(DCNF)—A good way to think of this week’s earnings reports by four big oil majors is a test of competing corporate strategies. Two U.S.-based companies spend the last decade largely sticking to the things they do best — producing, refining, and selling oil and natural gas. Two Europe-based competitors spent big chunks of it chasing unprofitable renewables projects designed to burnish their ESG metrics.
Guess which two companies are handing their shareholders the biggest checks today? It isn’t a hard question.
ExxonMobil reported Q3 2026 earnings of $17.5 billion on Friday, along with $19.1 billion in free cash flow. Its refining segment earned $9.05 billion, more than double the previous quarter, as its Gulf Coast refineries ran at 100% utilization. CEO Darren Woods credited investments like the Beaumont refinery expansion with raising Exxon’s distillate production by about 40% since 2019. The icing on the cake for investors: A $20 billion stock buyback program for 2027.
Fellow U.S. major Chevron posted adjusted earnings of $10.4 billion, up from $3.6 billion a year ago. Its downstream business earned $4.9 billion, more than four times the $1.1 billion of a year ago, as its U.S. refineries ran a record 1.09 million barrels of crude per day at almost 98% utilization.
While other big oil companies wandered off into ESG world, Exxon and Chevron focused their capital on their core oil and gas business ventures in the face of massive pressure to change course and get with climate alarm program.
Now, look at BP. On paper, Q3 was also a blowout for the venerable British major. Profit came in at $8.46 billion, nearly four times the $2.2 billion of a year earlier. Its refining indicator margin soared to $46.7 per barrel, up from $15.8 year-over-year.
But BP also booked $4.0 in impairments that the company says are “linked largely to transition businesses,” i.e., investments mainly in wind and solar. While Exxon, Chevron and even ESG-focused Shell all rewarded shareholders with big investment returns, BP had no room for that during the quarter. Instead, its new management team led by CEO Meg O’Neill used the windfall smartly to pay down debt and help settle its remaining Deepwater Horizon liabilities.
This is what years of chasing ESG virtue cost a company that lost sight of what it has always been in business to do.
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Fellow British giant Shell — which reported Thursday — falls somewhere in between these extremes. Its $10.81 billion adjusted earnings came with a $1.9 billion impairment of its own, but also left room to invoke a $5 billion stock repurchase program. Meanwhile, its entire renewables segment contributed just a nominal $289 million, boosted by trading activities that more than offset losses by wind, solar and other unprofitable “transition” projects.
All four companies generated most of their profits the same way in Q3: By turning crude into diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline. As CNBC put it, “Diesel prices have surged globally as Ukraine and Iran have bombed refineries in Russia and the Middle East.” The world is short of refining capacity, and the companies that kept theirs running flat out are being paid handsomely for it.
So, the main drivers of the profits are no secret, and the impacts of those drivers are equally obvious. Families feel them every time they fill their tanks at the gas stations. Truckers and farmers are feeling them, too. Every consumer pays the add-on effects when they buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for the kids.
Cynical Democrats in D.C. — like California Rep. Ro Khanna and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, to name a couple — will re-introduce dumb windfall profits tax bills for political advantage. But punishing the companies that are actually meeting market demands will do nothing but raise consumer costs even higher. America played this ridiculous game before in the 1980s, and many of us remember all too well how it ends. The real fixes aren’t complicated: End the wars and unleash the industry to fix the problem. We need more energy, not less, because abundance of any product lowers prices.
Bottom line: Exxon and Chevron didn’t get lucky this quarter — they got ready. Shell is back on track, and BP under O’Neill and her team now seems ready to do the same. If the politicians will stay out of the way, the decade just past will soon be remembered as an unfortunate detour into fantasyland.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
