It would be very easy to be sharply critical of BP, given its sudden volte-face on its environmental commitments. Under pressure from a shareholder, Elliott Management, it has abandoned the green ambitions it announced in 2020 and pivoted squarely back to an overwhelming focus on oil and gas.

While easy, it would arguably be unhelpful, and perhaps even misguided. Because viewed in the round, this isn’t really about BP: it’s about capitalism at large, and its inability to respond to the climate crisis in the manner we need.

One thinker who would probably have been somewhat sympathetic to BP is Karl Marx, surprising though that may seem. Marx understood market competition as what he termed a “coercive law”, whereby individual companies are forced to act in certain ways because of their competitors’ behaviour. Competition, he said, compels companies to maximise profits on pain of succumbing to stronger rivals – or, as in the case of BP, to activist shareholders such as Elliott Management.

It stands to reason that BP has refocused on fossil fuels: oil and gas production is simply much more profitable than renewable energy. “No capitalist,” Marx wrote, “ever voluntarily introduces a new method of production, no matter how much more productive it may be … so long as it reduces the rate of profit.” He could just as well have been talking about the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The CEOs of firms such as Exxon have........

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