THE CARBON WAR

170
The Winning of The Carbon War
Their bankers are here in numbers too. The Financial Times has reported
yet more malfeasance on their part of late. Petrobras bribes have been paid
through Swiss banks, a former executive has told the FT. He claims he laundered
a hundred million dollars through a web of accounts, including at HSBC.
I sat with a very senior lady from HSBC at dinner last night. We avoided
Petrobras, and the criminal case the bank faces in France over tax fraud.
The Financial Times tells me the commodities industry is trying to clean
up its act. But that is not the reason they have invited me here. I am the after
dinner speaker. They want me to offer the traders a different view of what their
energy world might look like, ten years from now.
I make my way to the top table. I cannot remember the last time I was
this nervous.
Tony Hayward, just in from the airport, greets me. The former BP CEO
is chairman of Glencore these days. We shake hands and catch up as people
do who first met more than a quarter of a century ago, and not often since.
We were graduate students at the same time: we researched the same types of
rock, at different universities. It is very difficult to take people seriously who
you knew as a fellow long haired student and shared a drink too many with.
I expect he feels the same way as I do about that.
Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, sits between us. He tells me I am no longer
after-dinner speaker, but pre-dinner speaker. There are demonstrators outside,
agitated about carbon and the rest of it. Security is worried that if we wait until
after dinner there will be too much din for me to be heard.
But the din I fear more is inside the dining hall. I have seen dinner speakers
at conferences literally drowned out by a rising tide of chatter from tables,
even if they are saying things the diners might normally want to hear – which
these traders and bankers will most certainly not be hearing from me. Guests
at occasions like this so much prefer talking to people they are sitting with:
especially if they have been both cooped up all day in sessions and have been
quaffing champagne before dinner.
Sure enough, as soon as I am a few sentences into my talk a table at the
back of the room starts up an audible conversation.
I press on, now expecting that contagion to spread to the nearby tables,
and on around the hall. As for the tables outside, where diners can’t even see
me other than on a TV screen, I am amazed they are not talking already.
I recall some advice I was given as a young university lecturer, by an old
professor of petroleum geology, a colleague at the Royal School of Mines. If
faced by a class of students up to collective subversive mischief like tapping