The chief executive of Exxon Mobil is pressing lawmakers in Europe to abandon a sustainability law, calling it part of a “very misguided effort to kill oil and gas as a way of addressing climate change.”
The comments by the chief executive, Darren Woods, in an interview this week with The New York Times, came just days after U.S. officials denounced the European Union’s policies to swiftly reduce planet-heating emissions of greenhouse gases. The continent has experienced one of its hottest summers on record and its governments are taking steps to protect their people and their economies from the hazards of extreme weather, which are being exacerbated by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Mr. Woods said he had spoken with members of the Trump administration and lawmakers in Europe about a rule that requires large companies operating in the 27-nation economic bloc to identify and prevent adverse environmental and human-rights effects in their global supply chains. The rules, known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, were adopted in 2024 following several years of debate. Their timelines have been delayed. They are now scheduled to go into effect for companies starting in 2028.
“We see this as a really significant impediment to continuing to have operations in Europe and to be a successful business there,” Mr. Woods said. Exxon is the largest U.S. oil and gas company.
Companies operating in Europe will have to come up with a plan to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit temperature rise to relatively manageable levels. The rule is in line with the European Union’s broader law to neutralize its climate emissions by midcentury.
To meet that 2050 target, the European Union has also adopted legally binding commitments to cut emissions in the short term. The bloc has pledged to reduce emissions by 55 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, and it is currently debating what emissions-reduction targets it should set for 2035.
On Thursday, the European Union’s energy ministers were scheduled to meet to discuss those 2035 and 2040 proposed emissions cuts. They remain at odds over how stringent the cuts should be, and it remains unclear whether they can settle their differences in time to announce their 2035 targets ahead of this year’s global climate summit, scheduled for November in Belem, Brazil.
The office of the European Union’s climate commissioner, Jopke Hoekstra, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There is broad scientific consensus that the rise of global temperatures is intensifying extreme weather disasters such as droughts, storms and wildfires over time, contributing to trillions of dollars in economic losses.
European lawmakers have made the case that renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, afford them energy independence, meaning that they do not have to rely on other nations to keep the lights on. That has become all the more important since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia was a key source of gas for European power plants.
That Russian gas has largely been replaced by American fossil fuels, but Europe has accelerated its construction of renewable energy infrastructure too.
Mr. Woods said he wanted the corporate-sustainability directive “reversed and repealed.”
“The European policymakers have gotten it wrong,” he said, “and instead of fixing the mess that they’ve created, they’re trying to drag every American company that’s doing business over there into that mess.”
Several major oil companies have been sued in courts in Europe and elsewhere over the climate effects of their core business, the selling of oil, which, when burned as fuel, produces greenhouse gas emissions dangerously warming the world.
Industrialized countries in Europe are among history’s biggest polluters, and European Union lawmakers have been under mounting pressure from citizens to move their economies away from burning coal, oil and gas. The net-zero regulations, as the emissions-reductions laws are known, pose a threat to oil and gas companies worldwide and particularly American ones, given that they supply the largest shares of oil and gas to the continent.
On a tour of key European cities last week, Trump administration officials criticized those laws as products of “climate ideology” as they sought to secure contracts to sell more American oil and gas. Under the latest trade deal with the United States, European officials have said they would buy an additional $750 billion in oil and gas from the United States over the next three years of President Trump’s term, a pledge that many analysts said was not feasible in practical terms because it would mean tripling the trade in fossil fuels.
The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas as well as the largest producer of oil.
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
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