Part 1 of this series defined a market society. A market society is the arrangement in which price alone settles the allocation of land and labor (Part 1). Part 2 followed that arrangement to the colonies and measured what it moves (Part 2). This post examines the same arrangement and the atmosphere.

Between 1977 and 2003, scientists at Exxon and ExxonMobil projected how much the world would warm. Their projections were accurate. The company continued to produce oil and gas, and it paid for advertisements that told the public a different story. This post asks two questions about that record. Why did the company behave that way, and why did the behavior look normal to the people inside it?

Four terms do the work here. I use delay for the postponement of a reduction in fossil fuel production. I use shareholder value for the doctrine that a company exists to maximize the return to its owners. I use licit for the quality that makes an activity feel lawful and ordinary to the people who perform it. I use machinery for the corporate forms and the corporate language that produce that quality.

Three claims, and how each one ends

This post makes three claims of different types.

1. Oil company scientists projected the warming that their products cause, and their employers said something different in public.
2. Shareholder value made continued extraction rational for investor-owned oil companies.
3. The machinery of the corporate form makes extraction licit to the people who work inside it.

Claim 1 holds. Claim 2 fails in the strong form and survives in a bounded form, and the emissions data set the boundary. Claim 3 carries the title of this post, and it is the weakest of the three. It rests on an analogy from other industries, and a rival explanation covers the same evidence. Each section below states its own limit.

What the companies knew and what they said

Geoffrey Supran is an environmental scientist and Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science. In 2017 they published a content analysis of 187 ExxonMobil climate change communications from 1977 to 2014. They compared internal documents and peer-reviewed papers by company employees against paid editorial advertisements in The New York Times. The internal documents and the peer-reviewed papers acknowledged that climate change is real, human-caused, and serious. The advertisements from 1989 to 2004 expressed doubt about all three points (Supran & Oreskes, 2017).

The paper drew a formal challenge from inside the company. Vijay Swarup was vice president for research and development at ExxonMobil, and he published a comment in the same journal. He made two criticisms. The analysis treated Exxon and Mobil as one company before their 1999 merger. It also read only 36 advertisements from a collection that Greenpeace assembled (Swarup, 2020).

Supran and Oreskes then published an addendum with additional documents and a statistical test. The addendum reports that their original conclusion holds (Supran & Oreskes, 2020).

A third objection is stronger than either of Swarup’s, and nobody published it as a comment. An advertisement and a technical paper address different audiences, so a difference in tone between them is normal. The study design answers part of that objection, because it compared the advertisements against internal company reports as well as against peer-reviewed papers. Internal reports face no audience problem. The objection still limits what the record shows, because a gap in tone is weaker evidence than a gap in stated fact.

The 2023 paper is the stronger evidence, because it tests numbers instead of language. Supran, the climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf, and Oreskes collected every global warming projection they could find in Exxon and ExxonMobil documents from 1977 to 2003. They digitized the graphs and scored the projections with standard methods. Between 63 percent and 83 percent of the projections are consistent with later observations. The company scientists projected warming of 0.20 ± 0.04 degrees Celsius per decade.

Their average skill score was 72 ± 6 percent. That score is higher than the score for the projections that James Hansen presented to the United States Congress in 1988 (Supran, Rahmstorf, & Oreskes, 2023).

One limit belongs here. This record shows a gap between what the company knew and what it said. It does not show that the advertisements changed public opinion. Later sections do not depend on that causal step, and this post does not supply evidence for it.

Shareholder value as doctrine and as practice

Milton Friedman was an economist, and he gave the doctrine its popular form. His 1970 essay in The New York Times Magazine argued that a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. The executive therefore has one responsibility, which is to make as much money for them as the law and custom allow (Friedman, 1970/2007). Michael Jensen and William Meckling gave the doctrine its theoretical form six years later, and Part 1 covered that history (Jensen & Meckling, 1976).

