Big fossil fuel producers' plans far exceed climate targets, U.N. says

I formerly worked for a fortune 500 single commodity mining company whose head office was based in St Louis. I wasn't in a position of power, but was in one of trust, and employed as a professional scientist and engineer.

The company quite frequently paid large sums to climate denialists with PhDs so they could produce and push out "our commodity is king" and "burning our commodity has a positive impact on the environment". It eventually became quite apparent that there was a professional disinformation racket going on between companies in the same commodity, with those involved tipping in money to "combined research programs" whose output was "research" that showed extracting and burning the commodity led to positive environmental outcomes. The company i worked for, along with several others had a huge presence in the US, but also had operations globally. The "research" was pushed through their global operations heavily and regularly.

They don't believe politicians about making real progress on the issue because they are pouring money into making sure it doesn't happen.

It really doesn't make sense to treat them as though they are just economic entities, they are big political players as well.

To give a specific example, when Washington state had a carbon tax on the ballot (a method to address the demand side), the oil industry spent 50 million on the campaign opposing the measure.

It's both.

By continuing to tap into supplies, you keep the cost of carbon-producing fuels (and their carbon intensive extraction industries) low enough that they remain price competitive with renewables; a price which is further subject to implicit subsidies in the form of negative externalities. This then helps buoy the demand side and slows the transition to alternatives.

One way to solve that is through carbon taxes so that the price of externalities is baked into the cost of the product.

But the alternative is to simply cut back on extraction in the first place and leave the carbon in the ground.

In either case the end result is higher prices at the pump which will push consumption toward renewables.