Could the demonised oil industry become a force for decarbonisation?

When warren buffett was asked to explain in April why Berkshire Hathaway, his investment firm, had built a 14% stake in Occidental Petroleum, or Oxy, over a frenetic fortnight of buying starting two months earlier, his answer was long. It included a digression into John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory” of 1936, and a rollicking description of why Wall Street still resembles a gambling parlour, as it did back then. He barely mentioned the Houston-based oil company, now worth $69bn, besides saying that he had read Oxy’s annual report for 2021 and that Vicki Hollub, its boss, “made nothing but sense”. The pithiest explanation came from Charlie Munger, Mr Buffett’s long-standing sidekick: “We found some things we preferred owning to treasury bills.”