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Here's the Fitch release about their report: https://www.fitchratings.com/site/pr/1013282

Most egregiously, Bloomberg is cherry-picking the words "death spiral" out of somewhere in the middle of the report and putting it in the headline.




This is useful, but I'm actually more interested in your opinions and analysis.


I don't have enough time to write a thorough post, but the most obvious flaw in their logic is that utilities and auto-makers are unlikely to be disrupted completely by switching from fossil-fuel technologies to renewable+battery technologies. Since the switch will take an estimated 20 years, they have plenty of time to invest in renewables.

A few things (like shale oil drilling investments) might be impacted in a "death spiral" way, but I don't believe that is anywhere near the 25% they claim by invoking everything that touches oil.

Also, bonds have a finite lifetime and are often for equipment with depreciation. Even if 25% of bonds today were for oil infrastructure, many would be re-paid before the disruption had significant financial implications.

TLDR: the headline is egregious clickbait of a regurgitated article.


Just to chime in, I too value when community members can provide more detailed arguments on things. There's a lot of very interesting topics on here that are simply WAY outside my domain of knowledge. The modern world is complex, and while I have opinions on a lot of topics I'm barely qualified to, there's a very real limit on how much we can even have any kind of view about.

I enjoy the comments on places like HN, because it provides a good accompaniment to Wikipedia: where Wikipedia is a summary of the topic, as it stands, comments on HN are a summary of the discussion about the topic, as it stands. (Well, when we get at least two different perspectives contributing and discussing, which is why we should be careful with groupthink and downvoting dissenting views.)




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