THE CARBON WAR

Epilogue 347
on the energy transition. If someone were to ask me to pick just one leg of the
journey between May 2013 and November 2015 to justify why I am cautiously
optimistic about the post-Paris world, it is this one.
And so, at the end of November 2015, we arrived in Paris. And the rest
is history.
Now, with 2015 coming to a close, I contemplate 2016 beside my fireless hearth,
trying not to be too discombobulated by the weird weather.
My first two invitations for the year ahead are from Saudi Arabia and
China. The Saudi national business daily Al-Eqtissadiah wants me to write an
op-ed on the kingdom’s solar future post-Paris. A Chinese solar manufacturer
wants me to come and present their board with my bullish view of what the
post-Paris world involves for their company. Two better signposts to a world
potentially shifting on its axis it would be hard for someone like me to be handed.
And I am confident that very many people like me, in many countries, will be
receiving invitations akin to these in the opening weeks of 2016.
I have called this book The Winning of the Carbon War. So has it indeed
been won then?
I think not. My first two invitations are no more than potential signs, at
the level of one foot soldier, of a wider winning trajectory. I chose the wording
of the book title carefully when I started publishing monthly instalments of my
chronicles from the front lines in March 2015. My argument is that we turned a
corner in the first half of 2013, and started the process of winning. The success
in Paris does not change this. It marks, to coin a much-used phrase of Winston
Churchill’s, “the end of the beginning”. It is not a definite “beginning of the
end”. It makes an ultimate win more likely of course, but the run of geopolitical
events could yet derail and reverse the process of winning. Anyone who reads
a newspaper regularly can come up with a derailment scenario or six. Their list
might begin with America electing Donald Trump in November 2016.
But let us set the potential for derailment aside for a moment. 195 governments
agreed in Paris to bat on the same side, to a meaningful degree, at
least on this one issue, and very many sectors of civil society elected to join
forces with them. As I have argued, this is a milestone without precedent in
human history. Many would say, on this basis, that the notion of a carbon war
is not even applicable any more: that we are all, at some level, on the same
side now. That might be prove to be a happy possibility. But much depends
on whether key players in the incumbency elect to switch sides, to retire from