Climate Change 2024: The Year in Big Oil

In a world managing climate change with even a hint of rationality, each year for the oil and gas industry would be a bit worse than the last. This is not that world.

In our continuing look back at 2024 in climate-related issues — see the first entry, on the year in disasters — we turn now to the industry primarily responsible for the problem but somehow facing essentially none of the consequences, at least so far. And that’s in spite of some truly damning looks into the industry’s malfeasance.

“Our investigation uncovered compelling evidence of aggressive industry deceit which continues to this day,” said Congressman Jamie Raskin (D—MD) back in May, discussing the House Oversight Committee’s years-long look into some big oil companies’ years of wrongdoing. “Big Oil’s campaign of deception and distraction undermines the efforts we need to mobilize our people and government to save our climate, our habitat, and our species.”

The now-widely understood facts about ExxonMobil’s and other companies’ intentional delay and deny tacts over the course of decades has helped fuel widespread litigation against the companies; these lawsuits have been going on for years, but there was some movement in 2024. For example, Maine recently became the latest state — joining eight others and Washington D.C., along with dozens of smaller jurisdictions — to sue the oil industry in state court, an effort opposed not just by the companies themselves but by their lackeys in red state governments and at the federal level.

These lawsuits, of course, are not exactly putting a dent into the bottom lines just yet. This summer, following another banner quarter from the usual suspects where they pulled in billions in profits and exceeded investor expectations yet again, I asked: why are these companies doing so well, when the world has a stated, vested interest in them not doing so well? The answers to this are both simple (money) and complicated (inertia, lack of vision, diverging multilateral goals and risks, among many other things), but one thing that will certainly not help is the incoming Trump administration.

Earlier in the year, news broke of candidate Trump simply asking the oil industry for $1 billion to help get him elected and push through things the companies would like — canceled executive orders, undone LNG facility pauses, and the like. The companies, which somehow manage to say things in public painting themselves as victims, more or less took on the challenge. By later in the campaign, it became clear that the industry — the one that has absolutely thrived under President Biden, setting records for oil and gas out put that get broken each successive year — was simply throbbing with excitement for a Trump victory.

Though the trend was building anyway, that win may have further released Big Oil from the unpleasant yoke of pretending to care about an energy transition. One by the companies have backtracked on renewable energy goals and production cut promises; just for example, BP dramatically cut its offshore wind investments in early December, while ExxonMobil followed that by announcing massive oil and gas investment plans, threatening to actually expand production by 18 percent through the end of the decade.

This will all keep happening, with a blip up or down here and there, until the industry is made to stop it. They have so many tools at their disposal — trillions in global subsidies, loopholes like ISDS cases where they can sue to intimidate countries into watering down climate policies, or the sort of back-room dealmaking like that on display in a sting operation just before COP29, the global climate talks that fizzled forward tepidly in November.

“It was a good year for the oil industry” should, at this point in our climate change trajectory, be a man-bites-dog story; it will remain the reverse until further notice.