Corporate Ethics * Blog 10

Exxon Mobile is a large company that works in an industry which continuously affects the environment in several different ways. There are certain rules and regulations that corporate companies like this one have to abide by to keep their carbon footprint as unnoticeable as possible.

For the purpose of this blog entry, I will be writing about Exxon as a symbol of all corporate companies and how they appear to be on top of things according to their website: http://www.exxon.com/.

When I hear about Exxon, my first thought isn’t what are they doing FOR the environment, but what are they doing TO the environment? Exxon provides fuel which various vehicles run off of. Well, that obviously isn’t helping pollution in any sort of form. The next thing I thought of was an oil spill.

I had remembered hearing that Exxon was involved in some sort of oil spill, but I wasn’t sure of the details, so I Googled it. (Something I think is the most amazing current invention.)

In March 1989, Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 billion gallons of oil off the coast of Valdez, Alaska near the Bligh Reef—this information according to http://www.valdezalaska.org/history/oilSpill.html. “No crude oil actually made it into the Port of Valdez, as Bligh Reef is about 25 miles south of the Port. However, winds and tides moved the floating crude oil further south into the Sound and onto beaches. Oil covered over 1200 miles of rocky beaches.”

Destroying the environment, accident or not, is not a reputation a huge corporation is keen on having; therefore, Exxon has done their best on their Web site to make the environmental efforts known.

I went on the Exxon Web site and clicked on the “Our Company” tab. From there, I went to “About Us” hoping I would find the information I was looking for. I found a “Current Issues” link—struck gold. Clicking the link brought me to an entire page about what they are doing to contribute to environmental studies, energy efficiencies, and their views on climate change and biodiversity.

Our organizational structure is built on a concept of global businesses and is designed to allow ExxonMobil to compete most effectively in the ever-changing and challenging worldwide energy industry. –Exxon

Every sentence on their Web site is politically correct in the sense that representatives of Exxon would never intentionally throw the company under the bus. They are of course going to say they are doing everything possible to help the environment while still providing a product that only speeds up the elimination of the world’s natural resources.

There are pages on climate change and energy efficiency, but nothing of true substance. It seems as though there are a lot of scientific, environmentalist words that the average American wouldn’t truly understand due to their lack of awareness.

There is also a page regarding the Alaskan oil spill. Their latest comment on the destructive accident is this: The 1989 Valdez accident was one of the lowest points in ExxonMobil's 125-year history. However, we took immediate responsibility for the spill and have spent over $3.8 billion as a result of the accident, including compensatory payments, cleanup payments, settlements and fines.