You said capital investment will be redirected elsewhere (where?). Your links disagree with what you said. The oil majors may restrain spending, they may cancel

You said capital investment will be redirected elsewhere (where?). Your links disagree with what you said. The oil majors may restrain spending, they may cancel projects. They don't direct capital spending elsewhere. If oil prices are so low that they pull back on capital spending, they stop spending and cut costs in their operations, they don't redirect their spending. Wall Street redirects industry capital investment in that climate, oil companies do not. You were talking about price volatility, which I referenced as oil going from $72 to $90 back to $72. What you're now suggesting wasn't mere price volatility, that was an extreme crash, caused by a brief global economic shut-down which sent prices to a multi-generational low. Which is why your links are so Covid era heavy in relation to that one-time event. That's like pretending WW2 is a common occurrence and projecting industrial behavior based on it. If oil crashes to $20, Exxon doesn't redirect their capital spending elsewhere. They aggressively stop spending. The oil majors all hedge price volatility. They're very used to dealing with price volatility. It's central to their business operations. What they don't do, is stop being oil companies, they don't redirect their capital investment to becoming farmers or car manufacturers or investing in tech companies just because the price of oil is lower by $20 or $30.