Global carbon budget gives all a clear and simple target

Two CEO members of the South African Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (SA CLG), Mike Brown of Nedbank and Mark Cutifani of AngloGold Ashanti, have contributed a substantial op-ed article to today’s Business Day, in which they set out to clarify what South African business leaders need to understand about the carbon emissions reduction challenge.

The SA CLG is convened by Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and is part of a network of 15 similar groups around the wolrd, collectively known as the Corporate Leaders Network for Climate Action.

The 2°C Challenge Communiqué

The 2°C Challenge Communiqué calls on governments to break the deadlock in the international negotiations and take the necessary action at a national level to ensure a successful transition to green growth and a climate resilient economy.

Starting with the negotiations in Bali in 2007, previous Communiqués quickly gained wide business and NGO support, with 950 companies endorsing its message of support for an “ambitious, robust and equitable global deal on climate change” before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. This year, business leaders emphasise that the window of opportunity to stabilise warming to 2°C “has almost closed”.

The Communiqué notes that, if they fail to act, governments “risk permanent damage to their credibility”, but the right action would “secure a low carbon-emission economy that is more resilient, more efficient and less vulnerable to global shock”. Without an international deal, “business will have insufficient clarity or certainty of action to invest to its full potential”.

Who produced The Communiqué?

The Communiqué has been written and delivered by business leaders from a range of sectors including energy, finance, mining, retail, and manufacturing, via the newly established Corporate Leaders Network for Climate Action (CLN). The CLN includes groups from Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the US.

We encourage all CEOs to sign up.

Event: A climate science update ahead of COP 17

CAMBRIDGE RESILIENCE FORUM
sponsored by Webber Wentzel

PRESENTS

Dr Emily Shuckburgh:
A climate science update ahead of COP 17

 

DATE: Wednesday 28 September 2011
TIME: 17:00 for 17:30 – 19:00
VENUE: Webber Wentzel Cape Town Office, 15th Floor Convention Tower, Heerengracht, Foreshore

Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in partnership with Webber Wentzel invites you to a presentation by Dr Emily Shuckburgh who heads the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey.

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 17) is taking place in Durban at the end of the year. While the international negotiations to allocate the available global carbon budget has progressed slowly over the last few years, the scientific research into the evidence of climate change and the expected impacts is continuing.

Understanding past and future climate shifts requires robust and fine-grained modelling and measurement. Antartica is an important focal point for much climate research and the British Antarctic Survey is one of the leading institutes conducting this work.

Entrance is free but numbers are limited, booking is essential.

To confirm your attendance please e-mail Elspeth Donovan on elspeth.donovan@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

More details on the speaker:

Dr Emily Shuckburgh leads the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She is also a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. She is a climate scientist who has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT, as well as at the University of Cambridge.

Her personal research concerns atmosphere and ocean dynamics and she is currently focusing her efforts on understanding the circulation of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. At the University of Cambridge she lectures a course on climate change in the Dept of Earth Sciences and is a faculty member of the Climate Leadership Programme.

At present she is undertaking a part-time secondment to the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and presently chair of their scientific publications committee.

Where money does really grown on trees

Article by Jane Notten who writes for Cambridge Progamme for Sustainability Leadership

In a debate between the environment and the economy, the environment seems always doomed to lose. Why?

Because it is assumed that the environment cannot solve pressing social challenges such as employment and poverty alleviation.

But what if it can? In one small country in Central America, the environment has triumphed – not at the expense of the economy – but to its infinite benefit, and that of the 4 million people living there.

Twenty years ago Costa Rica earned its keep primarily from agriculture, ranching and forestry, exporting timber to the developed world. It was losing its indigenous forests at a rate of 55 000 hectares a year. Today it has reversed the trend.

Through ingenious restoration and conservation efforts, it has achieved a remarkable doubling of forest cover and has turned itself into one of the ecological tourism hot spots of the world. GDP is up and the country is ranked No 1 in the Happy Planet Index and number five in the Environmental Performance Index.

In a very real way, in Costa Rica money grows on trees!

In South Africa recently to tell the story behind the story was Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, regional vice-president of Conservation International and the man who led the Costa Rica turnaround as the then energy and environment minister.

A guest of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s (CPSL) South African office, Rodriguez told an audience at a CPSL Resilience Forum earlier this month that the Costa Rican government knew it had to do something radical because, despite decades of conservation planning, the creation of protected areas and support at the highest political levels, they had not been able to stop the decline in biodiversity and loss of tropical forests.

