Recently a friend sent me a YouTube video from the Climate Town channel called Who Actually Controls Gas Prices. I must say that the guy in the video is accurate on most of the issues. He assigns cause and effect where it belongs. However, near the end of the video, he complained that after the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders crashed oil prices, oil companies stopped drilling. He said that they would rather withhold production to make more money.
Outside of the irony of a climate change activist complaining that not enough oil is being produced to keep prices low, he got this part mostly wrong. Although the charge has often been leveled at oil companies over the past couple of years, after the Covid-19 crash the number of rigs drilling for oil steadily increased. A year after the crash, the rig count had risen by over 50%. Two years later, it had doubled. And after two and a half years, the rig count had more than tripled from the levels of the crash. So, contrary to the claims, oil companies were definitely drilling