![]() A recent study showed that for the past 50 years, the oil industry has made profits of more than $1tn a year, close to $3bn a day. The price of oil fluctuates, but that short-term volatility masks the industry’s long-term certainty of success. ![]() In this, we see another key characteristic of the machine: the fortunes of nations may rise and fall, but the oil companies will always survive and thrive, floating above the chaos of the world like passengers on a private jet, shaking their heads performatively at all the problems below. The war in Ukraine, which has devastated a region of the world and displaced millions, has helped energy companies by driving oil and gas prices higher. More major companies will announce their figures this week, and they are all expected to be bountiful. Shell and Chevron each made nearly $12bn. Exxon Mobil made $18bn in profits in the past three months. Oil and gas profits in the most recent quarter were astounding. But one of its exquisitely evolved functions is to make it almost impossible to turn it off. ![]() Unfortunately the machine is also poisoning us all. The humming of this machine, the fuel and the money that it spits out, has powered a century of unprecedented production and consumption by the Earth’s first-world nations. Global capitalism is an incredible machine for extracting fossil fuels from our planet, refining them, shipping them to every corner of the Earth and making staggering amounts of money doing so. I t is useful to think of capitalism as a robotic savant, spectacularly gifted at doing one thing and cripplingly blind to everything else.
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