Its solution was as visionary as it is deceptively simple.

Its first radical act was to overcome what Rodriguez calls “major institutional failures” and marry the portfolios of the environment and energy (including mining and water), so instead of being at loggerheads, they had to work together.

Coherent

“This opened the possibility for more coherent planning,” said Rodriguez. It also gave the environment a louder voice in government.

“If politics was a football game, the ministry for the environment was almost always relegated to the bench,” he said. “We moved it to midfield.”

Its second act was to recognise the economic benefit of natural capital. “We came with the realisation that the forest wouldn’t be protected until we were fully able to recognise the economic services it was providing to society,” said Rodriguez.

Usually, natural capital is used up in the pursuit of economic growth, and this is never costed into the process. Yet ecosystems play a crucial role in sustaining life on Earth.

Forests provide essential services such as the absorption of climate-changing carbon dioxide, refuges for pollinating insects, purification of water resources, roots that prevent erosion, and recreation – all of which are critical to human life, and hence have a value.

Costa Rica’s third radical act was to find ways to reward the people who cared for these ecosystems. Simply put, they looked for ways to make it more valuable for them to protect the forests than to destroy them by, for example, selling mineral and timber rights for short-term gain.

The result was the introduction of a tax on fossil fuels, the proceeds of which were used to pay local communities for forest protection based on the carbon sequestration services they provided.

Known as the Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) scheme, or Pagos por Servicios Ambientales, what Rodriguez and his colleagues had developed was a pioneering financial instrument that attempted to measure natural capital and then compensate accordingly.

Quantify

Being able to measure (however inexactly) and quantify the value of ecosystem services was crucial in being able to win over all parts of government to the cause. Rodriguez learnt early on that he needed to speak the finance minister’s language before funds for environmental protection would be unlocked.

Having done this, he went on to successfully lobby other ministries to support a $50 million Ecomarkets project, backed by the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility, that would put a market price on the various services that ecosystems provide when left intact.

Over time the system has grown more complex. It is backed up by other policies that enforce the rule of law (Costa Rica passed a law banning deforestation in 1996) and eliminate subsidies that encourage the destruction of biodiversity.

Financial incentives have been expanded to include conservation of the water supply. Finding similar incentives for biodiversity protection is next on the agenda.

“There’s a big industry in Costa Rica that makes profits out of biodiversity – that’s ecotourism, and ecotourism generates revenue of around $2 billion a year, so that’s an industry that uses biodiversity, but doesn’t pay for the access and for the use,” explains Rodriguez.

Along the way, the focus has also broadened from pure conservation to restoration, which, Rodriguez said, is more complex “because there are already people in the landscape”.

By using PES to incentivise farmers to convert degraded lands into silvo-pastoral systems that combine forestry and grazing of domesticated animals or agriculture and create vital biodiversity corridors, they have succeeded in reconciling two other age-old enemies, the environment and agriculture, in a way that works for both.

This article was first published on IOL, 18 August 2011.

Event: Policy instruments to move SA to a low carbon economy

CAMBRIDGE RESLIENCE FORUM
sponsored by Webber Wentzel

PRESENTS

Policy instruments to move South Africa
to a low carbon economy

 

DATE: Tuesday 2 August 2011
TIME: 17:00 for 17:30 – 19:00
VENUE: Webber Wentzel Cape Town Office, 15th Floor Convention Tower, Heerengracht, Foreshore, Cape Town

In order to move to a low carbon, climate resilient future, a range of actions on the local, national and global level are required. Various processes are under way to investigate how to enable and finance such a transition. The Green Climate Fund that was established in Cancun in December 2010 was seen as a positive development in this area. An important feature of the UN climate negotiations in Durban at the end of this year will be discussions around the fund’s architecture. At the same time on the domestic front, the South African government is looking at policies and regulations to get the country to meet our Copenhagen Commitment, including a carbon tax that looks like a distinct reality for 2012.

We invite you to a panel discussion hosted by Webber Wentzel and the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership that will consider the following question:
What are the available policy instruments, within the context of the international climate policy framework, to move South Africa towards a low carbon economy?

PANELLISTS:
Hennie Bester – Partner, Tax Practice Group, Webber Wentzel
Saliem Fakir – Head, WWF Living Planet Unit
Emily Tyler – Independent Climate Change Economist

Entrance is free but numbers are limited, booking is essential.