Lynn Stout was a legal scholar, and she showed that the doctrine is a norm instead of a law. United States corporate law does not require directors to maximize share price, and the business judgment rule gives them wide discretion (Stout, 2012). Her finding removes one explanation for the behavior, and it does not choose between the ones that remain. A norm can bind, and so can a plain calculation of return. A later section returns to that fork.

Karen Ho is an anthropologist, and she describes how the norm spreads. Her fieldwork inside Wall Street investment banks in the 1990s documented a workforce that lived by constant hiring, firing, and bonus payments. Ho argues that the bankers took that experience and prescribed it for other companies as shareholder value and perpetual restructuring (Ho, 2009). Her fieldwork does not trace the path from those banks to any oil company boardroom. The transmission is her inference and mine.

Corporate leaders announced a change in 2019. The Business Roundtable published a statement on the purpose of a corporation, and 181 chief executives signed it. The statement committed them to deliver value to customers, employees, suppliers, and communities as well as shareholders (Business Roundtable, 2019).

Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita are legal scholars, and they tested the statement against the record. They examined corporate documents from the 128 United States public companies whose chief executives signed it. Most of the companies that updated their governance guidelines in the next two years kept a commitment to shareholder primacy in those guidelines. The signatures did not change the documents that govern the companies (Bebchuk & Tallarita, 2022).

One recent case in an oil company follows the doctrine. The activist investor Elliott Management acquired about 5 percent of BP’s shares. In February 2025 BP announced a strategy reset. It raised planned oil and gas investment to about 10 billion dollars a year through 2027. It also cut planned spending on transition businesses by more than 5 billion dollars a year (Meredith, 2025).

That case needs a caution. It shows a sequence instead of a proof. An investor acquired shares, and the company changed its plan. Oil prices and BP profits also moved in the same period, and this post cannot separate the causes.

The strongest objection to the central claim

The strongest objection to claim 2 comes from the emissions data.

The Carbon Majors database traces fossil carbon dioxide emissions to the companies and states that produce the fuel. Its 2024 report links 57 producers to 80 percent of global fossil carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. The composition of that total is the problem. Nation-state producers account for 38 percent of the emissions in the database since the Paris Agreement. State-owned companies account for 37 percent. Investor-owned companies account for 25 percent (InfluenceMap, 2024).

About three-quarters of those emissions therefore come from producers whose controlling owner is a state. That is a claim about control. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Coal India, and China Shenhua all trade on exchanges and all report to minority shareholders. State control changes the objective function of a producer, and it adds public revenue, employment, and national strategy to the calculation. A theory of delay built on shareholder value alone explains one quarter of the recent record.

Three further objections weaken the claim.

• The attribution method counts the carbon in the fuel that a producer sells, and buyers release most of that carbon when they burn it. The method therefore assigns to producers the emissions of the people who use their products. That choice is defensible. A reader who wants to assign responsibility to demand can use the same numbers to do it.
• One investor-owned producer stopped. DONG Energy was a Danish oil and gas company. It sold its upstream oil and gas business to INEOS in 2017, renamed itself Ørsted, and moved its capital into offshore wind (Ørsted, 2017). The Danish state holds 50.1 percent of the company, so state control accompanied the change. In August 2025 Ørsted announced a rights issue of 60 billion Danish kroner, after it stopped the partial sale of the Sunrise Wind project (Ørsted, 2025). The case supports both readings. An investor-owned producer can stop oil and gas production, and capital markets price the transition harshly.
• Shareholders sometimes push in the other direction. In 2021 the small investment firm Engine No. 1 won three seats on the ExxonMobil board. Large institutional shareholders supported it, and it ran that campaign on climate grounds (Kolodny, 2021). Shareholder power is a channel, and its direction varies.

A test of claim 2, and the result

An earlier draft of this post said that the ownership test was available and unrun. The test is in the report that this post already cites, and here is the result.

