Oil company BP recently announced it was ditching its climate goals to refocus on dirty energy in the hope of raising share prices.
However, the shares decreased by 1.4% on the day following the news and have continued to slip in the roughly five weeks since, as of April 4, showing a total decline of nearly 3% over the last month and 25% since April 2024.
BP made noise over the past five years about "reimagining energy for people and our planet" and aiming for oil production to fall to 1.5 million barrels a day by 2030, but it is singing a different tune now.
The company has relegated low-carbon energy investment to 5% or less of its budget (slashing a total of $5 billion), with its finance director claiming that even that amount must be "underpinned by government support." Meanwhile, the company is increasing its investment in oil and gas to 20% of its budget for a total of $10 billion.
The U-turn not only caused share prices to fall slightly but also infuriated green investors, as BP sold them a story in 2020 with promises of reducing oil production and investing more in low-carbon energy.
The world is consistently moving away from dirty energy and toward cleaner options, but political headwinds often lead to a mixture of impatience and skepticism with properly supporting renewable infrastructure development, so it's hard to predict the future for BP and other dirty energy companies that decline to diversify their business plans.
While not all fossil fuel stocks have struggled, the shaky recent stock performances from BP, Exxon Mobil Corp. (down 11% over the last year), and Shell (down 8%) nonetheless indicate that investing in dirty energy companies is no safe bet — especially when you look back at what happened to BP itself back in 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon spill led to a 55% drop in the company's stock value.
Even though the environmental, social, and governance investment bubble was built on strategies that have been called into question, the long-term momentum of the clean energy market provides a lot of appeal for investors.
That's even clearer when considering the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries' rapidly growing energy demands and increasing moves to run their own power generation have frequently led to wind, solar, and nuclear investments. Further, wave-based hydropower has experienced massive growth in recent years, with Eco Wave Power's stock rising by over 400% since April 2024, despite some leveling off in 2025.
Beyond these being smart investments, they are also better investments for the future of the environment, as they don't rely on burning fuels that send greenhouse gases into the air, among other environmental hazards from oil and gas production.
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No way 👎 As Matilda Borgström, a campaigner at the climate action group 350.org, told The Guardian, "Pumping money into more oil and gas increases the risk of climate impacts for us all, flies in the face of legal climate targets and, with the renewables sector growing exponentially, is a big risk to the shareholders that BP is so keen to please."
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