Setting the scene, moderator Christof Rühl, Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Global Energy Policy Centre, looked at energy outlooks a few decades ago. The outlooks highlighted that the global energy supply system is huge and growing, though disruptive change and discretionary spending is extremely rare. There was never an expectation that greenhouse gas emissions could be solved easily or mitigated.

Starting in the 1990s, another narrative emerged that would dominate the energy transition. It goes like this: science tells us that there’s a problem with global warming; and the energy sector is the biggest contributor, through burning of fossil fuels; but we can swap them out and replace them with renewables. If we are tenacious enough, we can solve this problem. In reaction to that narrative, politicians and business leapt ahead with a proliferation of net zero targets. Now we have thousands of companies and tens of countries with net zero targets between 2030–2050. In the last few years, there has been a bit of backpedalling. Maybe it’s not so easy to decarbonise, maybe we need to rely on offsets, but there is no market for offsets yet, so a gap is opening between perception and reality.

Taking up that latter point, the Energy Institute’s Head of Knowledge, Insights and Research Ian Jones pointed out that the Statistical Review of World Energy indicates that the world’s energy transition is not on track. Global energy demand is increasing at 2% per year over the past two decades, while 2007 was the first time that demand from non-OECD countries exceeded demand of OECD countries. This trend has persisted ever since.