To confirm your attendance please e-mail Magda de Kok on magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

Event: Creating a low carbon economy

CAMBRIDGE RESILIENCE FORUM
sponsored by Webber Wentzel

PRESENTS

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez:
Creating a Low Carbon Economy

 

DATE: Wednesday 22 June 2011
TIME: 17:00 for 17:30 – 19:00
VENUE: Webber Wentzel Cape Town Office, 15th Floor Convention Tower, Heerengracht, Foreshore

As South Africa has committed itself on the international stage to move towards a low carbon economy, it will be well served to look at successful examples of other countries that have already embarked on this journey. One of these examples is Costa Rica that is moving towards a low carbon economy by addressing market and institutional failures in the context of sustainable development.

Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in partnership with Webber Wentzel invites you to a presentation by Carlos Manuel Rodriguez who will discuss the policy and institutional process, the innovative financial mechanisms and concrete efforts around sustainable development in Costa Rica. The role that conservation and protected areas play in supplying valuable environmental services underpinning social and economic growth will be discussed. The talk will centre on the successful national instrument of payments for ecosystem services (PES) which has made Costa Rica very well known.

Entrance is free but numbers are limited, booking is essential.

To confirm your attendance please e-mail Magda de Kok on magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

More details on the speaker:

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez is Vice President for Conservation Policy at Conservation International (CI). Before joining CI, Rodriquez was the Minister of Environment and Energy for the Republic of Costa Rica, where he was a pioneer in the development of payment for ecosystem services (PES).

A lawyer, politician and, above all, a conservationist, Rodriguez held various political posts in Costa Rica, including Director of the National Parks Service. He is also founder and Board member of many environmental NGOs in Costa Rica, in addition to several tropical research institutes.

At CI, Rodriguez is responsible for providing strategic direction and identifying key international and U.S. policy issues, organizations, and forums in which to engage. He leads the CI policy team that informs and influences bilateral, multilateral and international policies impacting the nexus of human well-being, economic development, climate change, ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. Rodriguez also leads CI’s engagement with the governments and leaders of select developing countries, developed countries, and leaders of many of the multilaterals, the UN system and other NGOs with the goal of influencing human well-being through biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management. Lastly, he helps to ensure the availability of funds to implement and sustain the changes brought about by such polices.

Book review: The Great Disruption

Review of “The Great Disruption – Why the Climate Crisis will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World”, by Paul Gilding

By: Peter Willis

Would that there were more Paul Gildings.

I must first own to being a friend of the author and an admirer. Gilding has made his mark as a very engaging speaker, as a successful sustainability strategy consultant for multinational companies and as the Director of Greenpeace International in the early 1990’s. I have always enjoyed his talks, delivered in his rapid-fire Oz, barely comprehensible to my English ear, but could I see him writing a book? That seemed too patient, too learned and methodical for this quirky activist. I was wrong, and what a challenging and inspiring book about our future he has produced.

There are really only two ways to think about the future: you can decide what you think will happen (this is like taking a bet on future trends and events) or you can decide what you would like the future to be and contain (this has more to do with aspirations and yearnings). They are very different mental and emotional processes and the former gets vastly more airtime than the latter in our dominant social, academic and political discourse.

Gilding uses both approaches in this book and I found the combined effect quite fascinating. For the past six years or more he has been relentlessly peering into humanity’s future, trying to describe the outlines of the next few decades in ways that leaders and ordinary people can make sense of and respond creatively to. He has done this with courage and his own brand of dogged intellectual clarity, qualities that shine through the book. Gilding is not an academic and he speaks refreshingly from his feelings and his intuition as much as from his reading of the science in this field. We are offered ‘the world according to Paul Gilding’ and as we read we are invited to make up our minds whether he is a reliable guide.

Not surprisingly, with his decades of experience at the cutting edge of environmental and social activism the future he sees for us is, as the book title suggests, unsettling. So is this another in the litany of ‘doom-meets-gloom’ warnings that have been washing over us for a while now? Not quite – Gilding separates himself decisively from that pack.

For example, he does not stop at warning us that ‘business as usual’ is leading us into all kinds of trouble. He takes us through the next step and the next. Very few writers in this field stretch their and our imagination this far. He argues plausibly that, whatever our views or preferences in the matter, ours is the generation that will witness the end of economic growth. He makes it really clear that this is both inevitable and almost impossible for us to conceive of; so it will come as a shock, denied by most until it is beyond obvious. He also leaves us in no doubt that this period of adjustment will be turbulent, even traumatic.

