The IEA report: The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions
The key part: Oil and gas companies investments are incompatible with a level of fossil fuel usage that keeps global temperatures beyond catastrophic thresholds. “Incompatible” as in “double what they should be, and not looking like that’s changing any time soon.”
To emphasize: In a couple of decades, either fossil fuel demand will be high enough to justify those investments — and we’ll be facing (more) catastrophic environmental degradation, mass-death heatwaves, etc — or fossil fuel demand will have fallen to something on a reasonable path to keep necessary environmental systems working, and so between now and then the industry will have gone through an overcapacity crash of historical proportions and most likely geopolitical implications. You can have one or a mixture of both scenarios, but not neither.
How it’s going: Going by the latest and increasingly fed up UN Emissions Gap Report, the oil and gas companies are more likely to win that bet. Although how much energy demand there’ll be in that sort of environment, who knows? And there’s of course the reputational risk from highly populated areas of the world becoming uninhabitable, including some with nuclear weapons.
A parochial postscript: Argentina’s main export-oriented activity is agriculture (so important that the sort of record-breaking drought of the sort we’ll be getting more and more of is enough to cause a serious macroeconomic crisis), and the long-term structural bet for a second one is… fossil fuels. It’s not the only country that’s specially exposed global warming — the Middle East as a whole is a natural area of concern, and I’m rather terrified by the situation of India — but the simultaneous economic and political salience of both activities makes Argentina an interesting if, as usual, not necessarily replicable case study.