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By Keira Wright and Ruth Liao
Meg O’Neill’s rapid
rise to the top of one of the world’s
biggest fossil-fuel companies has been
unencumbered by doubt. At a moment when oil
executives are still being pressed to move away
from hydrocarbons, she has a different argument:
that the world is nowhere near done with them.
So when BP Plc stunned
markets by naming an external chief
executive officer for the first time, the choice
of O’Neill signaled more than a leadership
change. It marked a recalibration for BP,
bruised by a failed pivot toward renewable
energy, years of uneven financial performance,
and pressure from activist investor Elliott
Investment Management to return the company to
its core oil and gas focus.
Meg O'Neill
Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg
O’Neill, who has
led Australian oil and gas giant Woodside Energy
Group Ltd. since 2021, arrives with a reputation
for operational rigor and a belief that natural
gas, particularly liquefied natural gas, is a
long-term necessity. To supporters, she is
exactly the leader BP needs. To critics, she
represents an industry choosing regression over
reinvention.
“Her appointment as
CEO seems well-aligned with BP’s reversal from
green energy back to core oil and gas
profitability,” said Susan Sakmar, a University
of Houston Law Center visiting assistant
professor and expert on the oil and gas market.
“Good news for BP.”
She takes on her
new role amid a wider political split over
energy. US President Donald Trump’s revived
“drill, baby, drill” mantra and promises to roll
back years of climate rules that, he argues,
drove up energy costs have led to a renewed
emphasis on oil and gas. And while Asian
consumers are hungry for more fossil fuels, BP
in Europe faces a different reality of tougher
carbon-reduction mandates, stricter disclosure
rules and regulatory pressures to show progress
toward cutting emissions.
O’Neill will have
to navigate both worlds at once.
Read the full
story on Bloomberg.com.
By Emma
Court
Christmas candy
shoppers in the UK are set to feel the climate
pinch this year. Prices of popular chocolate
boxes have as much as doubled over the past four
years, according to a new analysis by the
nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
Rising cocoa
commodity prices in recent years have
reflected climate shocks such as drought taking
a bite out of West African harvests. Other
ingredients, including sugar and milk, have also
been impacted by climate change, the report
says.
The uptick in
commodity costs is increasingly filtering
through to consumers at the store in the form of
higher prices and ingredient and labeling
changes. Some chocolate makers have
swapped in cheaper ingredients, which has
sometimes affected their ability to call their
products chocolate at all. (Many countries have
labeling rules outlining how much cocoa a
product needs to contain to be considered
chocolate.)
The ECIU report
looked at brands like Nestle's Quality Street,
Mars's Celebrations and Mondelez's Roses and
Heroes that sell assortments of chocolates, as
well as Terry's Chocolate Orange, owned by
Carambar & Co. It found prices are rising
and boxes are shrinking. The analysis thus
relied on average prices per 100 grams,
collecting data from supermarket websites,
archived webpages and news articles.
Mondelez and
Mars said in statements that higher input costs,
particularly for cocoa, and other business
factors are driving shifts in pricing and
package sizes, while Nestlé noted that the cost
of manufacturing and other things affect each
year's new line-up.
Carambar & Co
did not immediately return a request for
comment.
Subscribe to
the Business
of Food newsletter for a weekly look at
how the world feeds itself in a changing
economy and climate.
The
Argentine flag Photographer: Sarah
Pabst/Bloomberg
Despite endless
financial difficulties, Argentina has seen a
remarkable increase in clean energy over the
past decade. It has gone from practically zero
to almost 18% of its electricity sourced from
renewables. In doing so, Argentina has overcome
a challenge faced by many countries that are
considered uninvestable by major financial
institutions. Sebastian Kind, former
undersecretary at the ministry of energy in
Argentina, joins Akshat Rathi on Zero to
tell the story of Argentina’s renewables blitz.
Listen
now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to
get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.
Jaycee
Pribulsky Source: Apollo Global Management
Apollo Global
Management is
building out its risk review process to
reflect the impact on asset valuations of
extreme weather.
The decision comes
amid a rise in the damage done to physical
assets by floods, storms and wildfires. Apollo,
which has been conducting so-called top-down
analyses for such risks since 2023, is now
broadening that approach to allow for a more
granular process to identify company-level risks
before closing deals, says Jaycee Pribulsky,
Apollo’s chief sustainability officer.
“Both private
equity and private credit teams are expanding
bottom-up, asset-level evaluations of physical
and transition risks,” she told
Bloomberg. “Climate-driven disruptions can
directly impact operating costs, supply chains
and insurance markets,” and that makes financial
risk factors “more immediate”
The development
feeds into a growing awareness that extreme
weather events increasingly have the potential
to dramatically alter asset values. That’s as
managers like Apollo look to reassure investors
more broadly that valuation models in private
markets are sound.
Read the full
story on Bloomberg.com
Galvanize, the asset
management firm co-founded by
billionaire investor Tom Steyer, has acquired a
portfolio of seven industrial properties in the
Chicago area as part of a plan to allocate $1.85
billion to buildings that it can
decarbonize and resell.
Xcel Energy switched
off electricity for about
50,000 customers in Colorado Wednesday to
lessen the risk that high winds will topple
power lines and start fires.
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