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This week sees President Trump’s highly controversial pick for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, answering questions in front of the Senate Judicary committee as part of her nomination hearings for the top legal job.

Why does the fight for justice take so long? Why is it so difficult to hold Big Oil to account? Why does it take years even decades to drag oil executives, kicking and screaming, into a court-room?

For those hoping that the duel whammy of the pandemic and our climate emergency would belatedly and finally pivot Exxon away from fossil fuels, this is not going to happen. The company just wants to carry on drilling.

Some of the world’s worst polluting companies, including BP and Shell, have been regularly lobbying the UK Government offering money to be part of next year’s UN COP26 conference.

Whereas Big Oil bosses still continue a strategy of climate denial, the majority of oil workers would switch to jobs in the renewable industry.

We are in a climate emergency. The warnings from Antarctica are real. The message is simple. Big Oil is not to be trusted as driving the solution to the problem they created.

Being a “leader” among laggards doesn’t cut it when we’re in a climate emergency – a crisis that the oil and gas industry has done the most to cause.

Despite our climate emergency and the massive demand reduction caused by COVID-19, American oil executives say it would be "folly" for them to switch to renewables.

This is a crossroads. The fires, the floods, the heat, the melting tell us how urgent it is. But the financial and industry news tells us that urgency has somewhere to go: to push harder to defang and dismantle the fossil fuel industry, and to protect communities along the way.

The oil industry maybe dying, but it will still pollute us for decades after its death.