BP Retreats on Its Climate Goals

As noted in the Washington Post, BP is scaling back its climate goals and deepening its investments in oil and gas, casting new doubts on big oil companies’ promises to embrace clean energy. This may or may not be related to the fact that their profits have more than doubled since 2021.

At this point, does anyone believe there is any real sincerity in their slogan “Beyond Petroleum?”

Someone noted recently that Big Oil has gone “insular.”  They’ve realized that they are completely unworthy of the public trust, and that they are detested by those of us who are working to achieve environmental sustainability.  We’ve reached the moment at which they no longer see any benefit from trying to reverse this situation.

If there is hope here, and there is, it will come, as the sages have suggested, not from destroying the old but by making the old obsolete, in this case with the electrification of the energy and transportation sectors.

The grandchildren of today’s oil executives will need to deal with the fact that their ancestors did their damnedest to get rich by rendering this planet uninhabitable.