All must be sacrificed to the parasite class’s cult of Big Number Always Goes Up.
They don’t need to invest in new production any more, so that capital investment money is now pure profit.
Sadly, they are in fact investing in new production.
I blame the young earth creationist christians who think that humans are incapable of destroying gods creation, and that the increasing planetary instability means that god will return and put them in charge any day now.
I blame them too, but bigger blame adheres to those who own the fossil-fuel companies, and to the politicians who let the fissil-fuel owners buy them off.
There’s some weird links between american christianity and oil. At the very least a bunch of the people who got rich off of oil also tended to be devout christians, and used their money to support evangelizing christianity and oil dominance.
There’s a number of different reviews for “Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America”
This is an especially detailed one. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/
I found the book and it’s reviews after noticing just how biased toward the republicans the owners of the oil companies tended to be. Other large businesses tend to play both sides in politics, but the owners of the oil companies really seem to be really into the traditional gender hierarchies.
We see a bunch of things happening. First of all the West attacked and keeps attacking Russias oil production and exports with sanctions, due to Russias invasion of Ukraine. That means we actually have one of the biggest oil producers and exporters being taken out of the game. Something similar happened with Venezuela and Iran previously. So we actually see declines, just not choose by the countries themself, but mainly by the US, to keep out competition. At the same time 2023 oil consumption is 1.7% above 2019 oil consumption. The pandemic had a massiv effect on the industry and a lot of production is being restarted. However we also see EVs starting to have an impact. There are also a lot of other pushes mainly by net oil importers to reduce oil consumption. This seems to start to actually hurt the industry.
If I had to guess, we probably see the next reduction in oil production in the Middle East. Not due to the governments wanting to produce less oil, but due to a war in the region.
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…or maybe massive lobbying, subsidies, corruption and fear mongering? No, that can’t be it. A trillion dollar industry would never do unethical things to cling to their power.
Just remember, for the owners of extractive resources, if they lose that revenue stream, they might be forced to earn their money instead. That must terrify them. Much easier sitting on a lake of oil and living the rentier life on a massive scale.
But this is an existential crisis, and if they don’t take no for an answer, it’s possible that the time will come soon when someone has to go in and shut down that business the hard way.
