Darren Woods

Birthday: January 12, 1965 

Hometown: Wichita, Kansas

Primary residence: Dallas, Texas

Current role: Executive Chair and CEO of ExxonMobil (2017-present)

Salary: $36.9 million in 2023

Net Worth: an estimated $186 million 

Education: 

• BS in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University

• MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management 

Board memberships, affiliations, and roles:

• Woods has worked for Exxon since 1992

• Committee member of the American Petroleum Institute

• Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies 

• Member of the National Petroleum Council 

• Member of Business Roundtable

• Member of the Business Council 

• Board member of the US-China Business Council

Past roles: 

• Chairman of the American Petroleum Institute (unknown-2020) 

• Member of Texas A&M University Engineering Advisory Council

• Board member of Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd. 

• Director of Imperial Oil (2013-2014)

Fun facts: 

• Woods’ wife, Kathryn Woods, also attended Texas A&M, and their youngest son attends the school.

Darren Woods and other corporate CEOs like him aren’t flashy or exciting villains. They don’t wear scary masks, they wear expensive suits. They don’t often make front-page news, their crimes begin in board rooms. It’s hard to pinpoint their exact victims because their crimes are omnipresent and global. 

The Nation described the corporate world in which Exxon operates as “Orwellian” – the company blatantly doublespeaks as it simultaneously pledges to eliminate its carbon emissions by 2050 and dramatically ramps up its oil and gas production. 

Continued Expansion of Fossil Fuels

• ExxonMobil is relentlessly doubling down its fossil fuel production and expanding its empire. In ExxonMobil’s 2023 Annual Report, Woods boasts: “Our industry leadership extends to our record annual production in Guyana and the Permian and the continued strengthening of our already advantaged portfolio through divestments, acquisitions, and investments.” 

• In May 2024, it acquired Pioneer Natural Resources for $60 billion, which doubled its hydrocarbon production in Texas’s Permian Basin. This deal is effectively a huge bet on the future of fossil fuel production in the US, revealing that Exxon doesn’t see fossil fuel output decreasing in the years to come. This is ExxonMobil’s biggest deal since Exxon and Mobil merged in 1998. Woods is attempting to spin this deal that is predicated on expanding fossil fuel infrastructure as something good for the planet by stating that ExxonMobil will expedite “Pioneer’s 2050 net-zero Permian goal to a 2035 plan.”

• According to David Tong for Oil Change International, “ExxonMobil expanding is bad for people, communities, and our climate…Further consolidation of the fossil energy market into a smaller number of mega companies will not secure energy access for people or help achieve climate targets.”

• In March 2024, ExxonMobil received a grade of “G” and was one of the lowest-ranked companies by Carbon Tracker for its misalignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement. 

Lying to Congress About What Exxon Knew

• In 2021, Woods was accused of lying under oath during a congressional hearing investigating the oil industry’s decade-long disinformation campaign to prevent climate action. Woods declined to make a specific pledge and to stop lobbying on climate initiatives. Rep. Carolyn Malone, Chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, pressed Woods on whether or not his predecessor, Lee Raymond, spread doubt about climate science despite clear internal evidence. Woods denied that Raymond misled the public, and he denied that there were any inconsistencies between Exxon’s public-facing narrative and what Exxon scientists told top Exxon executives. The opposite is true: since the 1970s, ExxonMobil’s internal climate company memos and climate models showed that they knew their fossil fuel products would lead to global warming and other environmental impacts. 

Blaming Consumers

• Darren Woods has recognized publicly that we’re off track to meet climate change mitigation goals, but, instead of taking responsibility for his company’s leading role in causing climate change, he has tried to displace the blame onto consumers. 

• In March 2024, Woods said, “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it. The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

• The emissions that Woods is referring to are called “Scope 3” emissions and are those that are released when oil and gas are burned by consumers. Activist investor groups have pushed oil companies like Exxon to track, publish, and reduce these Scope 3 emissions, but, according to Grist, Exxon prefers to focus on Scope 1 emissions (those that are released directly from oil rigs and power plants) and Scope 2 (fuel and electricity used to operate machinery and offices). According to the SEC, Exxon’s Scope 3 emissions in 2019 were “greater than any other major Western oil company, and similar to the GHG emissions of the entire country of Canada.”

• Exxon has a vested interest in limiting the scope of the emissions for which they can be held responsible, and this skirting of responsibility is unacceptable: Darren Woods must take responsibility for his climate crimes instead of blaming his victims. 

