I am not enough up to speed over these oil companies wanting it. It seems to me they wouldn’t..so there has to be some big gain for them...I guess trading carbon credits is a good guess.and might be why Gary Cohn is for Carbon Tax.
My guess is that oil companies, over time and at a considerable amount of pain, have accommodated what they saw as an unavoidable international climate change regime. Maybe they’ve been thrown a few bones along the way as well, but they’ve made their plans to get along as best they could with what they assumed to be an unalterable status quo.
Now whatever deals and accommodations they’ve, or strategies for coping with the climate change regime are out the window, and they will have to go back to the drawing board. They’re probably equally worried that when the days of Trump are over, there may be a new administration that gets them right back in the climate regime.
So I see this as much an aversion to uncertainty as anything else.
I do not think this was an instance of “agree to the climate change regime and we’ll pay you X billions of dollars in an unmarked brown paper C-141.”