Another Big Oil Company Slides Away From Renewable Energy Toward Its Natural State

The British oil giant BP will “significantly reduce” its investments in clean energy, it announced this week. This is like a ball rolling downhill. A balloon slowly deflating. A dead tree in the forest decaying into the soil. Nature is healing.

In other words, oil companies one-by-one walking back or outright abandoning their supposedly lofty green energy goals is more or less par for the course. In this case, BP hid the announcement inside a new partnership with a Japanese company called JERA; the new joint venture will manage offshore wind interests, and collectively will spend $5.8 billion through 2030. According to France24, though, only $3.25 billion of that will come from the oil company, marking a pretty sharp drop from a promise of spending $10 billion on offshore wind this decade.

BP was, theoretically, leading the oil industry charge away from its core business. In 2020, it pledged to cut its oil output by 40 percent by 2030; three years later, the goal was slashed to 25 percent. Then in October of this year, the goal was abandoned completely: no cut at all, let’s keep drilling.

This is no different than the rest of the industry; the herd is simply finding its way back to the well-trodden path. Last week Shell announced it would also split its offshore wind business off, saying it would no longer finance any new projects. The American behemoths including ExxonMobil and Chevron are barely worth mentioning; they made some nice algae-based fuel ads for a decade or so there, but never really dipped more than a toe in the water.

Again: these companies are not going to stop until they are made to, in one way or another. As long as oil and gas remain as lucrative as they are, the incentive for oil giants to do any more than bat their eyelashes in the general direction of a wind turbine is minimal. They are a bowling ball in the gutter; there’s no escape.