Fossil Fuel Divestment: Our Painfully Ironic Gift to the Fossil Fuel Industry
The global fossil fuel addiction must be tackled from the demand side, not the supply side.
This article will make one simple point: Fossil fuel divestment is akin to imposing a large (and very poorly structured) global carbon tax on ourselves and paying all the proceeds to stakeholders in the fossil fuel industry.
Put another way, the inevitable energy price shocks resulting from indiscriminate fossil fuel divestment create a huge wealth transfer from developing world citizens with tiny carbon footprints to oil oligarchs with massive footprints (and sometimes ominous geopolitical aspirations). Obviously, that’s the complete opposite of what we want to be doing.
In the following sections, I’ll unpack how we got here, why fossil fuels are demonstrating such incredible staying power, how high fossil fuel prices damage economic upliftment, and what we can do to rectify this broken system. Let’s kick things off with the fundamental reason why fossil fuel divestment was always going to create more problems than it solves.
Complete and Utter Dependence
Take a look around you. Most likely, every man-made object you see has fossil fuels…
