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The age of oil is ending: are you ready for the transition to clean energy?
Asked to name the companies that have fed the world’s energy needs during the last century, the big oil companies, especially the “the seven sisters” between the 1940s and the 1970s, automatically come to mind.
The development of oil and fossil fuels in general, together with the internal combustion engine, marked an era of strong economic growth and improved living standards, but built on an omission that the oil companies knew very well since the mid-1970s, but which they flatly denied: that we were poisoning our planet.
And as the truth about the damage they have done has gradually spread, the oil industry’s reputation has steadily fallen. We now know they are largely responsible for a worsening climate emergency that claims thousands of deaths every year in floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts and heat waves, as our damaged climate is choked by CO2 emissions and the methane released by the products these companies sell us, supported by the subsidies the governments of half the world give the oil industry. Without those subsidies, oil would no longer be competitive, and the climate emergency would be little more than a memory of a dark past.
What are most oil companies doing today? Extracting oil and gas like there was no tomorrow, while claiming that they are in…