• This scope limitation builds on Exxon’s history of blaming the public for the climate crisis. In 2021, a team of researchers at Harvard used machine learning and computational linguistics to analyze the language of half a century’s worth of content written by ExxonMobil. They found that the company used subtle rhetorical techniques to displace the blame for climate change onto the public. In internal communication and academic papers, Exxon recognized the link between their products and global warming, but in public-facing content, they were more focused on “consumers” and “demand.” 

• Darren Woods continues perpetrating this individualistic framing to save face, deflect responsibility, and conduct business as usual. 

Suing Activist Shareholders

• In early 2024, ExxonMobil announced it was suing two of its activist investors, Arjuna Capital and Follow This, who supported a proposal for Exxon to accelerate its carbon reduction plan and expand the scope of its measured emissions to include suppliers and customers. Exxon claimed this proposal was designed to diminish the company’s existing business and micromanage its operations. The proposal was dropped, but Exxon pushed forward with its lawsuit. This persistence reveals a desire to prevent investors from speaking out against the corporation in the future and is an aggressive escalation of tactics in the fight against investors who are trying to push fossil fuel companies away from their business model focused on short-term profits.

• Attorneys from Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher are arguing the case (Ted Boutrous, another 2024 Climate Criminal, works at this firm). 

Racial and Environmental Justice Concerns

• In 2021, As You Sow published a scorecard ranking the S&P 500 companies on their racial equity and environmental racism performances, and ExxonMobil ranked dead last, with a -23% score. 

• ExxonMobil’s crude oil refinery in Beaumont, Texas, has consistently failed to comply with the Clean Air Act, posing major environmental health risks in the neighboring majority-Black area.  

• Exxon has also been criticized for its unauthorized pollution and dangerous working conditions at its Baytown Refinery in Texas.

• In 2023, Woods’ salary was $36.9 million, and his net worth was an estimated $186 million, with more than $20 million in liquid assets (WealthX).

• Exxon uses at least 3 private jets, and top executives have been criticized for using them for personal travel. 

• Woods received the 2023 CME STEM Leadership Honoree for Corporate Reinvention (but not without an interruption by Climate Defiance). 

• Texas A&M awarded Woods the Outstanding Alumni Honor Award in 2023. 

ExxonMobil is involved in many parts of the fossil fuel commodity chain. Upstream, ExxonMobil works to discover and develop new oil and natural gas resources. As of 2023, it had oil operations in Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, Australia, Qatar, and the United States in places such as the Permian Basin. ExxonMobil is the world’s largest downstream and chemical company. Its “Product Solutions” business manufactures fuels, lubricants, films, and materials for plastics, cars, and other consumer products. Its “Energy Products” portfolio “delivered record global refining throughput in 2023,” and its expansion of a refinery in Beaumont, Texas was the “largest increase in U.S. refining capacity in more than a decade.” 

ExxonMobil has a Low Carbon Solutions business with a strategy “geared toward ensuring strong returns with a focus on carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, lower-emission fuels, and lithium.” Exxon has invested $17 billion in this low-carbon business. The International Energy Agency claimed that wide-scale carbon capture as a way to fight climate change was an “illusion.” 

In the past, ExxonMobil has been called out for its explicit plans to increase annual CO2 emissions. For example, in 2020, Bloomberg analyzed internal documents that revealed Exxon’s plans to increase its annual emissions “by as much as the output of the entire national of Greece.” These emissions estimates predated Covid’s impacts on the global oil industry, but they nonetheless reveal Exxon’s knowing emissions increases. 

ExxonMobil relies on the shaky semantics that fossil fuel emissions are the cause of climate change, not fossil fuels themselves. Exxon believes it can keep increasing its fossil fuel production, as long as its emissions are cleaned up using false solutions to climate change like carbon capture. 

Read ExxonMobil’s 2023 Sustainability Report’s Executive Summary here. The phrase “climate change” is mentioned only once, in a “Forward-Looking Statement Warning” on the last page that functions as a legal disclaimer saying that ExxonMobil’s participation or membership in groups with climate-related goals “is not a promise or guarantee that ExxonMobil’s individual ambitions, future performance or policies will align with the collective ambitions of the organizations or the individual ambitions of other participants, all of which are subject to a variety of uncertainties and other factors, many of which may be beyond ExxonMobil’s control.”

