Drill, baby, drill': Big Oil is coming after electric vehicles

Have you ever gone back over your new year's resolutions from years ago and just thought, "What was I thinking?" Over the last year, it seems that Europe's biggest oil corporations did just that.

- CHRIS WRIGHT

Back in 2020, Larry Fink started the year with his traditional capitalist flex. As the CEO of the world’s largest investor, Blackrock, he sent a 2,000-word letter to CEOs of the world’s biggest companies outlining what he wanted to see in the world and what was going to determine where his company put their money. In the letter, he said that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.”

These words ushered in a super-spreading frenzy of sustainability commitments that extended across companies like Delta Air Lines, Ford and even Europe’s biggest oil companies such as BP, Shell and Equinor. Soon after, BP announced it was planning to cut its oil and gas production by 40 per cent and the emissions of its products by up to 40 per cent as well by 2030. It also planned to be a net zero company by 2050, which is just what the climate doctor ordered. That was all ushered in by former CEO Bernard Looney.

At the same time, Shell committed itself to massive renewable energy investments, in the hope of becoming “the world’s largest electricity company”. And all was going well for these companies. In the run-off of the energy crisis, BP reported its annual profit of $28bn in 2022, the biggest in the company’s 114-year history. That same year, Shell similarly broke records, with an annual profit of $40bn.

However, only 12 months after reporting some of the biggest profit margins in the history of money, sustainability concerns have been dropped in a greed-addicted scramble to keep up with US and Middle Eastern competitors.