You can read a response article by Offshore Energies UK here.

In a recent article, the Energy Institute’s CEO Nick Wayth said: ‘I agree with Fossil Free London that we urgently need to accelerate the energy transition – but looking at the whole picture, it’s far more complicated than just quitting fossil fuels.’

Yes, it’s complicated, but it would be far less complicated without fossil fuel interests buying political influence, promoting false solutions and denying the imperative for the transition. The key to an accelerated energy transition is no new oil and gas licences and consents.

Just Stop Oil isn’t alone in making this demand. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations (UN), the vast majority of the scientific community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have all been saying it for years. The government-funded UK FIRES Absolute Zero strategy is calling for zero use of fossil fuels within the next 30 years, while the UK cross-party Environmental Audit Committee says we must set an end date for new oil and gas and put the transition on a ‘war footing’.

We have been kicking the can down the road for 30 years or more and calling it realpolitik; now we need to get real. All pathways to a safe and just world require a rapid switch out of oil, gas and coal, and they require it now. Even the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI) recognises the need for rapid reductions in fossil fuels.

The window of opportunity is closing fast and, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres says: ‘Our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.’

We have been kicking the can down the road for 30 years or more and calling it realpolitik; now we need to get real. All pathways to a safe and just world require a rapid switch out of oil, gas and coal, and they require it now.

An unacceptable risk 
Many of the people reading this are engineers and, like me, you understand risk. One of the things I did when I worked at Shell was to work with BP and the UK Health and Safety Executive on the probabilities and consequences of large explosions on oil rigs. This means that the greater the consequences the lower the acceptable probability. Let’s consider this in regard to the climate crisis.

There is a 66% chance of breaching +1.5°C by 2027 due to the increasing severity of the El Niño, according to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organisation. Already this year, forest fires rage around the world – do we still think we can rely on planting trees to offset our carbon emissions?

Our agricultural lands are also failing. Even in the UK, crop yields are failing or at risk. In Essex last summer, apples cooked on the trees. The planet’s oceans are absorbing CO₂ and acidifying to the point where shells will dissolve.

We are currently on a median pathway to a global average temperature of +2.7°C (based on the sum of supposedly ‘legally’ binding commitments and excluding non-binding pledges). This is the 50:50 case for a catastrophic future, yet there is a significant probability the average temperature will be much higher than this. Indeed, +4°C is a credible future and if the methane from the melting tundra is released, it will be far higher. The former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government – Sir David King – says this would be ‘extinction’.

Some see it coming. US insurance group State Farm will no longer sell property insurance in California because of the ‘rapidly growing catastrophe exposure’. No engineering project would accept the risk we are carrying now, and yet we are. The climate crisis is an existential risk that our government and the oil industry are distressingly relaxed about and, through their actions and policy decisions, actively supporting.

Responsibility for transition
The Head of Strategy of an international oil company (IOC) said to me last year that the primary drivers for the oil and gas sector are ‘survival and profit’. This is a clear statement of fact and for oil and gas, the transition must be consistent with these two drivers.

The industry also argues that it is the hapless victim of the system. It is, it says, hemmed in by the constraints, beyond its control, of demand and financial markets. It says it is transitioning as fast as it can.

But it is lying. The fossil fuel industry has lobbied hard for decades for the continuation of its industry and the sector has pushed back against regulation on all fronts. I well remember some in the oil industry arguing the case for keeping lead in petrol, and the industry is still pushing back on tighter Scope 1 emissions (which at least one study has shown are themselves likely to be a severe underestimate).

The fossil fuel industry is incontrovertibly a brake on the transition. Oil and gas only changes when forced to, and it successfully lobbies governments – including the UK government – to regulate in its favour. We even subsidise the industry. The oil, gas and coal sectors are not part of the solution, they are the problem.

Every year we delay, the more rapid the change must be. Clearly, our government is not taking this seriously – it is still in the stage of appeasing the vested interests and telling the public not to worry. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his government are negligent, and so are the boards of our fossil fuel industries, who have their feet firmly on the accelerator to climate hell. Campaigners such as Just Stop Oil are doing the job that the government should be doing – informing the public of the crisis we are in so that we may prevent it from becoming a catastrophe.

