A Climate of Change? The Oil Industry and Decarbonization in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Decarbonization has been identified as necessary to preventing catastrophic climate change, creating a dilemma for the global oil industry. This article examines the industry's reaction to this dilemma and focuses on its historical response to market and governmental regulatory pressure. The article argues that differing national climate policies provoked some oil companies to develop proactive decarbonization strategies. However, the continued growth of fossil fuel demand, the industry's vested interests, and the voluntary nature of climate governance have resulted in the industry taking very little meaningful action to achieve decarbonization.

Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?

“…The rapid reduction in emissions necessary to check ongoing climate change poses a real threat to the near-and medium-term business models of incumbent fossil fuel companies and associated vested interests (34). A growing body of literature has outlined how powerful vested interests have developed strategies to both directly discredit the science on climate change and more subtly to delay the need to reduce reliance on fossil fuels (35,36). Alongside programs of misinformation by hydrocarbon companies (37,38), such strategies have notably been used by think tanks in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Europe-all with close ties to this industry (39,40).…”

“…What they have in common is that they view climate change as a significant business risk, although they have adopted slightly different strategies to deal with this risk (51). Those opposing decarbonization are increasingly abandoning outright climate denial in favor of hedging strategies, such as diversifying operations to mitigate risks (36) and insistently promoting gas as a transition fuel. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, for instance, brings together some of the largest oil and gas companies to try to devise strategies to lower their climate impacts (51).…”

Crisis conservation and green extraction: biodiversity offsets as spaces of double exception

“…Extraction and (neo)extractivism are increasingly used as concepts in the study of exploitation and subjectification within contemporary logics and practices of 'development' (Acosta 2013;Junka-Aikio and Cortes-Severino 2017;Veltmeyer 2016). Facing a negative public image and frequent resistance from local communities, some extractive companies have sought to advance claims of sustainability and contributions to climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation (Boon 2019;Dahl and Fløttum 2019).…”

Pedagogy of the implicated: advancing a social ecology of responsibility framework to promote deeper understanding of the climate crisis

“…Meanwhile, the climate emergency's interaction with other neoliberal and militaristic crises resulting in poverty, violence, conflict, food insecurity and mass displacement, constitutes a 'catastrophic convergence' (Parenti 2011, 7).Despite this catastrophic convergence and the threat of mass extinction, individuals, corporations, and nationstates continue to interact and influence one another in complex ways to preserve business as usual in political, economic and ideological terms. Fossil fuels are projected to control four fifths of the world energy market by 2040, and greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by over a third over the next 20 years, as the oil and gas industry use their influence to ensure that climate change mitigation remains voluntary and market-based (Boon 2019). In fact, efforts to curtail the production and sale of fossil fuels by so-called 'carbon major' companies are continuously resisted by powerful vested interests, resulting in an international climate governance regime that exerts little direct pressure on an industry that is permitted to extract and burn fossil fuels in the full knowledge of their harmful effects (Boon 2019;Bradshaw et al 2021;Díaz et al 2019).As traditional oil and gas reserves become depleted, the fossil fuel industry has resorted to even more extreme extraction technologies and techniques in the pursuit of alternative sources of oil, coal and gas (Klare 2010).…”

“…Fossil fuels are projected to control four fifths of the world energy market by 2040, and greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by over a third over the next 20 years, as the oil and gas industry use their influence to ensure that climate change mitigation remains voluntary and market-based (Boon 2019). In fact, efforts to curtail the production and sale of fossil fuels by so-called 'carbon major' companies are continuously resisted by powerful vested interests, resulting in an international climate governance regime that exerts little direct pressure on an industry that is permitted to extract and burn fossil fuels in the full knowledge of their harmful effects (Boon 2019;Bradshaw et al 2021;Díaz et al 2019).As traditional oil and gas reserves become depleted, the fossil fuel industry has resorted to even more extreme extraction technologies and techniques in the pursuit of alternative sources of oil, coal and gas (Klare 2010). These companies often benefit from generous tax and regulatory incentives to discover and exploit new fossil fuel reserves.…”