Rob Morse on Exxon's grant to Stanford

"...Oh, yes, and Stanford will be renamed Standard, as in Oil, and its motto will cease to be “The Winds of Freedom Blow,” which sounds like a call for wind power. The new motto will be “Oil’s Well That Ends Well.” ...

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ROB MORSE, The San Francisco Chronicle

The Big Game will look a little different this year.

Instead of a guy in a tree suit dancing on Stanford’s sideline, there’ll be a guy in a gas pump suit.

The Stanford team will be wearing red, but it’ll be the red of Exxon along with its blue. Players’ numbers will end in .9, like gas prices. The Stanford band won’t be playing its traditional “All Right Now.”

Instead, it will play the official Exxon company song. Yes, there really is such a thing, or so an anti-Exxon group called StopEsso claims on its Web site.

The song goes:
"Exxon’s the winner, Exxon’s the best, Exxon is better than all the rest. Exxon’s the greatest, how lucky can we be to be part of the Exxon company."

All of the above is in the fine print of the agreement by which Exxon, General Electric and other power companies are contributing $225 million to establish an energy research center at Stanford.

Oh, yes, and Stanford will be renamed Standard, as in Oil, and its motto will cease to be “The Winds of Freedom Blow,” which sounds like a call for wind power. The new motto will be “Oil’s Well That Ends Well.”

General Electric wanted it to be “We Bring Good Things to Life,” but former CEO Jack Welch got custody of the motto as part of his severance package, and it now says, “We Bring Good Things to Jack Welch’s Life.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that the big polluters are bringing good things to the life of squeaky clean, financially strapped Stanford. But how can any joke such as those above be more absurd than the idea that ExxonMobil is seriously looking for “environmentally benign” energy solutions?

Or as an Exxon spokesman put it, the company is funding research at Stanford to find attractive choices. You don’t have to be a cynic to believe that this massive money spill down on The Farm is a result of unattractive choices made by Exxon over the years.

Word association test: “Exxon” . . . “Valdez.”

Exxon has led the industry in resisting the notion that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming. In 1997, Exxon’s President and CEO Lee R. Raymond gave a widely publicized speech attacking the Kyoto pledge to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. He questioned the basic research and said
the greenhouse effect is partly a result of natural causes.

You know, like cow emissions.

Raymond resisted a shareholder resolution on greenhouse gases, instead calling for more debate. Yet he resisted debate to the extent of going to the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep shareholders from voting on the resolution.

The Exxon chief is under attack on other fronts, too. He refused to add sexual orientation to his company’s nondiscrimination policies. When Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999, he dropped Mobil’s domestic partners benefits program.

I say “he” because Raymond very much runs Exxon, and his verbal emissions have made him the poster boy for greenhouse gases and Exxon the poster company.

Raymond may claim he doesn’t know anything about his company’s record, though.

In 1994, after losing the Exxon Valdez lawsuit, Raymond refused to answer yes or no when asked if his company’s recklessness caused the oil spill. He said he didn’t know anything about the officers running the ship— even though he said it was his job to report to the Exxon board on the company’s internal investigation.

What else? Exxon faces a lawsuit charging it with supporting the Indonesian military in torturing and killing suspected rebels and civilian sympathizers near the company’s operations in that country.

Welcome to Stanford, Exxon. Take the money and run, Stanford. Open holes as big as the one in the ozone layer, and run right through that Cal line. Of course, the agreement calls for the team to lose that silly name, “the Cardinal,” so blatantly copied from Harvard’s “the Crimson.” The team will
be called “the Robber Barons,” a suggestion made in the mid-1970s when Stanford dumped its Native American mascot.

From a 19th century robber baron to 21st century robber barons. That’s the Stanford story. Maybe it will work out for the best, and the research will discover that attractive choice.

Oil’s well that ends oil. But somehow I don’t think that’s what this is about.

San Francisco Chronicle

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