Oil and Gas Companies Will Lead the Energy Revolution

When it comes to climate change, I have always been a believer: not in hand-wringing debate, not in unrealistic solutions like the elimination of hydrocarbons, but in the power of action. In 1997, as chief executive of BP, I was the first leader of a major oil company to acknowledge that climate change was a problem, and that the industry had a responsibility to acknowledge and address it. The head of the American Petroleum Institute claimed that I had “left the church.”

Twenty-one years later, I returned to the church in a different way, along with a group of distinguished business leaders. Last month, Pope Francis hosted the chief executives of many of the biggest oil and gas companies, investors overseeing nearly $10 trillion of capital and many of the energy sector’s leading thinkers and policy makers. We convened to discuss ways of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.