Fossil fuel folks are getting annoyed. The moment may be passing them by. They are still in charge, like high school bullies, but the younger kids are growing up, putting on muscle, talking smart. The bullies sound worried, and not a little peeved. It’s like, who needs them? And that’s gotta hurt.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” said Amin Nasser, head of what is, by far, the world’s biggest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, as reported by the New York Times.
“The energy transition was ‘visibly failing,’ he added, continued the Times, saying that predictions of impending peak oil and gas demand were flatly wrong. The room, full of representatives of the fossil-fuel industry at [this month’s] CERA conference in Houston, greeted the statement with applause.”
Here is a cool chart showing what’s happening with new clean energy vs. fossil fuels, or electrons vs. burned carbon, if you will:
So it’s no fantasy, given the trendlines. It’s not so much that oil and gas won’t be there to use, since there’s plenty in the ground and under the sea, it’s that we are abandoning it, we won’t need it, and a future without it will save millions of lives from less pollution and slow the planet from turning into a jalapeno taco chip, too.
The Saudis and the Texans have thought of a way out of their quandary, naturally. Note that the chart is almost all developed countries. So the dirty fuel guys plan to sell their oil and gas to developing countries in Africa and South Asia, much like the tobacco companies did when America and Europe banned cancer sticks. The success of this marketing move is not inevitable or even logical. Remember landline phones? As soon as cell phones and the internet came out they were banished to the electrical recycling bin. Same thing could happen to oil derricks and methane spewing pipelines and LNG ships and facilities if developing countries are able to go wind, solar, batteries and the rest, and leapfrog fossil fuel infrastructure before it’s even built out.
Over the coming years, that trillion-dollar-tussle will be on the front line of combat in the Energy War. Both sides know it and are lobbying governments for their desired outcome.
But why are the Nasser’s and the Exxon’s so bothered right now? After all it’s going to be a fairly long transition of an energy war. I think it’s because making really a lot of money and saving the planet at the same time is starting to excite the powers that be, defined as the liberal media, much of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, California and the West in general. Animal Spirits, as they say in the stock market. And the fact that a majority of Americans (and 78% of Democrats) believe climate change is real and should be addressed is a strong voter wind at the back of the move to clean energy.
Of course, how to make this transition has been detailed for decades in the books of Lester Brown, the Wedge Theory put forth by Sokolow and Pacala for the National Academies of Science, Mark Jacobson’s No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technologies Can Save Our Planet and Clean Our Air, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, Peter Kalmus’ Be the Change, my own tome with Jeremy BC Jackson for Yale, Breakpoint: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises, Paul Hawken’s Drawdown and Regeneration, Amory Lovins forever!-- to name a few predictors.
This month, though, two hip, telegenic and New York-sanctioned best-sellers have joined the list and tipped the balance with a fanfare that’s making the climate cognoscenti sit up, and the Amin Nasser’s push back: Not the End of the World by Hanna Ritchie and Climate Capitalism by Ashat Rathi. These are terrific books. Nothing particularly new but there is a breezy confidence from Ritchie, a yeah, we can solve this thing called climate change! No need to rend your garments and throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge, Gen Z! From finance writer Rathi, comes the hard-nosed spin that oodles of money can be made, and should be. The first line of his book pretty much sums up the next couple hundred pages: it’s cheaper to fix the problem now than to clean up the climate mess later. Certainly no time to cavil about capitalism vs. outmoded finger-pointing socialism. We’ve got maybe 7, 10, 15 years (error bars, people!) before all hell breaks loose, to put it in scientific terms.
Much truth to this. In fact it’s what we believe at Hot Globe, minus Ritchie’s Pollyannish view on the worth of nuclear power. She discounts the paramount issues of poisonous waste, the industry’s refusal to monitor for radiation and cancer, vastly underestimates death and disease at Chernobyl, the short-term memory of our otherwise elegant species concerning Fukushima, and the fact that there is no business rationale for nuclear power whatsoever (see HG with Amory Lovins) only a military one (“Atoms for Peace,” greatest PR slogan ever.)
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