THE CARBON WAR

344
The Winning of The Carbon War
nations to go along with the Paris Agreement, in the endgame. We met the
Saudi Arabian climate envoy, and we saw how keen he was for the Kingdom
not to be seen as obstructive. He, like the executives we met in Total, genuinely
does not believe 100% renewables by 2050 is feasible. Let us see how the march
of events in 2016 influences opinions like his. I predict a lot of mind-changing.
February 2015 provided a perfect example of why this might be the case.
We learned then that Apple is intent on mass producing solar-charged electric
vehicles by 2020. How many announcements like that would it take before
disbelievers in a renewable-powered future come to re-examine their premises?
In early March 2015, we met with the BBC’s environment correspondent
and learned that the energy transition is not covered on TV as much as he would
like because of a dearth of moving pictures. Today, the success in Paris should
have painted a label of “unavoidable” on the issue. Climate change coverage
in the media can be expected to rise. Increased coverage of both the energy
transition and climate change will make it more difficult for the oil-and-gas
establishment to keep pumping out the messages it needs to convince the world
of, if it is to keep a business-as-usual licence to operate.
In mid March 2015, at a conference in Bloomberg’s HQ, we heard incumbency
captains in industry and government on the offensive, professing that
those who oppose the fracking of shale are “misguided” and “naïve”. They
seemed blind to, or negligent of, the growing problems with junk debt, pollution,
and methane leakage in American shale fracking: the model they seek
to import to the UK. But then so many people seem to be unaware of these
problems with fracking. First, they rarely see the emerging problems in the
news. Second, they are often simply too busy with their day jobs to follow play.
In April 2015, at a conference in PWC, we saw how even the solar industry’s
practitioners are ill-informed about the what the oil and gas industry is up to.
We can expect this to change, too, in the post-Paris world. One reason will be
the increasing emergence of confident advocates on the side of clean energy,
on the offensive themselves.
In early May 2015, we watched one such, Elon Musk, launch Tesla Energy
online. He was not slow to point out the downsides of fossil fuels to his whooping
supporters. A week later, with $800 million in indicative orders for Tesla’s
batteries – for buildings and industrial sites, not electric vehicles – he can have
had few regrets about picking an enemy so visibly. The energy incumbency can
expect more of this kind of confrontational marketing in 2016.
In late May 2015, we sat in an expert panel at work in Rome, one of many
plugging perspectives into the Vatican as the Pontifical Council for Justice and