Backcasting Exhibit: FUTURE NEWS TODAY
In hopeful news datelined 2036, BP celebrates it's green energy shift funded by the Stewardship Fund
As a way to put an endpoint to a creative exercise about remaking our energy future, we posit that BP actually makes good on its current goal to shift from oil to integrated energy. This is a piece of time traveling fiction to illustrate our backcasting paper presented at the 2023 Energy Ethics conference at St. Andrews University in June.
This kicks off a multi-part version of that paper that explains how such a future might be true. It’s available as a PDF here.
Part 1: Intro
Part 2: Methodology
Part 3: Our findings
Of course, for this kind of event to come together by 2036, a lot has to happen differently that what’s on offer right now for a company like BP to contribute to a more ethical energy future.
So, for illustration only:
BP celebrates a successful green energy shift
funded by trillion-dollar Stewardship Fund
London, 2036: At a corporate gala last night at London’s Savoy Hotel, a jubilant Bernard Looney, CEO at BP, called the company’s 10-year shift from oil to integrated energy a success.
“After 126 years in the oil business, we are today an integrated energy company,” said Looney to a ballroom packed with climate and clean energy leaders. “We did it!”
In real terms, that means more than half of the company’s $200 billion in 2035 revenues came from renewable energy, biofuels, carbon capture and storage, and green hydrogen – all contributing to BP’s new net zero status.
Ongoing oil production makes up the balance of revenues, along with natural gas that BP says is critical to its “integrated” energy portfolio.
“We have an enormous challenge as a society to provide the world with reliable, affordable and clean energy,” he added. “It’s what society wants and needs. It’s what our owner-partner demands.”
While BP’s emissions totals have sharply improved, analysts say it’s how BP shifted operations that has implications for an even more robust scaled climate response that does not rely on governments or corporate sustainability.
Advocates credit the $5-trillion Stewardship Fund created in 2025 by an alliance of 10 public pensions including Japan’s vast Pension Fund and CALPERS in the US. It was a response to a landmark fiduciary duty law passed in Massachusetts in 2024. That law sets the bar for how, why and for whom public pensions deploy their aggregated $50 trillion in the global economy.
“Pension fiduciaries, regardless of their legislation at home, have seen the writing on the wall and are self-regulating to implement this full expression of fiduciary duty as a stewardship strategy,” says analyst Conor MacDonald. “Climate stewardship is an obvious demonstration of that.”
Later in 2025, Bank of Nature – the general partner for the Stewardship Fund – brought a $120-billion private equity deal to buy BP, delist it from all public exchanges and fund a detailed energy transition strategy. The ROI was set at a modest 6% per year with a 30-year buy out.
The deal released BP from the demands of quarterly reporting, growth-centric shareholders, mounting legal exposure to climate-based liabilities, market volatility and the priorities of short-termism. It also forfeited the traditional tax incentives and subsidies offered by most governments to prop up the oil sector for less rich green sector incentives.
As part of its turnaround, BP has applied the Stewardship Funds’ model of minimum fiduciary returns, true-cost accounting like the long-term costs of negative externalities and transparency about its energy production.
Other oil companies await BP’s results before adopting the model.
“The Stewardship Fund reflects the time-based mission, legal duties and enormous financial scale of fiduciary money, like public pensions and endowments, to finance our climate security,’ says Tim MacDonald, co-founder of Bank of Nature.
“It’s not quick-buck finance, but the long play that reflects the future in fiduciary choices today. Fiduciary finance is about sufficient returns that enable future promises – like a dignified retirement.”
According to Bank of Nature, fiduciary money has unique characteristics and obligations that are not met by speculating with Wall Street investment advisors. Fiduciary Finance, it says, is a “dedicated and right-sized channel for tens of trillions of fiduciary money to do its job properly for beneficiaries of those funds, who are proxies for the rest of us.”
Fossil fuel sector insiders and cynics have dubbed BP’s massive pivot “Looney Tunes”. Others recall BP’s history as bad-actor most notably for its Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
The skeptics may have a point. While BP has stopped work at its Atlantis, Mad Dog, NaKika and Thunder Horse platforms, also in the Gulf, the rigs are maintained to restart, should Looney’s legacy project fall short.
Tim MacDonald says the break-through is in the scale of money available to pay for future security. Based on today’s market capitalization, it would cost $4.5 trillion to buy outright the 20 richest oil and gas companies operating today, including Saudi Aramco.
Global public pensions have 10 times that money active in the economy now, suggesting that financial scale, geopolitics and growth imperatives and risk are no longer concerns in addressing a global climate crisis.
Finance Staff