Author discredits themselves here. Big oil rules half the world. They are terrified of nothing. It shows a deep misunderstanding of the way the world runs or perhaps more accurately how it is controlled.
There’s are interesting splits here, too: for the 20th century the interests of the oil and car companies overlapped but now they’ve diverged with EVs, and there’s even a market opportunity for EV makers to turn on their former partners trying to gain the environmentally conscious market. I think the fossil fuel industry leaders are keenly aware of those inflection points where partners will leave them.