Between 2015 and 2022, emissions from investor-owned coal production fell by 939 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is a fall of 27.9 percent. In the same period, emissions from state-owned coal production rose by 343 million tonnes, which is a rise of 29 percent. Emissions from nation-state coal production rose by 2,208 million tonnes, which is a rise of 19 percent (InfluenceMap, 2024).

The three ownership types moved at different rates and in different directions. That result is what claim 2 predicts, and it is evidence for the bounded version. It also has an obvious alternative reading. Investor-owned producers sold coal assets to state-owned buyers, so part of the fall is a transfer of ownership instead of a reduction in production. The database records production by current owner, so it cannot separate those two effects.

The bounded version of claim 2 survives. Shareholder value explains the conduct of investor-owned oil and coal producers. Those producers cut coal emissions while state producers raised them. The documented record of public doubt and advertising in this post also comes from an investor-owned company.

That record needs one caution. Brulle’s lobbying total is not broken out by ownership type, so this post cannot compare the two groups on lobbying. Shareholder value does not explain the majority of emissions since the Paris Agreement. I therefore retire the unbounded version of claim 2 and keep the bounded version.

Denmark supplies the counterexample that the bounded claim needs on the state side. In December 2020 the Danish parliament cancelled the eighth North Sea licensing round and all future rounds. It also set 2050 as the end date for oil and gas extraction (Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy and Utilities, 2020). A state can decide to stop, and the same state controls Ørsted.

The machinery that makes extraction licit

Claim 3 is where anthropology does work that no other discipline does. Anthropologists can do fieldwork inside a company.

Hannah Appel is an anthropologist, and she spent years with the United States oil industry in Equatorial Guinea. The Licit Life of Capitalism organizes the industry around six forms. Two of them are the offshore rig and the fenced housing compound, which put the work at a distance from the country. Two more are the contract and the subcontract, which move liability to other firms. Appel argues that capitalism is a project that people build and rebuild (Appel, 2019). She also argues that the separation is deliberate and that it costs money to maintain.

Stuart Kirsch is an anthropologist, and Part 2 used his work on mining. Kirsch describes a new politics of time, in which a company works to delay the public recognition of harm. The company answers a scientific finding with corporate science. Kirsch traces the parallels with the tobacco industry (Kirsch, 2014).

Douglas Rogers is an anthropologist, and he studied the oil complex of the Perm region in Russia. The Depths of Russia shows an oil company that funded cultural festivals and social development programs. The company also funded a campaign for the city to become a European Capital of Culture (Rogers, 2015). The company became a regional institution. Its parent, Lukoil, is Russia’s largest privately owned oil company, so this case is a fourth investor-owned example instead of a state one.

Susan Crate is an anthropologist, and her review article maps how the discipline studies climate change. She argues for climate ethnography, which is collaborative and works at several sites at once (Crate, 2011).

What is wrong with claim 3

Three problems apply to those three ethnographies, and they are more serious than any problem in the sections on claims 1 and 2.

The first problem is the transfer. Appel studied oil enclaves in Equatorial Guinea. Kirsch studied the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea. Rogers studied cultural sponsorship in Perm.

None of the three studied a climate delay operation inside an investor-owned oil company. Anthropology did not produce that ethnography. This post reaches its conclusion by analogy from three other industries in three other countries about three other harms.

The best evidence on the climate delay apparatus comes from other disciplines. Benjamin Franta is a historian of science and a lawyer. He documented how economic consultants funded by oil companies produced cost models that inflated the price of climate policy. Their reports appeared as independent work, and they helped defeat carbon pricing in the United States over several decades (Franta, 2021). Franta supplies the mechanism that the ethnographies cannot supply.

Robert Brulle is a sociologist, and he measured the spending. More than 2 billion dollars went to climate lobbying in the United States Congress between 2000 and 2016. Fossil fuel, transport, and utility interests dominated that spending (Brulle, 2018).

