Steve Coll characterizes ExxonMobil’s business strategies as “oriented toward the very long run,” and extending “much farther than those of almost any government,” since its business model contemplates “maintaining oil and gas wells profitably for up to forty years at a stretch” (“Gusher,” April 9th). Although forty years may qualify as “the very long run” relative to Wall Street’s quarterly-earnings fixation, or even to the quadrennial Presidential-election cycle, it is the blink of an eye compared with the hundreds of millions of years it took nature to create the fossil fuel “capital” that ExxonMobil is so rapidly—and profitably—liquidating. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to learn of ExxonMobil’s support for a carbon tax, a logical first step in the difficult process of correcting a flaw in the existing energy economy; namely, that the prices of fossil fuels are artificially low, as they do not reflect many of the actual costs associated with their extraction and use. If ExxonMobil would devote as much of its prodigious lobbying resources to implementing a carbon tax as it has to resisting the elimination of tax loopholes, I might be persuaded that it understands the “very long run.”
John H. Steed
Santa Barbara, Calif.