Just what do you think the world would look like if these companies—working against our collective “good”, apparently—folded up their operations tomorrow without successors?
> collective “good”
Privatized gains, public losses. Surely this is known to you? Compare this to how Norway distributed its bounties.
The US and Exxon could have been a leader of the green transition starting in the 1970's, when everyone figured this out. With a few things breaking differently, we would have been.
We'd have had the absolute edge on the solar/battery transition.
Instead, precisely because of decades of deceptive lobbying, deindustrialization, bribes, and outright crimes, we're coasting far behind China's industrial policies.