No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics

by Naomi Klein

When prices were high, with Tillerson at the helm, the company broke the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States, earning $45 billion in 2012. Compare that to 2016, when Exxon’s profits fell well shy of $8 billion. That’s a more than 80 percent drop in profits in a span of just four years. What does all this mean? It means that oil majors like ExxonMobil, and the banks that underwrote their bad bets, desperately want the price of oil to go back up—to get their super-profits back and to get the fossil fuel frenzy back on. So a very big question that needs answering is this: what is the Trump administration—aka Team ExxonMobil—going to do to achieve that? We are already seeing some policies that appear designed to drive up oil prices. For instance, Trump moved to eliminate the Obama-era requirement that vehicles become more fuel-efficient—which means more trips to the gas station for consumers. Trump’s budget plan, meanwhile, aimed to completely eliminate funding for new public transit projects, and kill funding for long-distance train services. So far, though, the market isn’t