He suggests we will respond in two distinct ways. There will be the heroic response – “The One Degree War”- where our old-style systems kick into feverish and effective action to defeat the threat of runaway warming. On the other hand and simultaneously, we will start unravelling the old economy and begin to assemble the new economy, one where we finally accept that accumulating money and stuff beyond a relatively modest level doesn’t make us any happier, and we build livelihoods and communities that actually serve our aspirations.

In case you glaze over at this point, thinking “Of course, and all the fairies will come tripping out from under the trees to help make that happen?”. Gilding supplies us with many current examples suggesting that this desirable future “is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.” More than this, he challenges us to recognize that not all of human nature is self-serving and focused on short-term gain. While those values have informed most of our business and politics to date we all seem to have some experience of the opposite also being true. The balance of human behaviour under stress is a hard thing to predict with any authority but I found Gilding’s steady gaze of hope, looking past the inevitable chaos as our current order collapses, increasingly compelling and credible as I read on.

Ultimately what makes this a really important book is how, after making an uncommonly robust case for the impending “Great Disruption”, Gilding holds out a prospect of the fresh humanization of economy and society that is not only tantalizing (who wouldn’t want to live in such a world?) but also surprisingly plausible. If he’s even mainly right about the latter the former becomes infinitely more bearable.

Book review: When a Billion Chinese Jump

Review of “When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It”, by Jonathan Watts

By: Peter Willis

I’ve just been visiting large parts of China. The trip was exhausting but completely fascinating and revealed more than I could have hoped about what the near future may hold for all of us. I managed to squeeze the trip into the long Easter week-end and with a minimal carbon footprint. I accomplished it via the near 400 pages of this extraordinary book. I still haven’t fully arrived home and my mind is filled with the myriad images Watts paints into his breathless narrative, but the sobering implications of the book have already started to re-shape my thinking. I strongly recommend the journey.

Watts, an accomplished environment correspondent for the Guardian newspaper group, has spent the past seven years reporting from China. This book is the fruit of a six-month odyssey where he travelled over 160,000 kilometres in search of a coherent answer to the question implied in the book’s title: can the world look to China to show us the way through and out of our encroaching environmental and economic constraints, or will it tip us all over the edge?

Watts is a superb writer with a journalist’s instinct for the individual human stories that illustrate large-scale political and economic dynamics. One meets a memorable array of local people, mostly close to the ground and unremarkable except in so far as they build colour into one’s growing sense of what it means to be Chinese in China right now. But he also has a reassuringly strong grasp of the facts and numbers associated with the issues he’s researching and a remarkable ability to keep the big picture in view while focusing on the detail before him as he travels. He comes across as an exceptionally reliable witness, endlessly curious and adventurous yet without any visible axe to grind or theory to prove, just a profound sense that the question he’s asking is probably one of the most urgent and important questions of our  time.

Working as I do in the field of sustainability one gleans a great deal of information about  China’s economic ‘miracle’ and the environmental costs associated with it. One also hears these days about some staggeringly rapid investments the country is making in clean energy technologies. But the information is usually fragmentary in nature and comes without a proper historical or political context. Accompanying Watts on his extensive travels, one comes to appreciate the mind-boggling range and scale of the challenges the Chinese Communist Party faces in continuing to provide a route out of poverty for all its diverse peoples.

What comes clearly through this book are the following:

• Most Chinese experience the last thirty years as having provided solid economic progress that contrasts vividly with the preceding decades of shaming poverty and internal strife.
• The West has been able to ‘clean up’ its own industrial economies thanks to the willingness of China (and a few others) to take over the dirtier jobs.
• Similarly, those Chinese cities that have developed most rapidly and successfully are now keen to ‘clean up’ and so the vast Chinese hinterlands, many left environmentally unscathed by earlier phases of industrialization (Tibet being one example), are becoming the dumping grounds for this further wave of cost externalization.
• They and their government are well aware that this progress comes with an environmental cost, but on the whole one that’s willingly paid. It is fascinating – and disheartening – to discover the firm cultural foundations for the contemporary Chinese disregard for other species, for example.
• Meanwhile there is a growing recognition in central government of the need to reduce environmental impacts dramatically if massive social and economic costs are to be avoided (and many such bills are clearly already coming due). But there is a deep reluctance to do anything that might significantly slow growth. As in all western countries and most others as well, the popular addiction to economic growth and burgeoning consumption is thriving as never before in China.
• In addition, Watts discovers that real power – or at least the power to ignore Beijing’s laws when push comes to shove – lies in the thousands of town and city governments, where the will to grow the economy is most viscerally felt and defended. One is left with the impression that even if the Party’s leadership is having a profound change of heart and wants to change the economy’s direction away from its currently self-destructive path (an idea less far-fetched today than just a few years ago), it probably wouldn’t be in a position to mandate such a change of course over any useful timescale. The inertia of the systems that drive development at the mid-level in China are simply too strong. As Watts puts it:

