"Climate change will not be on the agenda."

That’s the note White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney added to his announcement that the 2020 meeting of the G7 nations would be held at the Trump Doral Resort in Miami next June.

The ethical blunder of hosting the gathering at the president's property overshadowed the irony of dodging the climate crisis in a city that just declared a climate emergency. And although the president was shamed into a quick reversal of his decision on the meeting venue, he gave no indication that he'd changed his stance on discussing climate issues.

Since the uplift from September's student climate strikes led by Greta Thunberg, optimism on the climate front has deflated. Mulvaney's heads-up on the G7 agenda was just the latest in a series of disheartening developments related to the climate and the world's energy future.

In the Democratic presidential contenders' most recent debate — moderated by CNN and the New York Times — the panel did not deign to pose a single question on the climate crisis. The failure to ask about climate sent the completely wrong message, implicitly attenuating the public's perception of the issue's urgency and importance.

Impeachment may be the most salient topic of the day, but the candidates' multi-trillion-dollar climate proposals would radically transform the nation's economy and infrastructure. Under what rationale can that be ignored? As former presidential candidate Jay Inslee tweeted, "This is the existential crisis of our time. Not one single question, and that's completely inexcusable."

There was more bad news for the climate buried beneath the headlines, such as the Reuters interview with Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Shell Oil. Van Beurden unapologetically voiced his commitment to the corporation's shareholders to grow its core business in fossil fuels in the coming decades. The article quotes him saying, "it is entirely legitimate to invest in oil and gas because the world demands it." By 2025, Shell expects to develop 35 new oil and gas fields.

Consider what this CEO is saying. Because the global market demands a product it sells, Shell sees itself justified not only in providing that product, but in aggressively expanding the supply of the product as well. It portrays the corporation heroically fulfilling the needs of a world starved for energy.

The analogy to the tobacco industry, which profits from the sale of addictive carcinogens because there's a market for them, may be apt yet doesn't capture the scale of the menace presented by burning escalating amounts of fossil fuels. Tobacco may be an enormous hazard to public health, but it doesn't threaten to melt the Antarctic ice sheets and undermine the global ecosystems on which human civilization is built.

Shell's outlook would be less troubling if it were unique. It's not.

An article in the New York Times earlier this month featured comments on the future energy landscape from a number of leaders of multinational oil and gas companies, including Chevron, BP, Total and Suncor. They all acknowledge the need to reduce carbon emissions. They all advocate more investment in renewable energy.