What Role *Should* the Fossil Fuel Industry Play on Climate?

Source: What Role *Should* the Fossil Fuel Industry Play on Climate?

Amy Westervelt

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I couldn’t make it but our reporter and editor Molly Taft volunteered and wrote this great essay about the experience that we co-published with The Nation this week. Reading it, again, I was struck by the same thought: why does anyone think the fossil fuel industry is going to solve the climate problem? I understand why people want to believe that, I just don’t understand why they do given all the evidence of how very unlikely it is. Here’s just a snippet of that essay:

Oil and gas companies are not totally necessary to keeping the cleantech industry going, one investor told me; there are plenty of funding sources that aren’t Big Oil. But existing energy companies do make good partners for a lot of startups, and are certainly ponying up some cash for certain ventures. The investor encouraged me to notice which initiatives the fossil fuel funders were taking interest in: not in near-term technologies that could replace or knock out their product, like solar or EVs, but in longer-term ideas that will take a lot of research and capital, and give them room to keep producing as much oil as possible in the next decade. A startup that works in hydrogen or carbon capture makes sense for an oil company to invest in. Besides, fossil fuel companies have a lot of money to throw around, the investor told me, and it makes sense to diversify.

And finally, this week, I was looking up something related to fossil fuel funding of university research, a topic we’re constantly digging into at Drilled, and was reminded of a conversation I had with a university administrator last year. He called me up in response to a story I wrote for The Guardian and earnestly wanted to know what the problem was with fossil fuel funding so long as it wasn’t going toward more and better drilling. His school was only taking money for solutions, he told me. I asked whether they got a say in what got researched and he said not in any specific way, but that they were only funding research on carbon capture and biofuels. I asked him: “Do you think that so much money and effort would be going into carbon capture and biofuels if the industry hadn’t put so much money into funding those, hadn’t picked them as solutions?”