For years I’ve considered investors and executives in the fossil fuel industry to be lazy and stupid. They could make more money in the long term with clean energy, and yet they entrench themselves in their ways and opt to poison our discourse and slow down human progress.
I apologize if this thought experiment is messy. I got out of the shower with these thoughts and started writing. To separate clean energy from renewable energy, I will define the following:
- Renewable items can be “farmed” on demand, using natural processes that exist on the planet
- Non renewable items are created slowly, at a fixed rate, and cannot be created on demand. This includes fossil fuels and precious metals.
Those entrenched in fossil fuels oppose the alternatives that take away their power. Since fossil fuels are extractive and non renewable items, there exists a fixed amount of it on the planet. There is value and power from controlling this scarce resource.
Renewable energy can be created on demand by anyone with the means to do so. Solar and wind energy cannot be monopolized as both can be harvested planet wide by anyone with the resources to set up a “farm”.
In an alternate universe, if it was possible to harvest and store energy in the form of oil and gas, it would not be as attractive. Likewise, if it was possible to limit access to wind or sunlight, the rich and powerful would have an incentive to do that.
If people can recognize this difference, they will be more likely to ignore fossil fuel talking points and not act against their own self interest
I don’t think this is it. It’s simply a question of return on investment.
If I had oil industry related investments, I would want:
- supply from my investments to go up.
- demand for my supplied goods/services to go up.
Now if I am a small investor, it would make sense for me to slowly sell off my oil assets and invest into green energy IF: – I believe that there are investment opportunities in green energy that will give me a better return on investment than my current oil investments.
Whenever I sell an investment to pivot to some other investment, I undermine the value of my current investment. How’s that? Because I’m increasing the supply of my investment asset. This lowers the price.
Basically, if my oil stock was worth x, and if I put it for sale on the market, it’s now worth x-y, where y is some positive number.
Again, if I’m a small investor, y will be tiny as I’m not really increasing the supply of the oil stock by much.
BUT. If I’m an oil oligarch… Well, y is going to be VERY HIGH. It does not make monetary sense for me to sell off my assets and move them to green energy. I don’t necessarily have confidence that my losses (y) would be recouped through the ROI from green energy.
I’m a selfish, unempathetic asshole. I want to maintain my wealth. Therefore, I take the cheaper way out -> influence the government to delay green investment, so that demand for oil doesn’t fall.
“Touched” with the front end of a highway velocity Kenworth Semi truck towing final destination logs.
It’s simpler than that: the current rich support the industries that enabled them to get rich, whatever they are; and when a new industry finally does supplant them, a new group will get rich and oppose the next advance.
That’s the cost of privatized infrastructure.
If renewable energy had the lobbyist capital of non-renewable energy, things would change. Until then, very little.
For the rich and powerful, it’s not about making the world better, it’s about making my world better, and getting paid in oil money does that well enough.
You’re right that this has been a big reason for this resistance. It is not only that controlling the means of supply drives long term profits, but that the supply infrastructure generates huge profits as well. The largest portion of your home electricity cost is not the production but the delivery. If we could free everyone from both these costs almost everyone would be a lot happier.
You should extend this way of looking at it to the rest of the capitalist system we are being subjected to. Poorer quality goods lead to higher repurchase rates and more waste. Company mergers stifle new technology and slow human progress. These systems need heavy regulation and even extermination.
Changing your business model costs money and carries some inherent risk, and businesses hate risk. Its why theres so many sequels, spinoffs, and adaptions in theaters. Sure they could fund more Sinners’… but Fast and the Furious 35: Wheelchair Wheelies has a guaranteed audience.
The rich oppose anything that has a a smaller return of investment.
LINE MUST GO UP!
The rich oppose any enablement of the masses.
It’s not just that though. Sure it’s a decent rate of return but what is keeping your market cap/share high enough to maintain high investment?
Making money is secondary to selling stock
High stocks tend to be tied to high ROI. Meme stocks excluded.
Renewable energy (at least wind and solar) is decentralized.
It doesn’t need a huge corporation to build it, with enough bargaining power to blackmail the state.This feels a little truer than OP’s take. Even if oil were renewable, the steps to transform it from crude to something usable are beyond “normal” peoples abilities to just set up in the backyard.
Someone has been watching Technology Connections :p
Solution seems pretty simple get rid of the rich
Why do you think they are pushing for Hydrogen?
It’s made from oil.I completely forgot about hydrogen cars. What a strange middle man between electricity and oil.
You realise hydrogen comes from water right? You know, the thing made of hydrogen and oxygen? H2O? Why would it come from oil?
Because it’s cheaper to pull it from fossil fuels.
At present, approximately 96% of global hydrogen production relies on fossil fuels, contributing to substantial emissions, while only 4% comes from water electrolysis. Green hydrogen, produced via electrolysis with 55–80% efficiency, remains expensive at $2.28–7.39/kg, compared to grey hydrogen at $0.67–1.31/kg, which generates 8.5 kg CO₂ per kg of hydrogen production.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319925000382
If you were Shell or BP would you spend billions developing new production facilities to split Hydrogen off stuff or use your existing multibillion euro fossil fuel production facilities?
As solar and wind power becomes more popular so does green hydrogen because it’s a good place to dump excess production when no other storage is available.
Bingo, what you are explaining is a single Capitalist (or should I be saying Feudalism) principle of how to make even greater wealth-believing it is possible to make endless ever greater wealths.
The rich oppose clean energy…
Bit of an broad generalization.
It allows money to flow outside of the institutions they are heavily invested in. That’s why the rich don’t like renewables
Correct. Scarcity increases the value of a commodity. Which means renewable energy simply isn’t profitable enough.
