One of the many challenges on the road to fossil fuel abolition is the US-style of bankruptcy, where any valuable assets of a bankrupt corporation or individual are sold to help compensate their creditors.
With fossil fuels, this risks setting up a perverse circumstance where coal, oil, and gas which we should not burn keeps getting shuffled to new owners whose only reason for buying it is to burn it:
Financing more digging at existing mines—the second link in the supply chain—is no problem either. Last year coal production hit a record 8bn tonnes. It is not quite business as usual. Since 2018 many mining “majors” (large, diversified groups listed on public markets) have sold some or all of their coal assets. Yet rather than being decommissioned, disposed assets have been picked up by private miners, emerging-market rivals and private-equity firms. New owners have no qualms about making full use of mines. In 2021 Anglo American, a London-based major, spun off its South African mines into a new firm that instantly pledged to crank up output.
If humanity is to have a safe and prosperous future, fossil fuels need to be abolished before we produce catastrophic climate change. This is a social objective far more important than refunding the creditors of bankrupt firms.
