Here is a fact that should short-circuit the whole "sides" narrative you've been sold. The same firm that has built a brand around the green transition — that sells you climate-conscious funds, that lectures the world on decarbonization at Davos — also owns pieces of the oil and gas pipelines carrying the fossil fuel it says we must move beyond. BlackRock is long on the fire and long on the fire extinguisher. And it collects rent on both.
In 2021, a BlackRock-led consortium struck a deal on the order of $15 billion for a stake in the gas pipeline network of Saudi Aramco — the world's most valuable oil company. Around the same period, another investor group did a comparable multi-billion-dollar deal for Aramco's oil pipelines. The plumbing that moves Saudi hydrocarbons to the world now has, sitting inside its ownership, the same Wall Street giant that also runs the largest sustainable-investing platform on Earth. Read that twice. The bet is not on oil or on green. The bet is on the flow itself — whatever it happens to be.
The house wins whichever horse runs
Understand the trick, because it is the deepest move in the Ring's playbook.
A pipeline is the purest chokepoint asset there is — even better than a road or a port. It is a monopoly by physics. You cannot build a second pipeline next to the first; the right-of-way, the capital, the permits make it a natural monopoly. Whoever owns the pipe owns a toll on every molecule that moves through it, on long contracts, for decades, largely insulated from the price of the commodity inside. Oil at $30 or oil at $120 — the pipe still charges its fee per barrel. The owner doesn't gamble on the price. The owner taxes the flow.
Now scale the thought. BlackRock, through its index funds and its infrastructure arm, holds enormous positions across the entire energy landscape — the oil majors, the pipeline networks, the utilities, and the wind farms, the solar developers, the battery and grid companies of the "transition." It doesn't need to know which energy future wins. It owns the incumbents and the challengers. Whichever way the world turns, the electrons and molecules flow through infrastructure it has a stake in, and it collects.
This is why the "climate vs. oil" framing is, at the ownership layer, close to theater. At the level of you and me it's a fierce and real fight about the planet. At the level of the fund, it's a diversified position. The green transition, sold as a revolution against fossil power, is being financed and owned by the very same concentrated capital that owns the fossil power. Same house. Different tables. The croupier does not care which number hits.
Rent as the through-line
Trace it back to the pattern this whole series keeps finding. The Ring does not fall in love with a technology, a fuel, or an ideology. It falls in love with the chokepoint — the narrow place every flow must pass, where a toll can be set and collected forever. Oil is a chokepoint. So is the wire that carries the solar power. So is the port, the road, the water main, the exchange, the ER. The commodity changes. The position — owner of the neck, collector of the toll — never does.
That is what makes a pipeline deal like this so clarifying. It strips away the story and shows you the skeleton. The energy transition is real, necessary, and worth fighting for. But if it is built on the same enclosed, concentrated, rent-extracting infrastructure model as the old system, then you have not changed who owns the flow. You have only changed the fuel while leaving the toll booth exactly where it was — and leaving the same hand on the lever.
Our Record
The old world knew energy as Sekhem — the life-force, the vital current that moves through all things and lets them act. The sun's fire was Ra crossing the sky; the river's flood was Sekhem arriving to feed the land. Energy was not owned. It was the gods' gift, circulating, animating, given freely to the living so that life could move.
Now weigh what the pipeline deal reveals. The Shadow Neteru have understood something profound and terrible: you do not need to own the sun or the oil or the wind. You need only own the conduit — the narrow channel through which the life-force is forced to pass — and then every flow of Sekhem, from whatever source, pays a toll into your hand. Fossil or renewable, the current runs through your pipe, and you tax it at the neck. This is Apep grown patient and diversified: not the enemy of any one flow, but the owner of all the necks through which flow must move.
The mastery is that there is no side left to root for at the top. The fire and the water, the old power and the new, are held in the same fist. Isfet here is not chaos — it is total position, the quiet ownership of every channel through which the world's Sekhem is compelled to run.
The lever: own the conduit, not just the fuel
Never doom without a door. The door is this: if the toll lives at the chokepoint, then the fight is not "which fuel" — the fight is who owns the conduit. Win that, and the fuel question sorts itself out on fair terms.
First, see through the theater. Stop letting "green vs. oil" distract you from the real question the Ring least wants you to ask: who owns the pipes, the wires, the grid, the flow itself? The commodity is a decoy. The infrastructure is the prize.
Second, build the transition on a different ownership model, or you will simply re-enclose the future. Community solar owned by the community. Cooperative wind. Municipal and public grids. Energy commons where the people who use the power own the wire that carries it, and the toll returns to them instead of flowing up to a fund that is also long on the thing they're trying to escape.
Third, use the new tools to route around the neck entirely. Distributed generation — panels on your roof, batteries in your home, microgrids in your town — moves the flow off the monopoly conduit and onto infrastructure you hold. You cannot toll a molecule that never enters your pipe. Decentralized energy is not just cleaner. It is unownable by the Ring in the way a central pipeline never can be.
The fund wants to own every conduit so that every flow pays it, whichever way the world turns. So build flows that don't run through its pipes. Own the wire under your own roof. The current that never touches the chokepoint is the current no one can tax. Light your own house.