Big Oil’s green-bashing stokes backlash as campaigners hit out at ‘talking points from the 1970s’
Saudi Aramco President & CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas, on March 18, 2024.
Mark Felix | Afp | Getty Images
Top oil executives have been sharply criticized for pushing back against the viability of the clean energy transition at a U.S. conference, with campaigners denouncing an industry claim that the shift away from fossil fuels is “visibly failing on most fronts.”
Speaking during a panel interview on Monday at the annual CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, Texas, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser said that a transition strategy reset was “urgently needed.”
The CEO of the world’s largest energy company proposed that policymakers abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas and instead “adequately” invest in fossil fuels to reflect growing demand. Aramco and Saudi ministry officials have previously advocated for ongoing investment in hydrocarbons to avoid energy shortages until renewables can fully meet global energy demands.
Nasser’s comments drew applause from the audience at CERAWeek — an annual energy conference by S&P Global that’s known as the “industry’s Super Bowl.”
Other oil and gas executives at the event echoed Nasser’s views, but spoke less directly about the state of the energy transition.
Shell CEO Wael Sawan said government bureaucracy in Europe was slowing the necessary development of clean energy, according to Reuters. Separately, Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods on Monday said that demand for petroleum products is “still very, very healthy.”
“So, I think one of the things the policy to date and a lot of the narrative has been very focused on is the supply side of the equation and hasn’t addressed the demand side of the equation. And the impact that price has on demand,” Woods told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”
“At the same time, the cost of converting and moving to a lower-carbon society, if that cost is too high for consumers to bear, they won’t pay. And we’ve seen that play itself out in Europe, with some of the farm protests and the yellow vest protests a year or so ago,” he added.
Campaigners have hit out at the oil industry’s claims this week.
“The fossil fuel industry continues to make distorted claims about our energy future,” Jeff Ordower, North America director at 350.org — a U.S.-based group focused on the global energy transition — said in a statement on Tuesday.
“They work night and day to torpedo a transition to renewable energy and then have the audacity to critique the slowness of the transition itself,” Ordower said. “CERAWeek should highlight a global vision toward a clean and equitable future, and instead, we get talking points from the 1970s.”
Aramco, Exxon Mobil and Shell were not immediately available to comment when contacted by CNBC on Wednesday.
IEA vs. OPEC
The International Energy Agency has previously said it expects global oil, gas and coal demand to peak by 2030 — a forecast that Aramco’s Nasser rejected at CERAWeek. The energy watchdog said in October last year that the transition to clean energy is not only happening, but is “unstoppable.”
“It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better for all of us,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement.
The oil-producing Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which disagrees with the IEA on its outlook for oil demand growth, said earlier this month that it still expects relatively strong growth in global oil demand for both 2024 and 2025.
Participants are seen at the Innovation Agora of the CERAWeek in Houston, Texas, the United States, on March 18, 2024. CERAWeek, known as a superbowl forum in the global energy industry, kicked off Monday in Houston of the U.S. state of Texas, with topics covering the entire energy spectrum but themed on multidimensional energy transition in four fields: markets, climate, technology and geopolitics.
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
Policymakers have also renewed their focus on energy supply security in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.
It is in this context that oil and gas executives have repeatedly sought to fend off climate criticism, claiming that Big Oil is not to blame for the climate crisis and warning that it won’t be possible to keep everyone happy in the shift away from fossil fuels.
The burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas is the chief driver of the climate crisis.
“It’s no surprise to see misleading claims like this coming at CERAWeek, because fossil fuel companies are the biggest cause of the climate crisis, and their continued political influence is the biggest obstacle to solving it,” David Tong, global industry campaign manager at advocacy group Oil Change International, told CNBC via email.
“Oil and gas companies are deliberately slowing and blocking a rapid fossil fuel phase-out with the types of dangerous distractions they are peddling this week in Houston,” Tong said.
‘There’s really no debate’
Some energy companies have scaled back their greenhouse gas reduction targets in recent months.
Activist investors have put pressure on fossil fuel companies to further align their emission reduction targets with the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, while some have urged firms to scale back on green pledges and instead lean into their core oil and gas businesses.
“What we are seeing now is a desperate attempt from the oil and gas industry to stay relevant and to double down on their old business model despite knowing the products they’ve sold us for decades are responsible for the climate crisis,” Josh Eisenfeld, corporate accountability campaign manager at Earthworks, an environmental non-profit based in Washington D.C., told CNBC via email.
“They’ve failed to evolve their business into one that is compatible with what science tells us must be done to avoid a climate catastrophe. There’s really no debate — science has made it abundantly clear what needs to be done and paramount to that is a transition away from fossil fuels,” Eisenfeld said. “To think otherwise is delusional,” he added.
EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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