Robert Romano asks and answers the pressing energy question in his Daily Torch article Why aren’t oil companies drilling more? Look no further than the ESG goals in their corporate annual reports. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray

The largest oil producers in the U.S. do not appear to have major plans to increase production through 2025, a review of U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) data and corporate reports of U.S.-based oil companies reveals, despite oil prices being over $100 per barrel and inflation raging at 7.9 percent the last twelve months.

According to EIA, U.S. oil production will reach 12 million barrels per day in 2022 and 12.6 million barrels per day in 2023, a return to pre-Covid production levels that peaked at 12.9 million barrels per day in Nov. 2019.

But what about over the long term? A look at top U.S. oil producers reveals that these companies have been pivoting away from carbon-based energy for years. In short, they’re going green.

[ExxonMobil and Chevron are two examples where] explicit Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals are being pursued by the largest oil companies in the U.S., particularly goals to support the Paris Climate Accords and to reduce carbon emissions to zero.

In both companies’ cases, the strategies short-term include deploying carbon capture technologies as well as reducing onsite carbon emissions on existing production facilities, and more investment in green energies.

Long term, however, they are sealing the fate of carbon-based energies, by embracing an investment model that calls for their extinction.

Ultimately, that will mean almost no oil production or consumption, a goal that would be contrary to an oil company’s continued existence and profitability.

ESG investing has increased dramatically the past decade via private retirement funds regulated under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) thanks to a regulation by the Obama Labor Department in 2015.

In addition, the $762 billion federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal employee retirees will begin investing in ESG funds in 2022, following state government employee retirement funds in California, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland and Oregon.

The combination of these incentives and subsidies has led to an unprecedented rise of ESG investment: $38 trillion out more than $100 trillion global assets under management, will grow to $53 trillion by 2025, according to Bloomberg News. That’s about one-third of all assets under management, not necessarily seeking profitability, but to save the world.

BlackRock, a hedge fund with more than $9 trillion of assets under management, have placed green activists onto the board of Exxon to make it a “not-oil” company, thanks to ESG. Other hedge funds like Vanguard also make significant ESG investments.

But it has led to catastrophe. Besides making Europe and the West increasingly dependent on energy from adversaries like Russia, inflation is on fire. Thanks to the energy crisis, even major ESG beneficiaries like Tesla CEO Elon Musk are calling for an increase in oil and gas production in a bid to offset Russia, writing on Twitter on March 8: “Hate to say it, but we need to increase oil & gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”

Musk is right. It’s time to expand production dramatically. But ESG won’t let us. That’s a big problem.

The net result of these policies incentivizing and subsidizing ESG investments has been to restrict capitalization and financing to carbon-based oil, coal and natural gas energies in favor of green energies such as solar, wind and electric vehicles — and endangering the West.

As it turns out, energy security is national security, and with ESG, we do not have energy security.

See also Wake Up and Smell the Fossil Fuel Insanity