sustainable compact of regulator and regulated. and they had themselves adapted. they had accepted the validity of these environmental goals when it comes to spills and air pollution and so forth, and they had adapted themselves. it imposed costs on themselves in order to build the sustainable compact. so just at the moment when they've got cruising speed on all of the other environmental issues that arose in the first three or four decades of the oil world now comes this other

existential, more abstract, global challenge to the prime is city of fossil fuels in our system -- primacy of fossil fuels in our system. i think that was one factor. lee raymond personally, as a trained chemical engineer and as a very direct and, you know, determined chief executive, decided that he would just say what he thought and use exxonmobil's resources to prosecute his views. most corporate chief executives, even if they had that conviction, would not have acted as aggressively as he did. so that's a factor. the book reflects -- i interviewed raymond, and i asked him at one point, you know, surely you could have handled the costs of modest carbon pricing legislation, right? i mean, look at your cash flow. looked at your profitability. why resist it? >> host: right. >> guest: you've adapted to air pollution regulations, you've adapted to spill regulations, you run -- you pride yourselves on your compliance with

regulatory regimes that impose costs on you for making the oil industry sustainable in a political and environmental sense. why not just adapt to these regulations? and, you know, i found his answer not that convincing. he sort of said we thought the costs on the whole economy would be too great, that would break up america's economic progress and so forth. but there was a visceral reaction to kyoto that exxonmobil had that was kind of out of line with their actual business interests. i would understand if you're a coal company and you see kyoto coming, you see a price on carbon coming. >> host: right. >> guest: this really could be existential. but the oil industry, because of the mix of gas which is a lower footprint, they had an opportunity to adapt to this in a more forward-leaning way and, frankly, the european companies saw that, and their publics were already there, and they moved with much more adeptness, i thought. >> host: now, another idea that i found really interesting in the book as you raise it a

couple times, at least twice that i can remember, but you're not hearing it at all in washington right now is raising gasoline prices like we do -- >> guest: right. >> host: and how leafing the lights on -- leaving the lights on is a public rate and we regulate that. if it got out of control and prices soared, people wouldn't be able to turn the lights on. why aren't we hearing that more? when it comes to gas? and should we be hearing it more as a solution, as something the government could do? >> guest: right. well, i think it's a very serious question, and the reason we don't hear more about it is because, in fact, the political arguments we have during campaign seasons about gas prices are just theater. there's no reason to bring a serious policy question into them. >> host: right. >> guest: but the point you make is really important which is you flip on a switch in this room, and you generate power, and a company profits from that use of power.

that company is a utility that is regulated by a public interest standard in every state or jurisdiction separately, but the public interest standard is there. and that's our history with the provision of electricity. we think it's so important, so fundamental and so inescapable that we require the profitable companies that provide it to meet certain public interest standards and to be accountable to the public for their performance. and we cap their profits often. now, in exxonmobil's case, they're a global company. they're out discovering oil under ice and in seas and so forth. nobody's going to regulate them in the public interest in that sphere. but in the provision of gasoline, it is a similar utility function. and, in fact, you know, if you're a commuting construction worker who has to drive 60 miles a day in your pickup truck to a job site, you go to the pump, you've got no choice. you've got to put it in at whatever price is there, and you can't understand why you have no accountability or control over that kind of trap you're in.

i think it's a serious -- it's sort of an accident of history that we treat the provision of gasoline as entirely a free market function would want any public interest oversight, basically. some taxes and some environmental regulation. but we treat public -- electricity as a public utility. in many other countries, they organize things differently. i don't know that there's an easy way to fix this, but exxonmobil recognizes the problem because their unpopularity arises from the fact that their brand name is stuck on all these pumps. >> host: right. and you make the point in the book that that's actually the only way they're visible. >> guest: yeah. >> host: otherwise people don't understand the whole oil process. people aren't watching them drilling holes in the ground or deep offshore in equatorial guinea as you travel in the book. all we really see of them is the tiger on the tank and, you know, their brand name. >> guest: and there's a board meeting that's described in there when lee raymond, toward

the end of his career, says to the board for all the reasons you just listed, why don't we just get out of the gasoline business. why don't we just be like dupont? nobody gets up in the morning saying dupont is evil. >> host: right. >> guest: but dupont is a huge industrial corporation, it's invisible by comparison. >> host: right. now, one of the other points you make later in the book, and it's in reference to the discussion about energy policy and kind of the lack of a u.s. energy policy or at least a coherent one, and you made the point earlier in our conversation that really exxon is the u.s. energy policy, that politicians have kind of struggled with that because at the end of the day, it requires a public to make some sacrifice. and they really don't want to step there. they don't want to go there. because once you go there, people start to say, hey, i don't want to do that. >> guest: right. >> host: every poll we've done at the associated press on energy always says, well, yeah we want to reduce the risks of

climate change, and we want clean air, but we really don't want to have our electricity bills go up to do that, right? >> guest: right. >> host: which is a consequence of any market theme and also a consequence of a tax. so to turn the tables a little bit, exxon as the bad guy, i mean, it seems to me that our inability as the public to make sacrifices makes us more beholden to these companies that we don't like. >> guest: right. well, i think that there's truth in that. and, you know, it's interesting, i was trying to think about this question of the price that people would have to pay to address climate change in particular, and i think while no public at any era wants to volunteer for higher prices in their household expenditures, our politics shows that where the public saw a threat to living generations, if they thought that their children were more likely to get asthma or