The second problem is the rival explanation. Brett Christophers is an economic geographer, and he argues that the binding constraint on the transition is expected profit. Renewable electricity is cheap to produce, and it earns thin and uncertain returns. The capital that must fund the transition therefore goes elsewhere (Christophers, 2024). If Christophers is right, the machinery is decoration on a return calculation.

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist, and he made an earlier argument of the same family. He grounds the politics of fossil fuel in the physical properties of coal and oil, which decide who can interrupt the flow (Mitchell, 2011).

I cannot separate the two explanations with the evidence in this post. One test would work. The machinery costs money, and a company that faced a pure return calculation would pay for it only in proportion to the return. If the spending on corporate science, sponsorship, and consultation tracked the return on the underlying project, the profit account would win. If a company kept paying for the machinery on projects it was ready to abandon, the machinery would do its own work.

The Franta and Brulle figures measure one side of that test. Brulle counted the lobbying spending, and Franta described what the paid consultants produced. Neither one matches the spending against the return on a specific project, so neither one completes the test. Nobody ran the full test. I state claim 3 as an interpretation until somebody does.

The third problem is the sample. All three ethnographies describe cases where the machinery worked. A claim that the machinery makes extraction licit needs cases where the same forms failed.

Suzana Sawyer is an anthropologist, and Part 2 cited her study of an oil company in Ecuador. The enclave and the contract produced an indigenous movement and a lawsuit instead of licitness (Sawyer, 2004). Cymene Howe is an anthropologist, and she documented a wind park in Oaxaca that indigenous resistance stopped (Howe, 2019). The machinery has a failure rate, and this post cannot state it.

Naming the epoch

The word Anthropocene names a proposed epoch in which human activity drives Earth system change. Geologists rejected it as a formal unit. In March 2024 the International Union of Geological Sciences upheld a vote against the proposal, so the term remains informal (Witze, 2024).

Andreas Malm is a human ecologist and Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist. They argue that the species category is analytically wrong for this purpose. A minority of humans built the fossil economy, and most humans did not (Malm & Hornborg, 2014). Malm made the historical version of the argument in Fossil Capital. British cotton manufacturers chose steam over water power for control over labor and location, even though water power was cheaper and more abundant (Malm, 2016). That mechanism produced fossil lock-in a century before anyone wrote about shareholder value.

Jason W. Moore is a sociologist and environmental historian, and he proposed Capitalocene. His argument is that capitalism organizes nature instead of acting on an external nature, and he calls the resulting system a world-ecology (Moore, 2015). Donna Haraway is a biologist by training and a historian of science, and she accepted the political point while she added further terms. She proposed Plantationocene for the specific system of plantation agriculture, and Chthulucene for a way of living that she prefers (Haraway, 2015).

Malm published the sharpest objection to Moore. He argues that Moore dissolves the distinction between nature and society, and he calls the position “unbridled hybridism in Marxist garb” (Malm, 2018).

The obvious historical counterexample is the state socialist record. Those economies burned coal at very large scale, and they did not run on capital accumulation in the market sense. Heede records nation-state producers, which include the Soviet Union and Chinese coal, at 312 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Heede, 2014). Moore answered that objection before I raised it. He argues that the Soviet project belonged to the capitalist world-ecology and competed on its value logic. He reads it as a tributary mode of production instead of a socialist one (Moore, 2018).

His answer works as an interpretation, and it has a cost. A system that contains its declared opponent is hard to test. The distribution question is the durable part of this debate. The Anthropocene assigns responsibility to humanity in general, and the emissions record does not support that distribution.

The numbers, and what they do not show

Richard Heede is a researcher at the Climate Accountability Institute, and he built the original database. He traced 914 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent to 90 entities. That total is 63 percent of cumulative world industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions from 1751 to 2010. Investor-owned entities account for 315 gigatonnes, state-owned enterprises for 288, and nation-states for 312. Half of the total came after 1986 (Heede, 2014).

