$2.8 BILLION

LAST YEAR, we were hit with a staggering number: $2.8 billion is how much profit the fossil-fuel industry has earned daily for the past 50 years. Which is a problem, because the people making that money have the motive and the means to try to keep it alive.

“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel Verbruggen, the academic who calculated that figure, points out. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

You can see this happening at the highest levels — at last year’s global climate conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-fuel-connected people registered in attendance, dwarfing the delegations from almost every country. This year’s climate conference is scheduled for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO of the national oil company. And you can see it at the most granular levels, too. Earlier this year a study was released showing that gas stoves cause hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma in the U.S. alone — an unnecessary toll since cheap magnetic induction cooktops produce dinner without fumes. But within days of that study, it was reported that the natural-gas industry spent millions hiring “influencers” to say happy living demanded a blue flame.

That endless payoff can’t last forever — eventually the economics of renewable energy will prevail. Indeed, things have started to shift.

The fossil-fuel sector underperformed for the past decade, until Putin’s war intervened and the price of oil spiked, and Exxon reported record profits. Any delay in the move away from fossil fuel is profitable to Big Oil, and damaging to the rest of us. So we must build movements to speed up that transition. Hence: