THE CARBON WAR

270
The Winning of The Carbon War
San Francisco and Oakland, 28 th October 2015
CalCEF’s office in the heart of the financial district. I am giving a webinar
for more than a hundred financiers, foundation representatives, and others
interested in the threat of stranded assets. I have so much to talk about that it
becomes increasingly difficult to organise it coherently, and hold back from
talking too fast. As well as the daily recent pattern of play, I am armed with a
new Carbon Tracker report, not much more than a week old. Entitled “Lost
in Transition”, it takes issue with big energy demand scenarios that routinely
assume fossil fuel use will continue to expand in the years ahead. Not so, our
analysts argue. Rapid advances in technology, increasingly cheap renewable
energy, slower economic growth and lower than expected population rise are
among nine themes that could dampen fossil fuel demand significantly by 2040.
Typical industry scenarios see coal, oil and gas use growing by 30%–50% and
still making up 75% of the energy supply mix in 2040. These scenarios do not
reflect the huge potential for reducing fossil fuel demand.
I show a particularly sobering chart from the paper. It plots the IEA’s estimates
of the forward growth of solar energy globally in 2000, 2002, 2005 and
2007. None exceeded 20 gigawatts by 2014. The reality was nearly 180 gigawatts.
I am thrilled by this report not just because it seamlessly maintains the
standards of the earlier catalogue of Carbon Tracker reports, but because
younger analysts, Luke Sussam and Tom Drew, co-wrote it with James Leaton.
The Carbon Tracker team is developing both resilience and strength in depth.
The webinar is an hour long: 20 minutes for my thoughts and the rest
questions and answers. The time evaporates.
I make my way by subway to Oakland for a lunchtime meeting with
entrepreneurs in solar and related businesses at an incubator, co-founded by
Danny Kennedy, called PowerHouse. Twenty entrepreneurs sit around a room
for a weekly session they describe as Open House. In it, they ask for and offer
each other help in areas where they can usefully skill share: personnel, finance,
contacts, IT, and more. I am asked to say a few words as a nominally successful
solar entrepreneur, and answer their questions.
The questions are sharp. The entrepreneurs are mostly young. The occasion
has a campus feel to it.
I tell them the obvious: that they are the future. I ask them to spare
a thought for executives in their fifties at the top of utility and oil-and-gas
companies, and the chances those culture-bound people have of leading their
companies across the energy transition successfully. Not high. Many of these