The Oil Kingmaker

As the world staggers through heat waves driven by our addiction to oil and gas,

climate scientists like University of California, Berkeley’s Zeke Hausfather have come to coin a new term for the drastic rise in global temperatures we saw last year: “gobsmackingly bananas.” You can see why scientists are so concerned. By a “large margin,” 2023 was the warmest year on record. 

In April 2023, before records were broken month after month, Munich Re, austere backers of many of the world’s insurance companies, said that it would no longer underwrite any new oil and gas developments and had set itself “ambitious decarbonization targets.” Joining in was the International Energy Agency, which said there should be “no new oil and gas fields approved for development” if the world is going to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets agreed under the 2015 Paris Agreement.