THE CARBON WAR

76
The Winning of The Carbon War
GE’s chief digital officer, Ganesh Bell, is a creature of Silicon Valley through
and through. He talks enthusiastically about the “internet of things”, meaning
the notion – increasingly aired in visions of tomorrow – of objects of all kinds
being embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity to make
a network that allows exchanges of data between manufacturers, operators
and/or other connected devices. The network of “things” becomes all the more
valuable and serviceable because of its interconnectivity.
Wait until all this hits decentralised energy fully, Ganesh Bell says. Stand
back and watch how fast the disruption of everything traditional will be: in
energy, data management, economics and much else.
He doesn’t spell it out, but it is clear that he doesn’t see Shell factoring
much of this kind of thinking into their version of the future.
Macquarie Bank’s man, Simon Wilde, is little less enthusiastic about his
vision for tomorrow. Where better to look for growth opportunities to invest,
he enthuses. Renewables are generally way ahead of fossil fuels on his list,
especially when you throw in all the smart energy opportunities. He only sees
that accelerating.
Wim Thomas does his best, but as he speaks, sitting next to me, I slowly
develop the impression that the Shell man is not comfortable in his own skin
today. He is relaying a party line that he does not have total confidence in.
I offer my thoughts about how neuroscience plays against rational patterns
of behaviour in big corporations.
Thomas is not entirely defensive, and even concedes some truth in the
analysis, based on his own experience. But we will still need to depend on fossil
fuels for a very long time, he adds.
And the risk of stranded assets?
There is a “slight exaggeration” in that narrative, he suggests.
So I am not trivialising anything, I am tempted to ask him. Your employer’s
letter to shareholders didn’t seem to see anything “slight” in Carbon Tracker’s
exaggeration.
It occurs to me that I have been here before. From 1990 until 1997,
throughout the first seven years of international climate negotiations, BP had
stood full square alongside Exxon Mobil, Shell, and the other oil giants in
denying that climate change is anything to worry about. The world needed
“sound science” before rushing to judgement, they said, as though the hundreds
of scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and their
exhaustive processes of peer review, were incapable of providing it. Then, in
May 1997, everything changed. The BP CEO of the day, John Browne, gave a