BANGOR DAILY NEWS • April 27, 2020
For the global oil industry, it has been a double whammy. First, a price war between two of the world’s three biggest producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, drove the price per barrel down. They were fighting each other for market share. Then the COVID-19 lockdowns that started spreading across the world in early March cut total demand for oil by 30 percent. The rate of return on new oil and gas projects is now about the same as on wind or solar power projects, so where is the smart money going to go? Oil is ‘low return, high risk, high carbon’, so don’t touch it. The real question is: what does the decline of oil mean for our civilization’s prospects for dealing with climate change without a global calamity? ~ Gwynne Dyer