"The Problem Is That Capitalism, As A Way Of LIfe, Does Its Best To Force Us To Be Greedy"
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“The problem,” the political economist Geoff Mann has written, “is not that capitalism is a conspiracy of greedy people. The problem is that capitalism, as a way of organising our collective life, does its best to force us to be greedy – and if that is true, then finger-pointing at nasty CEOs and investment bankers may be morally satisfying, but fails to address the problem.” Substitute “greedy firms” for Mann’s “greedy people”, and this was exactly Marx’s point about capitalism and its coercive powers. Private individuals do not make history under conditions of our own choosing, but neither do businesses.
In short, the problem is not BP or indeed any other individual company. The problem is that BP and its fossil-fuel peers operate within a system that requires them to invest and operate in ways that are deleterious to the environment. In the half-decade after the 2015 UN climate change conference in Paris, European governments briefly talked a good game about taking actions – even up to the stranding of hydrocarbon assets – that might actually make fossil-fuel production less profitable in the medium and long term. Hence why BP, Shell and others then started making plans to transition into cleaner energy. They wanted to be ahead of the curve, or at any rate, not too far behind it.
But since 2020, governments have shown that it was in fact just talk. Most notably, they have continued to issue licences for new oil and gas production at near-record rates, despite being told by experts that such licences are fundamentally incompatible with plans for net zero emissions; Norway alone has issued more than 100 new production licences since then. It is this miserable government appeasement that has emboldened BP and the rest to abandon their transition plans. Elliott, the activist shareholder in BP’s case, merely forced the issue; putting Marx’s “coercive law” into practice.
It is entirely within the power and purview of governments to change this situation for the better; either by making fossil fuels less profitable, or by making renewables more profitable, or both. For example, robust carbon taxes would hobble fossil fuels, or more generous electricity tariffs would inflate returns on renewables. But what is economically straightforward on paper is politically fraught in practice: either of those courses of action would result in the one thing that sitting governments will never actively countenance, especially given the electoral experiences of recent years: namely, inflation.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/03/bp-green-ambitions-climate-emergency-capitalism
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