A relative who worked as a fairly senior geologist at Exxon explains it thusly: the top management is “scary smart”. They have been preparing to pivot into other energy markets in a huge way for decades. They are currently exploiting the resources that are available until it makes more sense to move into those alternative markets. Thus they offload the first mover costs to entrepreneurs and the cost of continued fissile fuel extraction to the global poor. From the perspective of the management, they have a legal responsibility to increase shareholder value above all other concerns.

That’s an anecdote but corporate strategy is never truly known by scholars, who instead compare the declaratory and observed behavior of sector actors with one another. Kolk and Levy find that Exxon is least invested in green technologies right now and explain it based on “company-specific factors, particularly corporate histories of profitability and location, market assessments, degrees of centralization and the presence of climate scientists.”

Short answer then is that their leadership believes it is in the best interest of shareholders to keep making money from oil - and it seems certain that to the degree their socialization allows they are planning to shift revenue streams precisely when the calculate first mover costs are negated and the benefits of staying with oil are too low to justify the reputation costs.

Sources:

Winds of Change: Corporate Strategy, Climate change and Oil Multinationals, Ans Kolk, David Levy, European Management Journal 19 (5), 501-509, 2001