The above video is worth a watch, Al Gore rallies against the blatant pretence of oil companies to do something while bying the whole COP process and being total jerks about the fate of our planet. He shows one slide where he is angry that oil companies spend very little on carbon capture and storage, but instead give all their profits to shareholders.
To talk about it this way is the way oil companies want you to talk about it, because it hides the truth about money. It pretends that money is a thing separated from fossil fuels. It is not. This has been a point I have tried to make for 10 years now. Money is fossil fuel credit. This dictates how oil companies use money.
To understand this we need to imagine for a moment there is only one single oil company in the world. It sells oil for money. Let’s start there. Then it has to get new oil form its wells to the buyer. It takes the money and does what? Drill for oil. That requires energy. The company can pay the workers with the money, but what do they do? They go to the company gas station and buy gasoline, the money is back with the oil company. When it comes to moving the oil on trucks and ships, that requires oil, not money. The oil company can give money to the tanker which then needs to fuel up to move it, but that fuel comes from the oil company so it gets its money back again!
I hope you understand where I am going with this. You can extend this reasoning to all the users of the oil in the economy that this single oil company serves. All pay for oil with money, and all that money the oil company can not spend because it will come back again, only now there’s less oil to sell. The job of the oil company is thus to lock up the money. They do that in stock value, in dividents. Because those are not really spend. The whole investment world is meant to disappear money so it doesn’t try to buy oil.
You can probably find an answer to how much money that is invested in companies and funds etc. is eventually cashed out to buy real products and services. From the trillions on our planet its not a lot. Say its 5%. At the same time inflation eats at the amount of oil you can buy per $ and of course banks expand and contract the amount of $ in circulation.
Oil companies and banks cooperate to make sure the oil is not depleted too fast, the value of money doesn’t vary to much (banks care about inflation) but money does devalue (to release pressure of loans and destroy savings) and Al Gore does not realize this is what is happening.
He does not realize that if we invest in renewables (like the Trillion he talks about) that this money will have to be able to buy energy, still mainly fossil energy, and oil companies and banks have to agree. So the Shell CEO who says ‘I will produce oil until it runs out’ is not so much the problem, the problem is banks providing people with money so they keep buying that oil. Those banks also have to exist, and surprise, they exist for the largest part because they handle fossil fuel cashflow.
The hard, to near impossible thing to do, is to get control over the resources (raw materials, iron, wood, plastic, electronics) to build renewable energy sources. This is hard because banks want to give those (through loans, pricing, market manipulation, economistic lying) to companies that do not try to make them redundant.
To explain the redundant point : Say a company stamps aluminum for cars, it uses a lot of energy, that is bought from a power plant (maybe build for that purpose), and banks handle that cashflow. Banks live of that cashflow, lets assume its enough. Now if that company buys a row of wind turbines to provide it with energy, that cashflow from energy purchases from the power plant dry up. The bank loses a significant reason for its existence.
You can expand this small world example to the real world, banks are handling energy cashflows everywhere. Every product you buy the money you pay goes for a large part to the energy used to make it. If it is not logistics, heating lighting the store, the machine that made it, that melted the steel or stamped the plastic, its to the mine that mined the iron, the foundry that melted the raw ore into steel, the ship that took it to the factory or the oil that was needed to make the plastic. Etc etc. Banks depend on you driving energy expenses. Renewables at every stage of the productive chain will bleed banks from vital money and control over the system.
This is why I advocate the roboeconomy and why the main priority is to increase the amount of renewable energy sources. Granted this is going faster and faster, because not all banks are aligned and they at present can still come up with debt loaded financial constructions (so that they see cashflow from the use of renewables). That is why they push the grid, to make sure there is energy trade which banks can then be part of.
This story is however only told by me at the moment, I wish All Gore did it too. Why he doesn’t, why he keeps acting surprised about what banks and oil companies do, why he keeps acting as if we live in an organized society where people have to conform to the situation while its clear companies and entire industries don’t give a damn about any law, is a mystery to me.