Promises, Profits and Postponements: Inside the Great Climate Stall

Here’s a number worth sitting with: $93 billion. That’s the combined profit major oil companies raked in even as war rattled energy markets and the planet kept warming, according to a Guardian investigation published this week. It’s the kind of figure that makes climate pledges — the net-zero targets, the tree-planting decrees, the “we’ll get there by 2030” promises — look less like commitments and more like marketing copy. And it turns out the oil industry isn’t the only one falling behind. From Swiss postal trucks to French forests to corporate boardrooms tracking their impact on nature, a pattern is emerging: the world keeps announcing climate ambition, then quietly walking it back when it gets inconvenient.

Big Oil’s banner year

The Guardian’s reporting landed like a gut punch to anyone hoping the climate crisis might finally be denting fossil fuel profitability. Instead, the newspaper found major oil firms posted a combined $93 billion in profits, even as global conflict — the kind that typically spikes energy prices — collided head-on with mounting climate pressure. The optics are brutal: companies whose core product is driving the crisis are cashing in precisely because of the instability that crisis helps create. War pushes prices up. Climate urgency pushes public pressure up. And somehow, both currents flow into the same set of corporate bank accounts.

This isn’t a story about a single bad actor. It’s a structural one. Energy markets reward scarcity and volatility, and right now the world has plenty of both. The uncomfortable truth the Guardian’s figures expose is that the incentives facing oil majors haven’t fundamentally changed just because governments have gotten louder about decarbonization. Profit motive still points the same direction it always has.

When climate targets quietly slip

If Big Oil’s profits are the flashy headline, the smaller stories are arguably more revealing. Swiss news outlet swissinfo.ch reported that Swiss Post — a state-linked institution, not an oil giant — has postponed its own climate targets. No war profiteering here, just an organization finding that its green timeline was harder to hit than promised. It’s a small story on its own, but small stories like this are piling up.

The Irish Times, for instance, uncovered a backlog of more than 60 delayed climate-action initiatives — a startling number that suggests missed deadlines aren’t the exception in climate policy, they’re becoming the norm. Whether it’s bureaucratic friction, funding shortfalls, or simple political cowardice, the effect is the same: ambitious targets get set with fanfare, then drift past their own deadlines with barely a press release to mark the slippage.

Perhaps the starkest example comes from France, where, as reported by the Times of India, the government promised in 2022 to plant one billion trees within a decade — a headline-grabbing pledge meant to signal serious climate intent. Four years later, a court struck down the very decree that funded the programme. The trees that were supposed to be quietly soaking up carbon by now instead became a case study in how easily bold climate promises can be undone by paperwork, budget fights, or legal technicalities nobody anticipated when the cameras were rolling at the announcement.

Nature’s report card isn’t much better

It’s not just carbon targets that are slipping. A United Nations assessment, covered by Yahoo Finance, found that companies broadly aren’t moving fast enough to address their impact on nature loss — biodiversity collapse, habitat destruction, the quieter cousin of the climate crisis that gets far less attention than emissions counts. The UN’s message, as relayed by Yahoo Finance, is essentially that corporate sustainability strategies have gotten very good at talking about nature and considerably less good at actually protecting it.

This matters because nature loss and climate change are tangled together. Degraded ecosystems store less carbon, absorb less flooding, and buffer less heat. A company can hit a renewable-energy milestone and still be quietly complicit in destroying the forests, wetlands, and soil systems that do a huge amount of climate work for free. The UN’s finding suggests that even companies proud of their climate credentials often haven’t extended that same rigor to the natural world their operations touch.

The tech fix everyone argues about

Amid all this backsliding, there’s a recurring pitch: carbon capture. It shows up whenever emissions targets look shaky, offered as the technological escape hatch that lets industries keep operating while still claiming climate credibility. But as The Conversation explained in a recent explainer, “carbon capture” is not one thing — it covers wildly different technologies with different costs, different scales, and very different track records. Some capture carbon directly from industrial smokestacks. Others pull it straight from the atmosphere. Some are proven at scale; others remain expensive and experimental.

The confusion The Conversation highlights isn’t accidental. Lumping every version of carbon capture into one reassuring buzzword makes it easier for companies and governments to point at “the technology” as a reason to delay harder choices, like actually cutting emissions at the source. When a French tree-planting decree gets struck down, or Swiss Post pushes back its targets, or oil majors post record profits, carbon capture is often waiting in the wings as the technological alibi — proof, supposedly, that solutions are in hand even when the harder political and financial commitments keep slipping.

What happens next

None of this means climate action is dead. Plenty of institutions are still moving — but the gap between announcement and delivery is where the real story lives right now. The Guardian’s $93 billion figure, the Irish Times’ 60-plus delayed initiatives, France’s collapsed tree pledge, Swiss Post’s pushed-back targets, and the UN’s warning on nature loss all point to the same uncomfortable pattern: climate promises are cheap to make and expensive to keep, and when budgets tighten or courts intervene or profits are simply too good to walk away from, the promises are usually what gives.

The pressure isn’t going away. Public scrutiny of corporate profits during crises is intensifying, as the Guardian’s investigation shows. Courts are willing to strike down poorly funded climate decrees, as France discovered. And international bodies like the UN are keeping score on nature commitments, not just carbon ones. The next chapter of this story will be less about new pledges and more about whether anyone — governments, oil majors, postal services — can actually be held to the ones they’ve already made.