ExxonMobil is infamous for its climate crimes and is widely – and fervently – condemned. According to Juan Cole for Common Dreams, “[ExxonMobil] are the most evil human beings to walk the earth since Homo Sapiens emerged in southern Africa around 200,000 years ago.” 

Darren Woods has been personally called out as a climate criminal on multiple occasions. He was listed on The Guardian’s 2021 “Dirty Dozen” list of climate villains, and the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a “Wanted” poster for Woods to answer for ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaigns.

In December 2023, Climate Defiance interrupted the Chemical Marketing & Economics gala in New York City when Woods was about to receive a “STEM leadership award” for “harnessing the transformative power of chemistry to advance humanity.” Climate Defiance activists stormed the stage with a banner saying “EAT SHIT DARREN.” An activist declared: “Darren Woods is a climate criminal. How can scientists be honoring this man who increases production of oil and gas every year? As long as production goes up, Darren, we’re fucked. We’re fucked because of you.” The activists were ushered off the stage to the sound of their chants: “Exxon lies and people die.” 

Clean Creatives, an organization urging PR companies to cut their ties with the fossil fuel industry, ran a campaign in November 2021 called #EdelmanDropExxon. 

In San Francisco in November 2023, hundreds of climate activists protested outside where Woods was giving a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) summit. The activists were criticizing APEC leaders for giving Exxon an international platform. The activists also denounced Citibank for helping to finance Exxon’s $60 billion deal to acquire Pioneer Resources and double down on its fossil fuel production in the West Texas oil fields. 

Some of Exxon’s shareholders are announcing their opposition to the company as well. At the annual shareholder meeting in May 2024, The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) expressed their opposition to Woods and the board of directors due to their lawsuit against activist shareholders. According to Forbes, “the ongoing conflict between Exxon and the pension funds epitomizes the broader struggle between corporate entities and public pension funds over the politicization of shareholder activism.”

Darren Woods has been personally called out as a climate criminal on multiple occasions. He was listed on The Guardian’s 2021 “Dirty Dozen” list of climate villains, and the Union of Concerned Scientists put out a “Wanted” poster for Woods to answer for ExxonMobil’s climate disinformation campaigns.

In December 2023, Climate Defiance interrupted the Chemical Marketing & Economics gala in New York City when Woods was about to receive a “STEM leadership award” for “harnessing the transformative power of chemistry to advance humanity.” Climate Defiance activists stormed the stage with a banner saying “EAT SHIT DARREN.” An activist declared: “Darren Woods is a climate criminal. How can scientists be honoring this man who increases production of oil and gas every year? As long as production goes up, Darren, we’re fucked. We’re fucked because of you.” The activists were ushered off the stage to the sound of their chants: “Exxon lies and people die.” 

Clean Creatives, an organization urging PR companies to cut their ties with the fossil fuel industry, ran a campaign in November 2021 called #EdelmanDropExxon. 

In San Francisco in November 2023, hundreds of climate activists protested outside where Woods was giving a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative (APEC) summit. The activists were criticizing APEC leaders for giving Exxon an international platform. The activists also denounced Citibank for helping to finance Exxon’s $60 billion deal to acquire Pioneer Resources and double down on its fossil fuel production in the West Texas oil fields. 

Some of Exxon’s shareholders are announcing their opposition to the company as well. At the annual shareholder meeting in May 2024, The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) expressed their opposition to Woods and the board of directors due to their lawsuit against activist shareholders. According to Forbes, “the ongoing conflict between Exxon and the pension funds epitomizes the broader struggle between corporate entities and public pension funds over the politicization of shareholder activism.” 

• “When are people going to be willing to pay for carbon reduction? We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.” – Woods, 2024

• “We want to cater to the shareholders who are real investors, who have an interest in seeing this company succeed in generating return on their investments,” … “We don’t feel a responsibility to activists that hijack that process…and frankly, abuse it to advance an ideology.” –Woods, 2024

• “I know how this information looks–when taken out of context, it seems bad.” –Woods, 2023

• “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” … “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.” –Woods, 2024

• “I think every piece of this business is exciting. The way that we approach our business, the ethics that we bring, the standards that we hold ourselves to … we do things the right  way for the right reasons, and I love that about our company.” – Woods, 2023.

• “We leaned in when others leaned out, bucking conventional wisdom” – Woods, 2023 to his investors, praising his company’s continued and expanded fossil fuel production.