THE CARBON WAR

In search of the oil-and-gas U-turn 141
The environmental news from American shale regions makes matters
worse. Advocacy groups are suing the US Environmental Protection Agency
for public access to the toxic chemicals used in fracking, for example. Goodness
knows what unpleasantness will hit the press if that eventuates.
I pitch to him that there should be a Plan B, wherein if the house of shale
does start collapsing in the US, the coalition has somewhere else to go by way of
retreat from the Cameron-Osborne illusion of shale nirvana – a clear vision of
an accelerated green industrial revolution based on renewables, smart demand
control, all the rest – so minimising the damage of the inevitable U-turn. A Plan
B of the kind that E.ON is actively considering as we speak, in other words.
I wonder if you could pitch that to George Osborne, I conclude: get him
to agree at least a hedge bet, and work with him on it.
I make my case without much hope in my heart. The Secretary of State
for Energy and Climate Change and the Chancellor are famously unimpressed
with each other. They mostly seem to communicate through the national newspapers
these days.
There will be a lot of communicating to be done on shale in 2015, if I and
people like me are right.
Paris, 16 th January 2015
The heart of the Parisian business quarter in La Défense. Corporate towers
soar above the plaza. Electronic billboards announce “Je Suis Charlie.” The
EDF and Areva buildings are among the most impressive. I wonder who will
occupy these towers in ten years time, given how badly the nuclear-power saga
has been playing out for those companies in recent years.
Total’s 36 floor edifice is the most impressive of the skyscrapers. A screen
in the bustling foyer reads “Committed to better energy”, in English, Arabic
and Chinese. Earnest young people in hard hats – a league of nations both
masculine and feminine – appear fleetingly among imagery making clear that
“better energy” does not entail oil necessarily, at least in the collective mind of
Total’s marketing department. Solar features strongly.
I am here today to talk to the Sustainable Development & Environment
team, both about the big picture of the clean energy family replacing fossil
fuels worldwide, and the much smaller but emblematic picture of solar lighting
replacing oil-burning lamps across Africa.