Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Heated:

I keep hearing these January and February quotes from CNBC financial analyst Jim Cramer in my head as I watch it all happen:

“I’m done with fossil fuels … They’re just done …”

“My job is to help you try to make money. And the honest truth is I don’t think I can help you make money in the oil and gas stocks anymore.”

I’m sure the investors who followed Cramer’s advice back then are glad they did now.

Cramer, of course, expected oil’s downfall would come at a much slower pace. He also thought it’d be because investors would increasingly reject fossil fuel companies because of their role in driving catastrophic climate change. 

I don’t think anyone expected it to happen like this. 

Because of coronavirus, “The global oil industry is experiencing a shock like no other in its history,” International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. People aren’t going anywhere, or doing anything—so there isn’t a huge demand for oil. Prices are therefore dropping to historically low levels. Twenty dollars a barrels! Look at these charts from the Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Look at them!

No one knows when life will go back to normal again—if it ever does (yikes). So the oil industry has no idea when demand will go back to normal again. That’s why over the weekend, oil-producing nations led by the U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia agreed to a historic 10 percent cut in oil production, to hopefully have demand meet supply again, and raise oil prices enough where oil companies can make money.

This all obviously has implications for climate change. Do I know how significant they’ll be? Do I know what this drop in price, demand, and production will mean in the long-term for the oil industry or for the climate crisis? That’s a hard nope, and a hard nope—but I’ll at least attempt to answer those questions in tomorrow’s newsletter. I’ve already put out a few feelers, but if you know of any experts who could speak to these questions, shoot me an email. I’m at emily@heated.world.

For now, I’m just going to list a few things that cost more than a barrel of oil right now.

• An 18-pack of 2-ply toilet paper.
• A 30-rack of Bud Light Lime.
• Two 24-packs of Klondike bars.
• An original, unopened copy of Now That’s What I Call Music Volume One on compact disc.
• Delivery avocado toast.
• The bobblehead of former New York Governor David Paterson I bought off e-Bay for my friend Andrew Beam for his wedding. (Beam doesn’t read the newsletter so he’ll never see this. Eat dirt Beam!)