“Environmental pressures have forced the leadership to attempt something unprecedented in the world’s history: to re-engineer an economy before it has finished industrializing. I doubt if they have the authority to achieve this.”

So how does Watts answer his own question? His answer only comes at the end and even then, being a true journalist, he pulls back from any cast-iron judgement. But having shown us the extraordinary scale of the damage being done to the country’s eco-systems in the name of economic progress and western-style consumption, and having examined the case for change coming via the Party leadership or alternatively from civil society, he concludes that so long as materialism and economic growth remain the dominant values, the chances of averting disaster are very slim.

Those are of course the dominant values not only in China but elsewhere. So the imperative to change at the level of values – of what matters most to us – is laid at all of our doors, whether we live in China, the US or here in Africa. The Chinese people just happen to be the ones out there at today’s cutting edge of aspiration, physically putting in place infrastructure and comforts that developed countries take for granted. How exactly that deeper shift in values might be achieved is something the author does not address in this book.

As my journey in Watts’ company ended I felt that these (to me, previously) remote people were now familiar companions in my world. We really are all in the same boat and our destinies intertwined. What a fascinating voyage awaits us now.

Post Cancun Breakfast hosted by Investec

On 2 February 2011, CPSL convened and facilitated a breakfast hosted by Investec where the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun (COP16) was unpacked.
  
The United Nations Framework for Climate Change hosts a conference annually. The most recent of the Conference of the Parties meetings (COP16) took place in Cancun in December 2010. As in January 2010 when CPSL and Investec hosted a post-Copenhagen platform, this year’s event offered valuable insights from various experts.

Guest speakers at the breakfast were:

• Joanne Yawitch: Leader of the SA delegation to Cancun and Deputy DG of climate change at the Department of Environmental Affairs
• Richard Worthingon: Climate Change Programme Manager, WWF South Africa
• Dr Fred Goede: Group Safety, Health and Environment Centre Manager, Sasol
• Prof Jorgen Randers: Director of the Centre for Climate Strategy, Norwegian School of Management and faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability leadership

Images and videos of the event are available on the Investec website

Gary Kendall – Are we starting to ‘get’ the oil question?

An opinion piece by Dr Gary Kendall, CPSL SA Deputy Director and author of ‘Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age’

As unrest in North Africa and the Middle East enters a fifth month since the first sparks of the Tunisian Revolution last December, oil prices are starting to dominate the political discourse. In the UK, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne warned of a 1970s-style oil shock that could cost the UK economy £45billion over two years. Closer to home, last week’s Financial Mail cover story on oil – the three letters that threaten economic growth – argued that a sustained high oil price threatens to completely stall the global recovery.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. A little less than three years ago, within the space of a few weeks, oil prices hit a record $147/bbl, Lehman Brothers collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in history, and the global economy fell into a ravine from which it has scarcely emerged. A recent article by Jacob Weisberg in Slate magazine discussed the cause of the economic crisis by examining “the 15 best explanations for the Great Recession”. Surprisingly, the price of oil did not feature in that long list of persuasive explanations. It’s surprising because in the prevailing economic system oil is the economy.

Until quite recently, many economists and the mainstream financial media didn’t seem to ‘get’ the profound significance of oil. True, it was widely acknowledged that economic slowdowns – particularly in the United States, the largest oil consumer on earth – tended to be preceded by spikes in the oil price. But the clear correlation between high oil prices and recessions did not, in itself, prove any causal relationship. As far as 2008 was concerned, surely Wall Street’s wizardry and former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s laissez-faire approach to regulation were the real culprits. Surely the rising oil price was just another ‘derivative’ of the bewildering world of credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. Better still, by pinning it on these suspects we could even appear to be clever by pretending to comprehend the unintended consequences of ‘innovative financial products’.

