The CEO of ExxonMobil has a very surprising message for Donald Trump: Please, oh please, don’t take us out of the Paris Climate Accords again.

Yes, you heard correctly. Strange as it may seem, it appears that one of the country’s top oil executives is not happy with Trump’s plan to withdraw the United States from the international agreement to reduce global CO2 emissions. “I don’t think stopping and starting is the right thing for businesses,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said at a news conference. a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. “It’s extremely inefficient. This creates a lot of uncertainty.

In a sequel interview with PoliticoWoods said much the same thing: “I don’t think the challenge or the need to address global emissions is going to go away,” he said. “Anything that happens in the short term would only make the long term even more difficult. »

On the one hand, it may seem odd to hear the boss of one of the world’s largest oil companies siding with climate activists. On the other hand, you can understand why he might be tired of all the flip-flopping.

The Paris Agreement came into force in 2015 and it was largely the work of the Obama administration. The agreement aimed to force its 194 participating countries to reduce their CO2 emissions gradually over several years. The ultimate goal was to reduce the likelihood that climate change is killing us all. When he took office in 2016, Trump made clear he would pull the United States out of the deal, after previously calling climate change a problem. “hoax” concocted by the Chinese government. Actual withdrawal from the agreement did not take place for several years. The United States’ exit from the agreement took effect in November 2020, during the final months of Trump’s presidency. Less than six months later, in February 2021, the United States officially joined the agreementat the request of the Biden administration. Now Trump promisedonce again, to get us out of the deal.

At the very least, all this back and forth must be pretty confusing for the oil companies. One analyst interviewed by the Journal noted that oil companies are “working very hard to reduce their emissions, and the last thing they want is for all the rules and regulations to change again.”

Trump, as a political candidate, has always enjoyed significant support from the oil and gas industry. In 2016, 2020 and 2024 the Trump campaign has benefited from a steady stream of contributions from energy companies and tycoons, and Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, came to the job after spending ten years as CEO of ExxonMobil. The duo unceremoniously split in 2017, with Tillerson reportedly splitting describing Trump as a ‘fucking idiot’ and Trump challenge Tillerson to compare IQs.

During his first term, Trump also aggressively repealed many Obama-era environmental policies, gutting federal regulations in a way that oil and gas companies have profited enormously. Now that he’s back in the White House, it seems almost certain that Trump will do it again. Some of his top White House picks (like Stephen Miller) are avowed enemies of the Paris Agreement. Project 2025, a policy agenda that has close ties to Trump’s allies (but which Trump has personally disavowed), has sought to disrupting US-based climate efforts. The new administration has also toyed with the idea of relocation of the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency to a location outside Washington, D.C., a move that one staffer called an attempt to “decapitate” the agency.