...AND CHEAPER...:

Meanwhile, the oil industry faced a second challenge: solar and wind engineers were relentlessly dropping the price of their technology, to the point where it was both cleaner and cheaper than digging stuff up and burning it--in Abu Dhabi last week, the low bid for what will be the world's largest solar array promised power at little more than a penny per kilowatt hour (the average electricity price in the US is about 13 cents per kWh).

As a result of these twin pressures, the fossil-fuel industry has been the laggard in the last decade of economic expansion, underperforming every other sector of our economy. Exxon, in that span, went from being, in the words of a recent Bloomberg Businessweek report, "once the undisputed king of Wall Street," the most powerful corporation on the planet, to a "mediocre company," worth less than Home Depot Inc.

And Exxon wasn't alone. As energy finance campaigner Clara Vondrich has pointed out, one oil major after another has begun to cut the dividends that were stockholders' only reward for putting up with lagging returns. Warren Buffett last week apologized to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders for having made a $10 billion bet on oil last spring. "If you're a shareholder... in any oil-producing company," he admitted, "you join me in having made a mistake."

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