Based on my layman’s knowledge, it does seem that fossil fuel energy companies have been bad-faith actors. Or, at the very least, reacted predictably to poorly aligned incentives.
It reminds me of a Matt Damon quote from Syriana [1].
To a certain extent, that’s all of us. We are squandering one of the greatest resources to accelerate technology because it’s been so relatively easy to pull energy from the earth that we’ve been lulled into complacency.
I sometimes wonder if our level of technological advancement would even be possible without fossil fuels. If not, and we don’t actively invest in means away from it, I also wonder if that advancement is just a flash-in-the-pan on the geological time scale.