The Seven Sisters of the Old Oil Empire ruled the World for over a half century and were behind big conspiracies; starting wars, stealing countries’ natural resources, overthrowing democratically elected leaders and protecting autocrats most of the time with the help of the governments of the free western world. They used to control 85% of the Petroleum World Reserve but now they barely have 10%.
Air pollution, in 1960s, became a major issue and it was largely blamed on the combustion engines that was running all the vehicles that were populating the roads and highways. The Oil companies were in a state of denial and vigorously suppressed the truth by lobbying and hiring scientists to do this dirty job for them. Governments’ agencies started to feel the heat and many regulations were on their way to keep their citizens’ lungs clean and erase the smog that was haunting their landscape reminiscent of horror movies.
When regulations started to take effect, the CO2 emissions were becoming nightmarish and were seriously effecting the climate toward Global Warming. The world was caught off guard and solutions were needed to relief them from their oil addictions. Renewable energies (Solar and Wind) were on the table to do the job. Upon these facts, and the critical situation we were in, the Congress passed a “Solar Energy Research Development and Demonstration Act” in 1974 to steer us away from our oil’s dependency. The budget was initially valued at $6 billion and was used to improve solar cells related technologies to encourage the private sector to enter this market.
The Oil giants, considered the move as a threat to their main line of business and major retaliatory actions were needed. Their strategy was simple and very effective, buy all these new photovoltaic companies to secure their research and patents. Their second move was to suppress these developments and scientific finding by terminating them them in their infancy.
This practice continued until the end of the last century, during this period most of these companies were owned by them. They kept Oil production in full capacity and they told the world that solar was not a reliable technology and very expensive to market.
During this period of darkness, the Oil Giants kept making money and taking advantage of government subsidies. At the turn of the century things started to shift and the world discovered that they have been deceived and renewable and clean energies were essential to fight the climate change.
Now that the world is on alert, many countries have made the big shift to renewables with huge projects spread around the world. Norway is 99%, Sweden is 49%, Germany is reaching the 35%, California just committed that all its electricity will be generated from zero-emission sources by 2045. It was an unprecedented boom.
The fight is not over yet, the Oil companies have managed to convince Electricity Power Plants, now that coal is suffering even with all of the President Trump’s promises, that Natural Gas was a bridge to renewables. This has been another fatal mistake that needs to be rectified soon because Natural Gas, even though its CO2 emission is 50% less than coal, its methane emission is very high and much worse.
How these Seven Sisters or whatever left of them managed to survive, is a huge mistake that humanity might not survive to correct.
