The cover of Private Empire, Steve Coll’s new book about the Exxon Mobil Corporation, is a forbidding black slab. Even the lettering looks dismal. It’s the colour of a chain smoker’s lung.
Mr Coll’s vast narrative is bookended by accounts of man-made disasters. Private Empire opens with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (the captain had been drinking), and closes with the BP Deepwater Horizon nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In between there is much for those who loathe Big Oil generally, and Exxon Mobil specifically, to feast upon.
The company, Mr Coll writes, is “a corporate state within the American state” and “one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism”. Some employees call its ominous headquarters near Dallas the Death Star.
Little light, or information, leaks from the Death Star. The company wields “a corporate system of secrecy, nondisclosure agreements and internal security,” Mr Coll writes, “that matched some of the most compartmented black boxes of the world’s intelligence agencies”. Exxon Mobil’s media strategy, an in-house joke declares, is learning to say “no comment” in 50 different languages.
Private Empire details Exxon Mobil’s harassment of environmental scientists, its messy entanglements in small wars in far-flung countries, its withholding of information from Congress, its dissembling about global warming, its arrogant culture, its obscene stockpiles of cash.
Mr Coll is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of books that include Bin Ladens (2008) and Ghost Wars (2004). His new book, like his previous ones, is a big dig. Mountains of facts are mined, crushed and consumed as narrative fuel. If Mr Coll were a corporation, you would want to impose a carbon tax on him.
Private Empire is meticulous, multi-angled and valuable. It is also impartial. Mr Coll and his phlegmatic research assistants have interviewed more than 400 people.
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It’s among this book’s achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world through Exxon Mobil’s eyes. The company is portrayed here, some egregious missteps aside, as possessing an honourable if rigid corporate culture that seeks to supply a product (unlike tobacco companies, to which it is often compared) that a functioning society actually must have. The company learned, over time, that it was necessary to play Darwinian hardball to survive. “Compromise,” Mr Coll writes, “was not the Exxon way.”
Mr Coll’s dispassionate sentences are his book’s great strength and its subacoustic weakness. He covers an enormous amount of ground. There are intricate assessments of Exxon Mobil’s morally complicated operations in countries like Chad, Indonesia, Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela and Vladimir V Putin’s Russia. There are accounts of employee kidnappings, and tick-tock financial reporting about events like Exxon’s 1999 merger with Mobil.
He is especially good on the company’s tangled relationship with George W Bush’s administration. Mr Raymond was a close friend of Dick Cheney’s. They’d both attended the University of Wisconsin and both loved to hunt. Mr Raymond telephoned his friend on corporate matters when necessary.
But Exxon Mobil kept its distance from the Bush presidency. The company steered clear of the folly in Iraq, despite the administration’s appeals to help that nation’s oil industry get back on its feet, until the smoke had well cleared, and Exxon Mobil employees would be safe there.
Mr Bush mostly delivered on the oil industry’s agenda. He hoped to be remembered, Mr Coll suggests, for the long-term investments his administration had made in alternative energy.
About Mr Bush’s hope, the author is pitiless. “Like presidents of both parties before him, however,” Mr Coll writes, “he lacked the depth of conviction, the political coalitions and the scientific vision to do more than toss relative pennies into a wishing fountain.”
That withering bit notwithstanding, Private Empire is perhaps too stoic for its own good. Emotionally it has few peaks or valleys. Where do you draw the line between an important book and a consistently interesting one? In this book’s more than 600 pages you may sometimes be tempted to utter, as did BP’s hapless chief executive Tony Hayward, disastrously, during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “I’d like my life back.”
Part of what keeps you reading is Mr Coll’s sly and revealing portrait of Mr Raymond, who became Exxon’s chief executive a few years after the Valdez spill and ran the company until 2006. He changed it in profound ways, moving its headquarters to Texas from Manhattan and making safety, efficiency and sheer profitability his hardboiled goals.
With Mr Raymond’s retirement, Exxon Mobil has become, if only slightly, a kinder place. It’s a company that’s begun to care what we think of it. It seems to want a good response to the following question, posed by a corporate-responsibility specialist to an Exxon Mobil executive, albeit in more graphic language than can be printed here:
What are you going to say to your grandkids when they say, Grandpa, why did you screw up the planet?
PRIVATE EMPIRE
Exxon Mobil and American Power
Steve Coll
The Penguin Press.; 685 pages; $36
©2012 The New York Times News Service