Fossil fuel companies are protecting themselves by lying compulsively about their intentions

[Most data here come from the 2023 IEA 'World Energy Investment ' report]

If you would like a pleasantly maddening picture of exactly how severely the fossil fuel industry has been lying to us, here's their total net income from 2015 to 2022, compared to how much they've spent on various non-fossil technologies:

In 2022, fossil fuel companies saw their net income nearly double. Their investments in non-fossil alternatives, both good (wind, solar, energy storage) and questionable (bioenergy, CCUS) are essentially invisible, relative to their windfall gains.

That money didn't come from thin air - it came from us. Your absurd electricity bill, the cost of filling up your car, heating your home, buying your food, paying your rent, paying your childcare - all of moved from 'pretty high' to 'anxiety-inducing' thanks to the terrible flow-on impacts of the dual crises of intense reliance on fossil fuels, and the price of those fuels sky-rocketing. Those tall bars? Millions of people had to suffer loss, to create this gain.

What are these companies doing with this cash? Mostly: spending it on supplying even more fossil fuels, or increasingly, buying shares back from their investors. Functionally, close to zero of it is going towards shifting their businesses away from selling deadly and dangerous fossil fuel substances.

And even though the IEA says clean energy spending in fossil fuel companies has increased, they also highlight that most of that increase (paltry as it is) comes from a huge investment in bioenergy - with all its questionable carbon accounting and land-use conflicts

In the year that profits more than doubled, spending by fossil fuel companies on wind and solar nearly halved.

There are, very often, demands that we ought to give fossil fuel companies the benefit of the doubt. Do we need another two thirds of a decade to sit there watching them continuing to make the problem worse? This is hard evidence of their real intentions, no matter their promises.

And make no mistake, most of the cash in the fossil fuel industry lies with companies that have established net zero commitments in their company policy.

An Influence Map report last year found that fossil fuel company marketing hyper-focuses on clean energy, emissions and new technologies. Given that only a tiny fraction of their actual spending is on these, how is this anything less than sinister, and knowingly dishonest?

Money is flowing in the wrong direction. We're tracking towards the most-bad outcomes, not the least-bad. And while total, global clean energy spending is increasing, so is fossil fuel spending. For four years in a row. That simply shouldn't happen, knowing what we know of both the immediate, medium-term and long-term impacts of relying on an expensive and dangerous product.

It's smashing the accelerator when we're careening towards a wall. We haven't even begun until we stop actively trying to worsen climate impacts

This is at the heart of the debate that's emerging this year about greenwashing, and the concern that calling it out causes companies to retreat back into their shell.

There is simply no escaping the real-world data on what these companies are doing. There is no utility in looking the other way, turning the other cheek, in the hope that if we ignore the discrepancies between what they say and what they do, perhaps they'll eventually change their minds and start taking material action.

We know that they won't. We know now, for sure, that they'll only do the right thing when they're forced to do the right thing, because their profit motive and our physical safety are in direct contradiction, and they always will be.