Why does capital love fossil fuels? It’s not hard to explain. They exist in a small number of discrete locations, where the right to exploit them can be owned and monopolised. Most can be extracted commercially only at scale, excluding small competitors. They can be stored and traded all over the world, allowing prices to be optimised across time and space. Renewable energy, by contrast, can be generated almost anywhere, by almost anyone with a small amount of money to invest.
Renewables might now be cheaper than fossil fuel in the vast majority of cases, but this makes them less attractive to capital, not more. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and highly profitable. Renewables are highly competitive and not very profitable.
As a result, fossil fuel extractors will fight tooth and nail to prevent market forces from operating. They demand the equivalent of the royal monopolies granted by the English Crown centuries ago, excluding competitors and enabling old technologies to fend off newer ones. Their enormous profits allow them to bend politics to their will, attacking and maligning their critics, sowing disinformation and denial and assisting the election of those who favour them. In Donald Trump, they have found the monarch who will grant them their exclusive charter.
Over the past year, the Guardian’s reporters have documented the methods used by this industry to maintain its profits pipeline. These range from bankrolling Trump’s election to extract the brutal environmental rollbacks he has ordered on its behalf, to the unprecedented congressional lobbying campaign it has financed, to the funding of secretive junktanks and the financial fuelling of the far right – which channels, as it has done throughout its history, the demands of powerful corporations and oligarchs.
Around the world, oil, gas and coal companies use an ever-widening set of tactics to crush competition and opposition, including lawsuits that seem designed to shut down environmental groups. Those who seek to defend the world from climate disaster and the tipping of Earth systems it could cause find themselves confronting a ruthless and deadly force.
Perhaps the most powerful weapon in the hands of the fossil fuel companies is the media. The billionaire press has defended their interests at every turn. It remains the principal outlet for their denial, disinformation and delaying tactics. Some of its proprietors are heavily invested in fossil fuels. As a body, they belong to what one of their editors once called the “rich man’s trade union”: they perceive an attack on any aspect of rapacious capitalism as an attack on themselves.
More than anything, we need media outlets not beholden to the fossil fuel companies; outlets that are prepared, despite the many financial and legal hazards, to resist this lucrative death cult. With no proprietor to appease, the Guardian’s reporters and commentators will continue to expose and document the machinations of this planet-killing industry.
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Join George Monbiot and special guests on 16 September for a special climate assembly to discuss the growing and dramatic political and corporate threats to the planet. Book tickets – in person or livestream
