EnergyFactor By ExxonMobil | Pespectives has a new home

Energy and the Economy

On Friday, ExxonMobil announced a $500,000 grant to underwrite a technology job-training program in the greater Houston area that will help develop the workers to staff a rapidly expanding petrochemical industry. This comes just a few months after prospects for a “major workforce shortage” were discussed at the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers annual meeting.

Regular readers of this blog know that ExxonMobil and other energy industry companies pay a lot in taxes. But not everybody understands this basic point, particularly politicians who want to target us with even higher levies. So it was nice to see growing recognition of the tax burden shouldered by the oil and gas industry in The New York Times recently.


We often hear that partisan politics have gridlocked Washington. But last week a bipartisan group of senators reached agreement to break a legislative deadlock on chemical safety reform. The result is a bill which is receiving positive reviews from industry as well as environmental groups.

Last week the White House announced its intention to make America “a magnet for jobs and manufacturing so we continue to build things the rest of the world buys.” One way to advance that worthy ambition – and to give the overall economy a much-needed lift – would be for the Obama administration to give…


Several items have caught my eye in recent weeks that reinforce the old dictum that states are the laboratories of democracy. Under our system of government, states and individual localities may adopt different policy approaches on a host of issues. The lessons and success of those policies can offer valuable guidance to other lawmaking and…

The national discussion on the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is raising several important issues with policymakers, and the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) recently assembled a roundtable of economic experts to clarify some of them. In publishing a transcript of that discussion, which it did yesterday, ACCF makes a significant contribution to…



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