An inelegant shift away from green energy

Plus, a decade after the Paris Agreement, Wall Street's oil financings are as high as ever

In today’s edition:

— BP’s bumpy shift back to oil and gas is attracting attention from rival oil giants

— Wall Street banks funding record fossil fuel financing as climate commitments fade

— Dancing against climate change? Group limbos to raise awareness

— Severe storms to hit U.S. for second straight week

— Battery storage deployments rising as world embraces renewables

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BP’s shift away from green energy after two decades has been anything but elegant. The oil giant has lurched from scandal to scandal as it seeks to sell renewable assets. It has a new CEO. It’s lost top executives. Shareholder activists are circling. It fired its chairman of the board. But through all that, year-to-date, its shares BP 0.00%↑ are up 20%.

That much criticized about-face has now started to attract the attention of rival oil giants, who are questioning why they want to spend so much on renewable energy during a war about oil that has made all energy prices more expensive.

Shell SHEL 0.00%↑ this week said it hopes to sell its wind farm business for as much as $1 billion next year and focus on what it considers higher margin profits in oil and gas production. Norway’s Equinor EQNR 0.00%↑ said this morning it would slash capital expenditures on renewable energy production over the next decade from a planned 50% to about 10%.

The trend is startling because the surge in energy prices in the past few years, and particularly since the Iran war started four months ago, is causing governments and customers to re-evaluate their reliance on oil and gas because of the constant geo-political risks to supplies.

It’s also a major step back for the theory that the oil and gas giants would ultimately become all-purpose energy giants with wind, solar and nuclear. What it portends, instead, is an energy arms race between fossil fuel companies and big tech and other energy firms competing to power a rapidly warming world.

Still, margins are margins, and at least the short-term benefits can be seen in BP’s share price. The question for the oil giant leaders now is who are they going to sell all these green assets to? Starting to look like a buyer’s market.

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Tuesday’s subscriber insights

A Valero refinery in Aruba. Production ended there in 2012.

Ten years after Paris, oil finance boom as strong as ever