David Biello is associate editor for environment and energy at Scientific American magazine.

So far in 2012, ExxonMobil has made $104 million a day -- and that's an off year. In 2005, the oil giant earned a net profit of $36.1 billion, or "more money than any corporation had made in history," writes Steve Coll in his illuminating saga of the most successful and largest heir to John D. Rockefeller's strangling monopoly, Standard Oil. Simply put, ExxonMobil has been among the world's largest and most profitable companies since the 1950s, and it is so confident of its future that it recently raised the dividend paid to shareholders by a whopping 21 percent.

Private Empire begins in 1989 with the tale of the Exxon Valdez, the company oil tanker that ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound, and ends 22 years later with ExxonMobil's credit rating surpassing that of the U.S. government. The title derives from the company's need to control actual physical territory in order to profitably pump. The result is amassed power and influence, used mostly for ill (if one's interest is human rights, economic development or combating climate change), or good (if one's focus is cheap gasoline).

Coll, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of previous books on the CIA's history in Afghanistan and on the Bin Ladin family, here weaves a work around a profile of the reigns of two emperors. There is South Dakotan Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, who parlays a relentless focus on safety in the wake of the Exxon Valdez into imperial corporate control, whether it is the initiation of a "safety minute" at the start of any meeting or the installation of tracking devices in the vehicles of known speeders. Raymond's successor, the Texan Rex Tillerson (the "Eagle Scout"), attempts to soften the company's image by doling out medals for good work, an incentive reminiscent of scout merit badges, and embracing a carbon tax to control greenhouse gas emissions.

ExxonMobil perhaps looms largest in the U.S. on this subject of climate change. Early in the book, Coll lays out the company's apparent objectives via an American Petroleum Institute memo from the 1990s:

Average citizen "understands" (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science; Recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the "conventional wisdom"; media "understands" (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science; media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints challenging current "conventional wisdom"; those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.

If that was also ExxonMobil's goal, the many millions of dollars that the oil company spent worked. Each item on that memo can be checked off -- thanks largely to Raymond's close relationship with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. "We just gave away the environment," observed then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill after the Bush Administration repudiated action on climate change in 2001.

Similarly, just 12 days before Obama's inauguration, Tillerson publicly advocated a carbon tax. In fact, that thumbs up seemed to have more to do with further delay of any regulation than a change of heart on climate change. As Coll puts it nicely, quoting a company lobbying meeting with the new Administration, Tillerson "was happy to have a position that nobody was going to embrace."

The irony is that ExxonMobil found good use for climate change: It cut its greenhouse gas emissions as a result of its focus on profits, largely by avoiding the flaring of natural gas co-produced with oil. It even used climate predictions to inform exploration, banking on global warming to melt more ice and thus allow access to Arctic oil, a nice side benefit of the company's intransigence on climate change. "Don't believe for a second that ExxonMobil doesn't think climate change is real," Coll quotes a former manager.

Such quotations as well as anecdotes humanize the massive cast of characters in this sprawling book. Raymond is revealed as kind to the air crew of his private corporate jet while routinely excoriating journalists, analysts and underlings for alleged stupidity. Fine phrases -- "Chad's politicians and labor leaders might be poor and some of them might be unsophisticated, but they had been schooled in obduracy and provocation by French colonialists, which made them formidable" -- leaven the work. And Coll puts the reader inside very closed rooms, such as a barbecue thrown for Russian President Vladimir Putin by U.S. President George W. Bush in November of 2001.

The book reads much like Dan Yergin's magisterial The Prize, absent the zest of conquest and with just a whiff of distaste. Coll handles science -- whether climate change, endocrine disrupting chemicals or geologic estimates of natural gas reserves -- with clarity and power. There are tantalizing hints of massive technological feats, such as Sakhalin I, ExxonMobil's massive engineering project off the western coast of Russia. Yet the poetry of the vast machines that enable oil's journey from well to gas tank is foregone in favor of the endless mundanity of bureaucratic power.

Read on

When it comes to energy policy, is the United States worse than Turkmenistan? How about Russia, where a contract is a contract only when President-elect Vladimir Putin so decides? Is it less congenial than Brazil, where according to Reuters, Chevron executives seem likely to face criminal charges over a leak of 2,400 barrels of oil, 0.1 percent the size of BP's 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill?

In a speech Friday, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson (pictured above left, with Putin) said the U.S. compares unfavorably from an energy policy standpoint not just to those countries, but also to China, Argentina and Kazakhstan. The backdrop is a humongous, high-stakes boom in U.S. oil and gas drilling, and a superlative election-year battle between the U.S. industry and the Obama Administration. Both sides think the bonanza will much improve the U.S. economy and its balance of payments, but after that their respective fact sheets barely coincide.

I won't parse the whole flurry of industry and Administration statements. But Tillerson's speech -- delivered at the IHS CERA annual oil conference in Houston -- caught my eye both because he runs the industry's most successful company, and for his atypical rhetorical flourishes. You can watch yourself.

Read on