The International Monetary Fund measures the public support for fossil fuel use. Simon Black, Antung Liu, Ian Parry, and Nate Vernon-Lin report that fossil fuel subsidies reached 7 trillion dollars in 2022. That figure is 7.1 percent of world gross domestic product (Black, Liu, Parry, & Vernon-Lin, 2023).

The figure needs a plain explanation. Explicit subsidies, which are cash payments and prices below supply cost, are 18 percent of the total. Almost 60 percent of the total is the price that users do not pay for global warming damage and local air pollution. The 7 trillion dollars is therefore mostly unpriced damage that no treasury pays.

The investment record shows the gap between the stated plan and the capital. The International Energy Agency published a net zero pathway in 2021. That pathway approves no new oil and gas fields beyond the projects already committed in 2021 (IEA, 2021). In its 2025 report the agency put upstream oil and gas investment for that year at just under 570 billion dollars (IEA, 2025). It expects world energy investment to reach 3.4 trillion dollars in 2026, with about 1.2 trillion dollars going to oil, natural gas, and coal (IEA, 2026).

Those figures measure one thing well. The stated pathway and the capital move in opposite directions. They say nothing about ownership type, and the 1.2 trillion dollars includes the state producers that the bounded claim 2 excludes.

Energy, power, and the transition

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, and he proposed the term energopower for power that operates over and through energy. He argues that the analysis of modern political power needs a theory of fuel and electricity alongside a theory of populations (Boyer, 2014). Mitchell made the case for that priority first.

Boyer and Cymene Howe tested the idea on renewable energy. They studied the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, which holds the largest concentration of wind parks in the hemisphere. Energopolitics follows the land contracts, the state agencies, the investors, and the indigenous organizations that opposed the projects (Boyer, 2019). The wind developers used land contracts and consultation processes that resemble the ones Appel and Kirsch describe for oil and mining. Howe’s volume records that the resistance stopped one large project (Howe, 2019).

The lesson is limited to this case. At Tehuantepec, a change of fuel did not change the arrangement that governs land and labor. A wider claim needs the same study at other sites. Anna Tsing is an anthropologist, and she named the related process salvage accumulation, in which capital captures value that it did not produce (Tsing, 2015).

The capture argument also has the weakness that Part 1 named in Polanyi’s double movement. If fossil production expands, the argument blames capitalism. If renewable production expands, the argument says that capitalism captured the transition. An argument that fits every result predicts nothing. The Oaxaca record contains the counterweight, because one project stopped.

What would count against this post

Four tests would count against the argument here.

• The ownership test on coal is one test, and the bounded claim 2 passed it. If the same test on oil and gas showed investor-owned and state producers changing production at the same rate, the bounded claim would weaken.
• One case would need a producer without state control and without a state as its majority owner. If such a producer stopped oil and gas production, the account of the incentive would need a revision. Ørsted is the closest case, and the Danish state holds the majority of it.
• If governments priced the implicit subsidy in full and production continued at the same rate, the incentive account of delay would fail. The IMF figure makes that test measurable.
• For claim 3, the spending test is the falsifier. If a company spent on the machinery in proportion to the return on the project, the profit account of Christophers would explain the behavior. Claim 3 would then add nothing.

What comes next

Part 1 argued that a market society treats land, labor, and money as commodities that they are not. Part 2 added the geography of that arrangement. This post added the atmosphere, which is the clearest case of land treated as a commodity that it is not.

The evidence supports a graded conclusion. Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists projected warming accurately, and the company communicated doubt in public. Shareholder value explains the conduct of investor-owned producers. Those producers account for about a quarter of the emissions in the Carbon Majors database since the Paris Agreement.

Ethnographers document the machinery of the corporate form in oil, mining, and wind. Its transfer to climate delay is an analogy that awaits a direct study. The stated pathway to net zero and the flow of capital point in opposite directions.

The next post turns to labor, which is the second fictitious commodity. It examines inequality, precarity, and the affordability crisis, and it asks what the ethnographic record shows about life inside them.

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