The IPCC and many other organisations tell us that we have all the solutions already, but knowing all the solutions does not mean that implementing them will be easy. It won’t. It is too late for the disruption free ‘green growth’ transition that the fossil fuel industry and governments have been promising for decades, but not delivering – now it is about the least disruptive pathway.

Pathway to net zero
The least disruptive pathway starts by putting the climate crisis before the economic system. This is what the UK cross-party Environmental Audit Committee calls a ‘war footing’. It means using empirical evidence rather than economic doctrine.

Critics are right, we can’t just shut off UK oil and gas production overnight – that’s why we’re calling for an end to licensing new projects. Existing UK production will keep going for as long as reserves last. The best way to make those reserves last and to meet the imperative of a rapid reduction in our carbon emissions is to rapidly reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

Sadly, the UK government’s Net Zero Strategy is reliant on (imported) LNG combined with the unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS). Under this strategy, by 2050 gas use will still be 70% of current use. No fossil fuel is a clean fuel, but LNG is awful. Unabated LNG emissions including the supply chain are ‘close to that of coal’.

So, as well as paying an opex in the billions each year to import gas, we also have to pay the cost of the additional capex and energy to capture and store the emissions all the way back to the wellhead. This is a terrible investment. This is not the IPCC position of ‘capturing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors’.

Let’s invest this money in our renewable energy infrastructure instead. Ramping up investment in the renewable energy sector is well within our capacity and we know that on a levelised cost basis, including fossil fuel emissions abatement, wind and solar are cheaper than electricity from gas-fired power. But, even if they weren’t, we would still have to do it.

Nick Wayth talks the talk for rapid change and much of the solution space he discusses Just Stop Oil agrees with – but it is clearly not happening fast enough. We know the technology and regulatory changes that need to happen. This means renewables, efficiency gains and demand management. We know the pathways to an absolute zero future. The first and entirely commonsense start to declining and ending fossil fuel consumption is to stop all new fossil fuel projects. Making that commitment will drive the transition. Anything else is appeasement.

Demand management and energy provision
There are two issues central to the transition that require some clarification. These are demand management and energy provision in the Global South (emerging economies).

In terms of demand management, where we have no technical solutions yet or they can’t be implemented fast enough, we must use less, and do it fairly. Failing to do this is failing to follow the science. The hardest part of the transition is not technology; the hardest part is adjusting our economic system so that the changes are implemented justly.

A significant part of the transition is the question of how we live and work. Consider for example the Jet Zero Strategy (an adjunct of the Net Zero Strategy) that supports an enormous growth in the aviation sector despite the lack of any credible and substantive solutions on the time scales that matter. The only solution is to fly less – some argue not at all. To make this fair we require the frequent flyer levy – which the public support but the aviation sector and government do not. This levy would allow the less well-off to fly occasionally in a contracting industry.

The position in non-OECD countries is different. Many are still heavily dependent on traditional biomass, car ownership is low, almost nobody flies, and meat consumption is generally low. It is not about demand management in these countries, but it is about avoiding another fossil fuel industrial revolution.

Nick Wayth said: ‘For the 700 million people globally without electricity, the priority is simply to obtain access to energy – of any kind’. But we disagree; it should not be ‘of any kind’. The non-OECD world – the Global South – can skip the mass use of fossil fuels and move straight to renewables. The argument for fossil fuels in non-OECD countries is driven by the oil and gas sector’s need for bookable reserves and the maintenance of the share price.

These essential changes will make our lives better, but different. Our safety and security will increase as we live in a cleaner and more stable world. We will still have modern medicine and good food. We will still have education, family, friends, sport and culture. We will still have our homes and our children, our pleasures and our joys. All the things that really matter we will take with us out of the age of fossil fuels.

But, if we fail to implement no new oil, no new gas and no new coal, we all fail.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.