This is worth noting:
> "One thing Woods didn’t cut was Exxon’s dividend, which is the third-largest in the S&P 500 and costs $15 billion a year. Employees recall the justification as basically this: A large portion of Exxon’s shareholder base comprised retail investors who relied on the dividend for income. “There might be many good business reasons to keep it, but don’t pretend to care about Grandma and her dividend when you’ve just fired thousands of employees,” says one former employee who quit in 2021 after more than a decade at Exxon."
This really points to a fundamental feature of the modern American economy - it is financialized to an unprecedented degree relative to the 20th century. The real power sits with the shareholders more than with industry.
This dividend issue also explains why the USA, which is also something of a petro-state (currently being the worlds largest fossil fuel producer since fracking took off), isn't really interested in developoing renewable energy. Renewable energy would destroy that whole market, and wouldn't replace those dividends.
This isn't too hard to understand, though some deliberately seem to avoid thinking about it. Renewable energy is mostly durable goods - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other storage systems. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels are a nice simple model - i.e., no fuel sales. This is offset a little bit by selling electricity over the power grid, and synthetic fuel production from air and water is another source of continual revenue (international jet travel requires this, in the absence of fossil fuels) - but make no mistake, those dividend payouts from continual sales at the pump over the lifetime of an internal-combustion vehicle will wither and die as renewable energy takes over.
All in all, I think that's why the Wall Street investment banks like Blackrock etc. are not moving investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables - all they'll see from that is a steep drop in profits.
Incidentally, this is not strictly a problem with investment capitalism - all countries that export fossil fuels face this economic dead end, be it socialist Venezuela, authoritarian Iran, capitalist America, etc. This is also why the main leaders in renewable manufacturing are places like China, Germany and Japan, which have no such resources (or only dirty coal).
> "One thing Woods didn’t cut was Exxon’s dividend, which is the third-largest in the S&P 500 and costs $15 billion a year. Employees recall the justification as basically this: A large portion of Exxon’s shareholder base comprised retail investors who relied on the dividend for income. “There might be many good business reasons to keep it, but don’t pretend to care about Grandma and her dividend when you’ve just fired thousands of employees,” says one former employee who quit in 2021 after more than a decade at Exxon."
This really points to a fundamental feature of the modern American economy - it is financialized to an unprecedented degree relative to the 20th century. The real power sits with the shareholders more than with industry.
This dividend issue also explains why the USA, which is also something of a petro-state (currently being the worlds largest fossil fuel producer since fracking took off), isn't really interested in developoing renewable energy. Renewable energy would destroy that whole market, and wouldn't replace those dividends.
This isn't too hard to understand, though some deliberately seem to avoid thinking about it. Renewable energy is mostly durable goods - solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other storage systems. Electric vehicles powered by solar panels are a nice simple model - i.e., no fuel sales. This is offset a little bit by selling electricity over the power grid, and synthetic fuel production from air and water is another source of continual revenue (international jet travel requires this, in the absence of fossil fuels) - but make no mistake, those dividend payouts from continual sales at the pump over the lifetime of an internal-combustion vehicle will wither and die as renewable energy takes over.
All in all, I think that's why the Wall Street investment banks like Blackrock etc. are not moving investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables - all they'll see from that is a steep drop in profits.
Incidentally, this is not strictly a problem with investment capitalism - all countries that export fossil fuels face this economic dead end, be it socialist Venezuela, authoritarian Iran, capitalist America, etc. This is also why the main leaders in renewable manufacturing are places like China, Germany and Japan, which have no such resources (or only dirty coal).