EXXON Mobil last week announced it made $10.9 billion (€7 billion) in the first quarter of this year, one of the biggest hauls in corporate history. It took a Rockefeller to tell the company that money isn’t everything.

Last Wednesday in a midtown Manhattan hotel 15 members of the Rockefeller family went public in an attempt to get Exxon to face up to the realities of climate change. The descendants of John D Rockefeller, America’s first and biggest oil industry magnate, said that the oil dinosaur faces extinction unless it steps up the search for alternative fuels.

“Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realised it could replace whale oil,” said Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, great-granddaughter of the Standard Oil founder. “Part of John D Rockefeller’s genius was in recognising early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”

Goodwin, an economist and environmentalist, said that Exxon was blinkered by its short-term pursuit of profits.

Until relatively recently, Exxon was chief cheerleader, and fundraiser, for the antiglobal warming crowd. In 2005 - when most of his friends in the oil industry were at least paying lip service to the concept of a greener future - Lee Raymond, Exxon’s former chairman and chief executive, said: “It’s yet to be shown how much of this [global warming] is really related to the activities of man.”

Greenpeace labelled Exxon the “number one climate criminal” and said its lobbying was instrumental in the US’s refusal to sign up to the Kyoto protocol, which set targets for reducing pollution in December 1997.

These days even George Bush is greening his act and Exxon too has become a little more eco-friendly since Rex Tillerson took the helm as chief executive. Not green enough for the Rockefellers or the firm’s growing army of critics, however.

Exxon is attracting heat on Capitol Hill as petrol prices climb towards $4 a gallon, creating conditions for what some see as an inevitable increase in taxes on oil company profits. Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton wants a windfall tax on oil company profits to be used to pay for a gasoline tax holiday. She also wants to create a $50 billion fund to invest in wind, solar and other clean energy sources.

Even on the oil-friendly Republican side, legislators are talking about tax changes to push oil companies to invest more in fossil-fuel alternatives. Congressman Devin Nunes, a member of the tax-setting ways and means committee, has a plan that will keep no one happy.

It includes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and then taking “all the tax revenue from drilling there and putting it into renewable fuels and advanced energy technology”.

Perhaps more tellingly for Exxon it wasn’t just the Rockefellers and politicos who were disappointed. Exxon’s soaring profits were $600m shy of what analysts had expected. Analysts were also worried – irony alert – that rising energy costs were hurting the company that makes its money from energy production.

Perhaps with some justification, Exxon has said that the new generation of fuels are not yet viable. Unfortunately for everyone – Exxon, the Rockefellers, you and me – the present generation of fuels is not viable either.

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