Oil Companies Are Still Determined to Burn the Planet Down

This is an extract from Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market by Adam Hanieh, now available from Verso Books.

A few weeks into 2023, the world’s largest oil and gas firms began to announce their end-of-year results. ExxonMobil led the way, recording a $55.7 billion profit for 2022 — the biggest in the company’s history.

Shell followed, also marking a historic milestone in its 115-year existence, with profits of nearly $44 billion, over twice the amount earned in 2021. All told, the five leading Western supermajors — ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and TotalEnergies — reported a total of $200 billion in profits, an eye-watering $23 million for every hour of 2022.

Yet even these record-breaking revenues would soon be overshadowed by Saudi Aramco. Coming in at just over $161 billion, Aramco’s 2022 financial results not only exceeded the combined announcements of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, they became the largest corporate profits recorded in history.

Such results justifiably attracted the ire of many environmental campaigners, who rightly protested unprecedented fossil fuel profits while much of the world was facing the real costs of climate change. Indeed, according to the British charity Christian Aid, the total cost of the ten largest climate-related weather events through 2022 — floods, cyclones, and droughts — was around $170 billion, much less than the collective profits earned by the five largest supermajors and just a little bit over Aramco’s bumper results.

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