An Empire of Dying Wells

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

Nobody has a time machine that lets us go back and fix things when they were fixable.

If this company never existed, most of these wells should have been permanently shut down long ago. The owners didn't have the money to do it, so the states were supposed to do it. They didn't have the money either, so they weren't doing their duty.

Along comes this guy, who offers plausible deniability and creative accounting, and the states get to delay spending the money they were always going to have to spend. In exchange, this guy gets to collect tax incentives that make his business viable. Who would voluntarily become the scapegoat if it weren't lucrative?

Meanwhile, the planet burns.