Your title oversimplifies a much more complex picture. The question it raises: can you really capital starve fossil fuel companies?
The dividend yields on the integrated oil companies define them as self-liquidating trusts. Since the 2014–16 oil bust the exploration and production independents have eschewed growth capex and committed to return excess capital to shareholders because their new shareholder base forced them to. Now the big institutional generalist investors like endowments and pension funds who could pressure the oil and gas companies to pivot to clean energy projects are driven to sell by ESG mandates. The companies are now under less pressure, not more because the shareholder base has changed.
If you sell, someone else, usually a more specialist bottom fishing vulture investor indifferent to ESG, is buying (Eric Nuttall's Ninepoint Fund in place of Harvard's endowment, for example). That reduces the pressure on the company to pivot its capex to renewables.
Who benefits from the EU's badly managed clean energy transition with natural gas prices going up by hundreds of %? LNG exporters from the USA and Australia who reroute cargoes that were already halfway to East Asia.
High oil and gas prices mean the oil and gas companies won't need their bankers for loans. They'll just issue more shares while their dividends are still low or zero or issue bonds. Again, owners of stranded assets don't need capital for growth capex unless it's the frackers whose time horizon is much shorter.
An Australian or Canadian divestment movement would merely move market share from better regulated companies like CNQ, Suncor and Cenovus to Aramco, Gazprom, CNOOC and the other Middle Eastern national oil companies.
The 2014–16 bust already starved the frackers and E&Ps of growth capex, which has yielded this year's energy crunch. Usually the cure for high prices is high prices that produce more supply. That won't happen this time because the shareholders who don't want a repeat of the boom bust cycle of 2006–2016 would revolt against the company managements. So the end result is a half built bridge to a clean energy future without a way to ensure the supply of enough legacy fuels.
LNG will fill the gap while wind and solar get even more competitive. That's why I own HASI (Hannon Armstrong), a clean energy mortgage REIT that finances wind and solar projects. The problem is there's a shortage of easy to own stocks like this, but no shortage of dirt cheap Canadian energy stocks that will gush cash while prices stay high, which they will since they're all constrained by return of capital promises made to shareholders.
