I got a free trial of seeking alpha. It’s like a social media site mixed with blog/article platform for traders. Not doing a commercial here, just giving context. By all accounts it’s a terrible site to listen to because people are shilling their own financial products more than writing earnest analysis and DD.

Anyways I came across this one about how the oil market is poised to be a good opportunity to make some money. If this information is to be believed (and that’s a wild notion given the guy who wrote it has a vested interest in getting people to buy oil stocks), then it actually is a good material analysis of why all this climate policy isn’t working.

Policy makers have been pushing down oil growth for almost a decade. That pushed a bunch of people who thought they were clever into investing to make money off the dead cat bounces of the decline. But those never came and instead all that money went into expanding operations within the oil industry. This increased production even though people were pulling out. Even when the biggest producers were divesting.

Covid was supposed to be the final nail though as everyone would now work from home and go out less. That would crash demand and finish off any profits left. But now demand is higher than ever. It didn’t do any thing long-term.

So essentially all this policy goes after deterring investment instead of demand. Which, according to what we’ve all seen over the past 10 years, makes a lot of fucking sense. That’s why I’m leaning toward this being a credible chain of events. Of course our leaders didn’t do anything to materially deter demand. Cars got lighter and smaller and more efficient, but more and more people drive too. Where has this curb in demand happened? Seriously, I have no idea. There hasn’t been any significant investment in public transport, that’s for sure. They’re even cutting that now. Uber and Tesla doesn’t help anything. If anything more delivery jobs = more driving = more gas.

Now people can make incredible profits (author cites the declining years of big tobacco and we all know how much they simply transformed into big vape companies) off oil. Which is only going to make investment more appealing until the typical economic arguments for using oil makes a big political comeback. A new generation of oil barons who didn’t strike oil but just invested in stonks.

Of course, like I said, this guy is invested in energy. He’s going to have a more rosy outlook on the future. He needs oil demand to go up. We’ll have to see if the single-point trend continues though. I just thought his version of events lined up a little bit well with the inaction we know is occurring on climate. If they don’t materially and significantly touch demand, but just try to attack investment, it’s going to leave a very rich and powerful industry in the hands of even fewer than before.