Though we live in an increasingly fast-moving, interconnected and complex world, it remains a truism that the simplest explanations are often the best ones. First, consider that the economy is ultimately about the movement of people and stuff. Expressed as GDP – the market value of goods and services produced – it is difficult to envisage economic activity taking place to any great extent without people and things moving around. Whether it’s raw materials being hauled from the point of extraction to a processing plant, or from there being distributed onwards to retailers, whether it’s customers accessing goods, or employees getting to and from their places of work, very little of our globalised economic system functions without motorised transport.

Second – and here’s the rub – worldwide, 95% of the primary energy that moves people and stuff from place to place – in cars, vans, trucks, buses, trains, boats, and aeroplanes – comes from a single source. Transport is uniquely dependent on oil, meaning the economy is uniquely dependent on oil, or rather on the liquid transport fuels – such as diesel, petrol (or gasoline), kerosene – that we obtain from oil refineries. So when the oil price goes up, the price of transport fuels increases and virtually everything that counts towards economic activity is impacted, either directly or indirectly. Of course, in the case of oil companies, rising oil prices have a beneficial effect, at least in the short term…more of which later.

Intuitively it’s easier to understand this effect on the cost of physical goods that actually get shipped around. But why should high oil prices impact the service economy, and aren’t advanced economies more service-oriented than ever? Again, the simple answer may be sufficient for our needs. As household transportation costs increase – and, crucially, they are inelastic because most of us cannot or will not change our abode or place of work according to the forecourt price of petrol – all discretionary expenses experience downward pressure. Food bills climb as oil-dependent agricultural commodities track the price of crude, an effect exacerbated by the gasoline substitution potential of corn-based ethanol in the US. Debt repayments are more or less fixed, give or take fluctuating interest rates. What remains is a shrinking domestic budget: quieter shopping malls, fewer evenings at the restaurant, one less trip to the hair salon. Economic activity experiences a general slowdown – this is the very definition of recession, and not an ‘innovative financial product’ in sight.

Anyone doubting the importance of liquid transport fuel to the health of the prevailing economic system – and therefore to maintaining social cohesion and political stability – need only recall what happened in the UK in September 2000. Truckers and farmers protesting the relatively high pump price of diesel staged blockades of refineries and fuel terminals. Diesel and petrol supplies slowed to a trickle as the public queued at forecourts to top up their tanks “just in case”. Within a few days, 90% of filling stations were bone dry, just-in-time supply chains unravelled and people were fighting over loaves of bread among bare supermarket shelves. The UK had staged a compelling if entirely accidental social experiment.

Conclusion: five days of petroleum separate an advanced civilisation from savagery. Note that we didn’t even run out of oil, we merely panicked!

Returning to the companies that maintain our oil flows: perhaps uniquely in the global economic village, they do rather well when oil prices are on the up. For instance, in 2008 – the year in which oil spiked to $147/bbl – ExxonMobil posted an annual profit of $45 billion, the largest in corporate history. That same year, oil companies accounted for six of the seven largest global corporations, as measured by revenues. (The outlier was Wal-Mart, an enterprise utterly symbolic of the economy’s dependency on relatively cheap and free-flowing transport fuel.)

In this context, it should not surprise anyone that oil companies are somewhat reluctant to allow the Oil Age to draw to a graceful conclusion, as the transport system inevitably electrifies to become several times more energy efficient and compatible with the full range of sustainable renewable energy sources. Not vested in the electricity generation game, oil companies continue to lead us astray. BP recently argued that biofuels are “the only game in town”, the only major way to decarbonise road fuel, possibly contributing around 12% of the road transport fuel mix by 2030. Or to put it another way, within twenty years if BP have their way the transport sector will be only 88% dependent on oil.

BP is missing the point, of course. The question is not only how we can decarbonise the transport sector, rather it is how we can achieve this while meeting the primary objective: gaining independence from oil. How can we divest ourselves of turmoil in the politically fragile oil exporting regions of the world, and insulate our economic and social stability from events over which we exercise no control? Ultimately, independence from oil means getting off liquid transport fuels, which won’t be achieved by shifting to 12% biofuels over the next two decades.

To paraphrase BP, electricity is the only game in town.

This article was first published in Business Day, 7 April 2011

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