On August 25th an icon of corporate America lost some of its sheen when Exxon Mobil was removed from the Dow Jones after nine decades, its predecessor company having joined in 1928. A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable for the leading oil company in the US not to be included in this prominent measure of the stock market. The ground has been shifting under one of the country’s biggest industries.
The removal of Exxon Mobil from the Dow Jones is not the beginning of a trend. It is the continuation of one. Energy stocks have been among the worst performers in both the dramatic sell-off and the equally dramatic rally this year. This came after energy was the worst performing sector in the US stock market in both 2019 and the entire decade since the depths of the global financial crisis, per CNN.
So, should we be jumping on this chance to put our savings into this major industry at a discount? Emphatically NO. The market isn’t wrong about the energy sector. It has been recognizing the reality that demand for oil, gas and – especially – coal is not going to be as high in the future and that the risks of climate change continue to rise. These trends are already forcing major changes on the industry. Even as the current US administration is opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, major oil companies around the world are taking multi-billion dollar write offs for oil reserves that they don’t expect ever to bring into production. BP has even rethought its long term strategy on the assumption that oil consumption has already peaked.
Ever since climate change activists began urging investors to divest from fossil fuels the argument against this course of action has been simple: it will hurt investment performance. Investors who avoid this major sector will not be able to properly diversify their portfolios and will lose out when fossil fuel investments do better than other segments of the market. This will hurt the performance of their portfolios and reduce the potential value of their savings.
It is now clear that this argument is fatally flawed and in fact the investors who divested from fossil fuels have outperformed those who stayed invested in the sector. Looking forward the external pressures on the fossil fuel industry will only grow. This will lead to increased regulation, such as carbon pricing and restrictions on the ability of fossil fuel companies to develop their energy reserves as well as growing liability risks.
Additionally, demand for fossil fuels is already coming under pressure, and not just from the COVID-19 induced recession. In many parts of the world solar and wind power have become cheaper than fossil fuels, even without subsidies. Moving to a cleaner energy matrix is becoming financially as well as environmentally advantageous. As these trends continue fossil fuel companies will likely face shrinking demand (as has already happened with coal) and will find themselves stuck with billions of dollars’ worth of stranded assets in the form of oil reserves that they will never develop and will have to write down or charge off. In fact, the Spanish oil major Repsol announced last year that it was taking a $5 billion charge to reduce the value of its North American reserves (“Spanish Energy Giant Repsol Writes Down Oil, Gas Assets”, The Wall Street Journal, December 3rd, 2019). More such announcements from the industry have followed and BP recently cut its future production target by 40%. Repsol and BP have both committed to being carbon neutral by 2050.
Divestment from fossil fuels has already gone mainstream, with fund giant Black Rock announcing early this year that it would being selling off investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk” and that it would introduce new fossil fuel free investment funds. Fossil fuel free ETFs are already widely available.
Lenders and bond investors are already avoiding the coal industry, as highlighted by last year’s bankruptcy of Murray Energy, the biggest of eight US coal companies to go bankrupt in 2019. The boom in natural gas production due to fracking has had a key role in this, of course, but so have market forces and regulations in the US and elsewhere favoring cleaner sources of energy. The UK – once one of the world’s biggest coal producers - has already stopped using coal to generate electricity and the US is moving steadily in that direction, in spite of the current administration’s best efforts. And it isn’t just coal that is losing access to capital. Last year’s initial public offering of shares in Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, was widely anticipated but ended up in disappointment as major international investors shunned the deal and the Saudis had to rely almost exclusively on domestic and regional investors.
At the same time that the pure investment case for putting your savings in fossil fuels is less compelling than ever, the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuel use are getting ever more dramatic. The terrifying fires sweeping across California and Oregon are just the latest disasters, following the enormous fires in Australia earlier this year and in California two years ago, devastating hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas and the Gulf Coast, melting ice in Greenland and – closer to home – lobsters disappearing off the coast of Rhode Island while multiplying in Canada’s Gulf of St Lawrence. The ethical case for divesting from fossil fuels and thereby helping to deprive the industry of capital has never been stronger.
What are you waiting for?
Urban Larson
Principal, White Pine Advisory LLC
Disclosure
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