[nicolailolansen]

Anti-wind groups are oil-funded? Surprised Pikachu.

[derbOac]

I agree although I think the value of the piece is in literally mapping out the relationships, and in explaining the extent of the problems, such as in ties to defunding an entire university's research budget over it.

[fabian2k]

Only the ones not funded by Russia.

[sligor]

Well, Russia itself is oil founded (huge part of the budget)

[dzhiurgis]

Why tho? Oil money should be funding renewables so they continue making money.

[PaulKeeble]

Shell at one point started doing that in the UK, they installed a number of offshore wind turbines. Then they sold them and doubled down on oil.

What I think is really weird in the world today is the power companies don't seem interested in selling more power. A parallel branch of Wind and Solar companies are doing all the installations and running the power but not to the extent of bringing new capacity online, its all purely for replacing the old coal and gas systems. Quite a lot of companies are having to buy their own installations and run them so they can have their new data centre.

[matthewdgreen]

Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.

[melvinroest]

You can argue both sides right? It makes business sense for oil money to do that.

However, there's also a trend that giant corporations are kind of like giant oil tankers (no pun intended). It takes a humongous amount of energy to change a company's fundamental core business. Oil companies are in the business of oil. Even if they expand to becoming an energy company, it takes a long time for them to change their "oil DNA". Based on that, I can imagine that certain oil companies - though not all oil companies - elect to maintain the status quo.

I don't think this is unique to big oil. It's unique to big {pharma, tech, oil, *}. What I find harder to find out is what the "weights" are for both sides and how they are influenced.

[chii]

> Oil money should be funding renewables

not while there's still oil to be extracted. Rigs (esp. offshore ones) take a lot of initial investment, and takes several decades to fully pay out. It's not hard to imagine that those investments hadn't fully matured and so they'd want the demand for oil to continue.

[tialaramex]

The whole point for them is ownership and while you can in effect own oil fields and these companies do, you don't own the wind -- the oil companies weren't smart enough/ early enough to persuade major governments to say oh, actually the wind belongs to BP and Exon.

So Hill Farmer Bob can just put a turbine up on the big hill and get "free" electricity. If there was magically Oil everywhere, and Bob was legally allowed to just drill for it, that's what he would obviously do, but in most places there is no oil and oil companies ensured they control the rights so Bob couldn't drill.

This is what capitalism is about, you own stuff therefore you get free money forever. But you don't own the sun or wind.

[wraptile]

You can actually do both. This way you have full control - invest where you control the market and sabotage where you don't.

[boesboes]

Because short-term profits outweigh everything probably.