Taking climate change seriously would mean drastically reducing fossil fuel use and extraction, hopefully fairly quickly to the point of near zero use.

If that were to happen, the oil industry would experience something called 'stranded assets', which is their calculation of how much money they would be leaving in the ground, and it amounts to trillions.

To the psychopaths in charge of the oil companies, that number gnaws at them relentlessly. The mere idea of not obtaining those riches because the government says you can't is maddening to their dragon-like mind, and so they instead choose to use their existing wealth to bribe our feeble minded government to save those stranded assets, in disregard to our long term destruction, all so they can impress their 'friends' with a bigger yacht at the Monaco port.

That is ultimately why they do it.