THE CARBON WAR

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The Winning of The Carbon War
a tale of success. But the Bakken shale belt in North Dakota is pumping less oil
than it did a year ago. September production is down 1.1%. “The shale boom
in North Dakota has softened to a whisper”, Bloomberg declares. The future
of shale lies in the Permian Basin, the Financial Times tells us. Production is
falling less steeply there than in the Bakken and Eagleford shale regions.
Meanwhile the warnings of widespread debt default among shale drillers continue.
Chief investment officer of USAA Investments R. Matthew Freund is the
latest to speak out. He tells CNNMoney to expect many. The collective global
debts of the oil and gas industry are an increasingly worrying component of
a general tendency to indebtedness and default. 99 companies have defaulted
globally since the beginning of the year, 66% of them American, mostly in oil
and gas, mostly in shale.
In conventional oil, the retreat from frontier projects continues. Statoil
follows Shell in pulling out of Alaska, exiting 16 operating leases in the process,
plus its stake in 50 leases operated by ConocoPhillips.
The City of North Vancouver marks the retreat from oil in a different
way. Fuel pumps are to be labelled with cigarette packet-style climate change
warnings, the mayor announces.
The first city in the world to label climate risks at the pump will be
Canadian.
US Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders announces unashamedly that in
his view ExxonMobil lied on climate. He is not waiting for the courts to take
a view. They knew the truth and “lied to protect their business model at the
expense of the planet”, he tells anyone who will listen.
President Obama seizes the zeitgeist to make a huge move. He rejects the
Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline and hails the US as leader on climate change.
“Frankly, approving that project would have undercut that global leadership”,
he announces.
Mark Fulton, Carbon Tracker advisor and analyst extraordinaire, is
ecstatic. He considers the work he did for us on the economics of Keystone –
or rather, the lack of workable economics – as among his finest. As do many
others. And that is saying a lot, given everything he has produced over the
years for Deutsche Bank, Citi, and now us.
In Belgium, I am talking to 300 people involved in the nation’s clean-tech
industries. Tesla has recently opened its first European factory not far from here.
I am going to have a fun day.