In Houston this week, the leading lights of the global oil and gas industry have gathered to congratulate themselves. Buoyed by the Trump administration and the prospect of surging energy demand from AI, executives at CERAWeek by S&P Global hailed themselves as sober-minded pragmatists who’ve finally prevailed in the alleged war on their business model. “We’re seeing some reality come back in the conversation,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told the crowd. Saudi Aramco CEO Amin H. Nasser similarly described the “inherent flaws in the current energy transition plan” whereby unnamed parties sought to “almost entirely” replace hydrocarbons “virtually overnight.” The future of energy, he added, “is not only about sustainability. Security and affordability must share the stage.”
Fracking executive-turned-Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who calls himself a “climate realist,” echoed the sentiment and took it one step further in his remarks to the conference, describing climate change as simply the “side effect of building the modern world.” The cures for that, he argued—”the Biden administration’s irrational quasi-religious policies”—have been “far more destructive than the disease. There are no winners in that world except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups.”
The supposed “realism” being projected in Houston isn’t exactly novel. Fossil fuel executives and the politicians they donate to routinely describe themselves as the victims of some fantastical green plot. Despite the fact that U.S. executives enjoyed record profits and production during the Biden administration, they love to whine whenever a Democrat is in charge and take a victory lap when Republicans kick them out. What’s novel about this round of self-serving oil and gas industry grandstanding is how much it aligns with the “realism” expressed by ostensibly more climate-conscious leaders.
So-called investor-led alliances to align the financial sector behind climate goals have largely collapsed as bankers and asset managers follow the example of fossil fuel companies who’ve walked back and reversed climate pledges. The Net–Zero Asset Managers Alliance suspended operations after its largest member—Blackrock—left earlier this year. The six largest U.S. banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo) all opted to ditch the Net-Zero Banking Alliance in the lead-up to inauguration day. Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates—who championed their climate philanthropy over the last several years—have warmed to Trump and stayed silent about his attacks on climate statutes. Breakthrough Energy, the climate group Gates funds, dramatically cut giving to climate groups and slashed dozens of staff in the U.S. and Europe.
Europe’s push to boost defense spending in response to Trump needn’t necessarily come at the expense of climate priorities, but some politicians are certainly framing green priorities as indulgent luxury items that should take a backseat to rearmament. And governments that have preached fiscal restraint with regards to green spending are broadcasting a new willingness to open their pocketbooks for weapons.
Polish prime minister Donald Tusk’s pitch for ramping up military spending included a rant against the bloc’s climate and environmental plans, blaming them for “prohibitively” high energy costs and limiting European competitiveness. Urging a ”full and very critical” review of all European Green Deal laws, Tusk warned in Brussels that Europe “cannot become a continent of naive people and ideas. If we go bankrupt, no one will care about the natural environment in the world anymore.” After successive German governments warned that deficit spending on climate priorities would lead to financial ruin, the two parties likely to form its new coalition government, the CDU and SPD, announced their intention to loosen the country’s supposedly ironclad debt limit in order to accommodate new defense spending. Bloomberg reports that the Netherlands and Germany will redirect $2.5 billion and $1 billion in climate spending for poorer countries, respectively, toward defense priorities; Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland are considering similar plans.
French president Emanuel Macron hopes to raise military spending from 2 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP—about $32 billion more annually. The French government also just released its long-awaited plan to adapt to a world that’s 4 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by 2100, well above the Paris Climate Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. Environment Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher announced the country will spend just under $1.75 billion to prepare for a “realistic” level of warming that the government predicts will devastate its most important economic sectors, especially agriculture and tourism, and slash GDP by 13 percent.
These European leaders and finance executives believe that climate change is a real and pressing threat. None would venture so far as to brag they don’t “do climate change crap,” as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted this week. But the paranoid, reactionary “realism” preached by oil and gas execs in Houston this week has plenty in common with the more genteel versions being peddled in Brussels and on Wall Street, where climate goals aren’t denounced so much as deprioritized in budgets and dropped from talking points.
Oil and gas companies have long recognized the very prospect of an energy transition as an existential threat to their business model. They spent decades and fortunes on lobbying and disinformation efforts to deny the climate was changing at all, and block any efforts that might impact their bottom lines. In the financial and, now, tech sector—where companies are angling to build-out huge fleets of energy-intensive data centers for AI—there’s still plenty of money to be made from fossil fuels. These executives don’t have much reason to worry about the taps getting turned off, or even slowed. That’s because the governments that broadcast their flashy net-zero commitments when those things were fashionable have reached a more mundane conclusion, cemented by Trump’s election: decarbonizing is too hard.
The problem with this line of thinking ought to be immediately apparent to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with climate projections. The catastrophic effects of climate change outweigh the costs of addressing it in just about every model. No amount of shoulder shrugging is going to keep that bill from coming due. It isn’t “realistic” for governments, especially, to pretend that rising temperatures won’t wreck economies and displace millions in order to focus on other priorities, or to half-heartedly prepare for a world warmed by 4 degrees Celsius. It’s delusional.
