Time for America to finally take on Big Oil, Oil executives have mixed expectations for 2021, and More

Big Oil is on the ropes. The global pandemic has caused people to stop driving and flying, resulting in low prices for crude oil and gasoline, just as the cost of renewable energy becomes competitive.

If President-elect Joe Biden is prepared to keep his campaign promises to protect the climate, then he must use this moment to end subsidies, favors, and bailouts for the oil industry. The fossil fuel industry has for too long benefitted from these corporate handouts and too easily called the shots for the Trump administration.

U.S. energy executives remain wary about the outlook for the oil and natural gas markets this year and are relying on moderate commodity prices as they finesse their 2021 capital spending plans, according to a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

2021 can't be worse for oil companies than 2020, but wow is that a low bar, and a new survey shows that executives see a mixed picture ahead.

Driving the news: U.S. prices hit their highest levels since February early today before receding.

On Sunday, The New York Times published a piece profiling a handful of recent college grads, all outfitted with varying forms of geology or engineering degrees and struggling to find a foothold in the natural gas industry. With color-matched portraits of the hopeful oil executives set alongside glamor shots of drilling machinery, the piece was presumably designed to provoke empathy for these young, well-educated twentysomethings deprived of six-figure fossil fuel salaries. Judging by the Twitter reaction, it seems to have failed gloriously. Instead, the Times piece became the weekend’s most rewarding hate-read, with readers mostly celebrating the Uber driver who reportedly asked one of the subjects on the way to an industry banquet, “Did you ever hear of a solar panel?”