Over the weekend, Saudi Aramco, the Kingdom’s state oil company announced it will go public at last. But as the latest round of oil industry earnings showed—ExxonMobil, the final major to report third quarter earnings, did so on Friday—Aramco will do so against a recurrently gloomy global backdrop: oil production, particularly of shale oil in the U.S., continues at a relentless, explosive pace; demand simply can’t keep up; and geopolitical shocks, however dramatic, barely push up the price. And that’s to say nothing of the growing climate backlash against fossil fuel expansion.