develop respiratory disease because of air pollution that was unaddressed or that their children were more likely to be exposed to cancer as a result of pollution in water supplies, that people were willing to pay a price, whatever the price was, to protect their living generations from that danger. the problem with climate is that it's over the horizon, and the dangers are serious but abstract. >> host: right. >> guest: so, yeah, you may be motivated to think i don't want to put my grandchildren in a world where there's three degrees celsius higher than we have now and rising seas, but it's not the same. so this cost benefit equation is part of the problem. and the other thing about what you observe is that there isn't a government in the world where politicians don't want to make gasoline as cheap as possible. it's like bread and circuses. it's two chickens -- >> host: $2.50 or something? >> guest: most of the world, governments oversubsidize gasoline just so they don't have to deal with the public's anger

about what the gas would really cost if they let market prices rule. here we let market prices rule up to a point, then we add a bunch of taxes and try to reduce driving, and so it's expensive already. and so you go to politicians and you say i have a plan to make gasoline even more expensive, and you're not going to find a big caucus lining up -- >> host: well, look, i mean, that quote from obama was in an edit board i think somewhere in california where he says that, you know, as a result of cap and trade, gasoline prices would necessarily skyrocket. that has been recycled. he was being honest, they're going to have to go up, but that has come back to bite him, you know, over and over and over again. on subsidies, let's talk about that. lee raymond, obviously, has a disdain, it's very clear in the book, for the crutch that renewables need to be economic. >> guest: right. >> host: and exxonmobil as a company seems to loathe any kind of crutches, you know? [laughter] >> guest: right.

they want them for their own -- >> host: right, exactly. >> guest: then they pulled them out of the closet. >> host: but there's crutches that oil has. there's a huge debate right now in congress, and the president is pushing to end tax breaks that oil companies have enjoyed, and they make these enormous profits. why should they continue to have them. >> guest: right. >> host: did that come up in your conversation with ray monday at all? -- raymond at all? it's pointing out a little bit of hypocrisy there. >> guest: yeah. well, i sort of felt stalemated around that subsidies question. i still don't know quite what to think about it. i don't know what you think about it. but, you know, basically, there are some tax breaks that oil companies alone get through interpretive kind of appeals about what, how the the oil industry in specific terms is located. >> host: right. >> guest: but most of these allowances are manufacturing allowances. they just happen to be manufacturers of gasoline as opposed to tractors or something else. >> host: right. >> guest: so, okay, we can say let's discriminate against the oil industry because they're making too much money, and

people are paying too much for gas. let's eliminate those subsidies and rebate it to drivers who have to drive to work. okay, that's a reasonable public policy. but to just say that these are subsidies only for the oil industry, i'm not sure that's actually even correct. >> host: right. >> guest: so i don't quite know what the right -- i know it's great politics, i get that. [laughter] and part of the reason why this keeps happening is because it's great politics for both sides, and there's no danger of these laws actually passing. >> host: right. >> guest: say what you want about them. >> host: right. >> guest: i think it's a serious question as to how you should restructure or emergency energy policy. i'm all for imposing greater costs on exxonmobil. i'm sure they'd be delighted to hear that. i think they should be doing more to facilitate a national energy policy goal of addressing the serious risks of global warming by moving as rapidly and economically as possible to a new emergency mix. but i don't think that stripping out manufacturing subsidies and then not repurposing those funds

to achieve that national goal necessarily is very persuasive. so i think the first thing to do is put a price on carbon and put it in a substantial and predictable way so that all companies can respond to it, and we can get moving in this direction we need to go. >> host: we have a few more minutes, and i can't -- i have to get to canada. i found, i found the canadian section later in the book really interesting. again, in light of modern events. >> guest: yeah. >> host: it is very clear from what you write that prior to keystone xl, exxon was infuriated with the u.s. approach to canadian -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- imports. >> guest: right. >> host: because they're from the tar sands, and as you and i both know, energy intensive to extract huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions just in the extraction process. >> guest: right. >> host: but now i guess the keystone happened, obviously, after the book was written. >> guest: right. >> host: that kind of goes right to the heart of that. >> guest: right.

>> host: you know, obama rejects keystone pipeline, environmentalists were furious about it because of the climate change issues. i'm assuming that you would conclude that exxon is also as furious as it was back then. >> guest: oh, yeah. i think they're -- they don't quite know what to do about the politics of the keystone pipeline because in their book it is such a, it's so irrational that they almost can't overcome their own sort of indignity about how disconnected the politics of the pipeline is from the underlying questions of climate change regulation, the tar sands or the oil sands and their role in that and the global oil markets. i mean, basically, this is -- the keystone pipeline is a continuation of the things that made them out earlier -- >> host: absolutely. the same thing. right. >> guest: yeah. it's basically trying to attack the problem. look, even the environmentalists would admit, i'm sure, that if