BP made a profit? Who cares.

The BBC feigns horror at corporate profits. The organisation would rather you cold, immiserated and watching Strictly forever.

I must confess that I am not in the habit of watching BBC News. After all, to rely on this haughty outfit for reliable news reporting would be as sensible as employing a nonce to host children’s TV shows for decades - simply unthinkable!

Recently, however, I managed to catch a glimpse. Top among the stories that morning was BP’s annual profits. The company reported £11bn worth of profits in 2023, which apparently is the same as Somalia’s GDP. Not bad going. The comparison between the two stops there, however, with BP’s stock doing well recently and Somalia still limited to leading the world in civil war, strife and piracy.

The BBC’s piece was delivered in a tone of unmitigated horreur. How dare BP make so much money amid the ever-present ‘cost of living crisis’. The well-remunerated journos of the BBC are the arbiters of what is and is not an acceptable profit level, and they have turned their thumbs earthwards in the style of a displeased Roman emperor at a gladiatorial game.

It seems doubtful whether the annual profits of many companies are afforded a predominant position on BBC news programming. Being British and a big-nasty petroleum company, however, BP is a fair target. The only time ‘business’ is given airtime is when it can be given a kicking, serving as it does as a handy scapegoat for the multivarious failings of the state.

I, for one, am comfortable with the fact BP is able to make so much dosh. Were energy provision left exclusively to the state one can only imagine how inefficient and costly it would become. Actually, we can see it with our own eyes: witness across Europe the rush to dismantle cheap and reliable nuclear, the headlong rush into expensive and insufficient renewables. Electricity prices in the USA are about one third to half of those in Europe: it is a government-induced noose around the neck of our economies and societies.

So very much of the green industry is a taxpayer-subsidised racket that is hard to know where the actual progress and value lies. Only in a sector totally reliant on government largesse and the excessive bullishness of venture capitalism could an electric vehicle company spend $1.5billion and fail to produce a single solitary van, after all. Said firm (Arrival)’s UK arm has gone bankrupt, having been valued at £9billion three years ago – a rise and fall worthy of the history books.

Thankfully BP are saying they will increase their oil output this year. Yet we have entered a world where a company with the word ‘petroleum’ in its name has to justify its extraction of hydrocarbons amid loud tuts from the misanthropes atop society’s political and media structures.

Somewhere along the way it was forgotten – forcibly forgotten, I wager – that such hydrocarbons are the reason that we have any standard of living above our 17th century predecessors.

Life without the immense energy easily produced by oil and gas (and nuclear, too) is one of immiseration and a constant battle to sustain oneself against mother nature. Slaving away in a field for six days in seven only to enjoy early mortality unalleviated by a diet of turnips: such was the reality of such pre-industrial time.

Ultimately, what is not done by machine power is done, with far greater effort, by muscle power. Those who would wish away cheap, bountiful energy have little conception of how fortunate they are to exist in a society whose basis lies in its presence.

So, stuff the BBC – as ever. BP provides people with something of fundamental importance to the continuation of our lives as we know it. The likes of the BBC – who have it in for business – and the government – who do everything within their power to reduce our overall standard of living – are a net drain on everything that comes into contact with their foul anti-Midas touch. They only thing they enrich is themselves.