As already illustrated, the fossil fuel industry takes great efforts to maintain a position of power and to stop the growth of clean energy and jobs, despite the growing certainty that they are massively bad for the environment and financially risky. Everyone must understand that they are never going to stop pushing to advance their industry, sell their products, and make more money, no matter what the costs to humanity, society, nature, or anything else. They’re not going to play nice. A report from the National Resource Governance Institute states the following (emphasis added):
“If national oil companies follow their current course, they will invest more than $400 billion in costly oil and gas projects that will only break even if humanity exceeds its emissions targets and allows the global temperature to rise more than 2°C. Either the world does what’s necessary to limit global warming, or national oil companies can profit from these investments. Both are not possible.”
BOTH ARE NOT POSSIBLE.
Oil companies know it, they’re fighting for life or death. This is just national oil companies, supposedly watching out for their people. As we know, we had a short stint recently in the US where Exxon Mobil’s CEO was Secretary of State. That was undoubtedly a big coup for the coal, oil and gas industry that has been fighting for decades to keep their position, and fighting dirty, and explains why the US government took climate change information off of it’s website on Day 1 of the Trump administration. Many regulations protecting people against the pollution and waste of the fossil fuel industry have been rolled back over the last four years, and we have a lot of work to do to make up from the damage, according to Inside Climate News:
“Trump Rolled Back 100+ Environmental Rules. Biden May Focus on Undoing Five of the Biggest Ones Together, the five regulations, if not reversed, would release an additional 1.8 billion to 2.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2035.”
Let’s not leave out Russian oil companies, which are fighting environmental rules and lauding climate change as a way to open new trade routes for delivery of their oil reserves and reach more oil in the Arctic.
These are not small foes. They’re not going to back down under any circumstances. Forget about their nice greenwashing commercials and empty promises and initiatives: they are not going to lay down and die while their billions in stranded assets are buried for good. They want to burn up their oil, gas and coal, and will stop at nothing to do so, but we cannot have a world where we burn up these fossil fuel reserves and have a livable future. The only choice is to put laws in place that will ensure the change that’s good for the climate, economy and humanity is prioritized, and not the fossil fuel industry, and to get everyone fighting the fight in their own way.
