Playing pass the parcel with toxic assets won’t save the environment

Wanting to do the right thing, big oil companies are divesting themselves of toxic fossil-fuel assets. But we still need oil, says John Stepek – and they're the best people to produce it.

Whale swimming past oil rigs
When Big Oil sells its assets, they don’t get shut down, they just shift ownership.
(Image credit: © David McNew/Getty Images)

One thing that globalisation enabled the developed world to do was to dump a great deal of its “dirtiest” business in developing world countries.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.