Bill McKibben writes:

People used to worry that the fossil-fuel industry would hit “peak oil” and we’d run out of crude. It now seems far more likely that it’s going to run out of money instead.

Thanks to Covid-19 and the lockdowns, oil-laden tankers swing at anchor outside major ports hoping demand and price will go up to justify offloading their cargo. But long before the pandemic kicked in, the economic future had begun to sour for the petroleum majors, in a way that’s becoming clear as we move into shareholder meeting season this spring.

Consider, for instance, the divergent fortunes of two strands of the oldest oil fortune on earth, the one descended from Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.

The main path leads from Standard Oil to Esso, and on to Exxon and to its longtime banker JPMorgan Chase. Those guys have doubled down in every way on a fossil-fuel industry future: we now know that Exxon had a full understanding of climate change in the 1980s, but that, instead of alerting the rest of us, it helped build the architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that held off a real response to global warming for three decades.

During some of those years, Exxon profited handsomely, making huge sums of money. But producing a product that is destroying the planet courts the danger of regulatory pressure: you can use your political clout to hold regulators off for a while, but eventually they begin to catch up with you. That’s what happened at the Paris climate talks in 2015, as the notion finally began to break through that we had to wean ourselves from oil. [Continue reading…]