"Fossil fuel extractors bend the world to their will – help fund the journalism that exposes them.
 Across the globe, oil, gas and coal companies use an ever-widening set of tactic to crush competition and opposition. With the world’s most powerful man helping them at every turn, it’s critical we reveal their full impact" Guardian George Monbiot  Tue 26 Aug 2025Why does capital love fossil fuels? It’s not hard to explain. They exist in a small number of discrete locations, where the right to exploit them can be owned and monopolised. Most can be extracted commercially only at scale, excluding small competitors. They can be stored and traded all over the world, allowing prices to be optimised across time and space. Renewable energy, by contrast, can be generated almost anywhere, by almost anyone with a small amount of money to invest.

Renewables might now be cheaper than fossil fuel in the vast majority of cases, but this makes them less attractive to capital, not more. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and highly profitable. Renewables are highly competitive and not very profitable. As a result, fossil fuel extractors will fight tooth and nail to prevent market forces from operating. They demand the equivalent of the royal monopolies granted by the English Crown centuries ago, excluding competitors and enabling old technologies to fend off newer ones. Their enormous profits allow them to bend politics to their will, attacking and maligning their critics, sowing disinformation and denial and assisting the election of those who favour them. In Donald Trump, they have found the monarch who will grant them their exclusive charter. Over the past year, the Guardian’s reporters have documented the methods used by this industry to maintain its profits pipeline. These range from bankrolling Trump’s election to extract the brutal environmental rollbacks he has ordered on its behalf, to the unprecedented congressional lobbying campaign it has financed, to the funding of secretive junktanks and the financial fuelling of the far right – which channels, as it has done throughout its history, the demands of powerful corporations and oligarchs. 

Around the world, oil, gas and coal companies use an ever-widening set of tactics to crush competition and opposition, including lawsuits that seem designed to shut down environmental groups. Those who seek to defend the world from climate disaster and the tipping of Earth systems it could find themselves confronting a ruthless and deadly force. Now there is uncertainty. Last week, a few dozen residents and activists held a protest event next to the sprawling plant, which hummed and whirred in the summer heat, one 650ft chimney puncturing the horizon, another, smaller flue striped red and white, like a candy cane.Dozens of train cars full of coal, hastily procured after the plant’s supply was used up ahead of a closure that has been scheduled for four years, backed up in the sunshine. When burned in the huge 1.5GW plant, this coal emits about 7.7m tons of carbon dioxide a year.“Trump is just trying to keep the money coming into coal companies as long as he can, I suppose,” said David Hoekema......read on  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/26/fossil-fuel-extractors-bend-the-world-to-their-will-help-fund-the-journalism-that-exposes-them