As the old saying goes: don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining.
I’m not going to stand here and tell you that everything is perfect in the world of electric vehicles and renewables. The reason I’m not going to do that is because it isn’t. It really isn’t. There are some serious hurdles and issues we need to sort out both globally and on a regional/ national level before everything is perfect.
But what I’m also not going to do is sit here and listen to all the naysayers concoct half-baked ‘problems’ to try and slow down or stop the transition to sustainable transport.
Or let you foist suboptimal solutions on me because ‘they’re better than doing nothing and at least they move the needle forward’ (Hydrogen for space heating, anyone?)
Or let people with vested interests stymie the movement towards a working and equitable solution (I’m looking at you, Sultan Al Jaber, head of COP28). The latest monstrosity of a pitch by the oil industry is the concept of ‘Low Carbon Oil1’. Let me see if I can explain this without dissolving into fits of pure rage.
Sultan Al Jaber maintains that his oil is low carbon because his company’s hydrocarbons are extracted efficiently and with less leakage than the others.
This is a little like the old tobacco industry move of providing ‘low tar’ cigarettes. “These cigarettes have a lower amount of deadly toxins in them. They won’t kill you as quickly as our competitors’ cigarettes so you should smoke these instead” That’s right, we are at the point in civilised society where companies are making the ‘Our product kills you more slowly than our competitors’ claims.
“But, Gary. We need oil and gas. Our society is built on it. Why can’t we let them just keep drilling?” I hear you cry. Nobody is saying we need to stop drilling for oil and gas. (Well, some people are but that’s not what they mean) What we need to do is stop burning oil and gas. From a single barrel of oil, something like 80% of the current content is burned for fuel. The remaining 20% is processed into the products that we currently use every day - plastic, bitumen, chemicals etc.
If we continue to drill for oil but use 100% of the barrel to fulfil the needs of the 20% that are not burned we will instantly keep the current standard of living we like but we will need one-fifth of the oil we currently use.
The need, therefore, to open more and more oilfields is dramatically reduced.
Coal is a slightly different issue. The majority of coal is used in some countries to provide power - although this is being vastly reduced. Indeed the UK has gone from producing upwards of 40% of its energy from coal fewer than 10 years ago to closing its final coal-powered plant later this year. This is a phenomenal achievement for any country and one of which we should rightly be proud.
But there are many other countries that are at the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to coal usage. Poland and China are two that are often cited as examples.
But it’s worth remembering that a lot of the coal usage in many countries - the US is an example - is mostly there as a political sop for voters. There are many states in the US where coal is a major provider of jobs (and income). As such politicians in these states don’t want to put legislation in place that will minimise or eliminate coal usage because it will directly affect their constituents (and, hence, their ability to be re-elected).
This means we have politicians making decisions on climate based not on what’s best for the planet (or even the country), but what’s best for their re-election chances.
We went through the same issues in the UK. There were many people who didn’t want the coal mines to close. They had - and continued to - make their living through mining (Indeed, my grandfather worked the Welsh coal mines for some time as a young man) and saw this, rightly, as an existential threat to their livelihood.
But the thing that made coal mining - and coal burning - a smaller and smaller part of their lives was the introduction of alternate jobs for them.
We saw closed coal mines being turned into renewable energy plants. We’ve seen miners retrained as beekeepers in the US1 . We’ve seen miners moving from coal mining to mining other minerals that are used in the environmental revolution.
This is similar to what we’ve seen with the North Sea Oil workers who are using their existing skills but applying them to things such as offshore wind installations and undersea cable maintenance and management.
So there are options out there. However, some workers will inevitably lose their jobs. But if that job contributes to the degradation of the planet, increased illness, air pollution and respiratory deaths is it a bad thing that these jobs are being reduced?
I’ve used the analogy before on this site but back in the early 1800s the largest industry in the United States was whaling. I provided livelihoods for literally thousands and thousands of people and the byproducts from whales were used all over the world.
Then oil and gas became the principal means of providing heat and light rather than whale oil and the whaling industry died virtually overnight. Whole towns lost their main source of income. Thousands found themselves out of a job.
But who remembers that nowadays? For most people, it’s a footnote in history.
Oil and gas can be the same. We just need the political willpower to make it happen.
https://www.adnoc.ae/news-and-media/press-releases/2021/low-carbon-oil-to-play-central-role-in-the-energy-transition
I console myself from time to time with returning to the logic that, if you had a unit of energy, what’s the most sensible thing to do with it.
It’s like the fact that, if food was distributed evenly, we’d all have about 5,000 kilocalories a day.
If we all had a bundle of sunshine, or a puff of wind, each day…..what on earth would we be doing wasting our energy digging up, making, transporting and then *burning* something….