Beyond Oil 2023 - Why we never stop pushing (and why that's good)

This is an edited and extended version of a presentation I delivered at Beyond Oil 2023, in Bergen, Norway. I have added in a couple of bits that came out after the presentation. My co-panellists were Jessica Jewell and Alexander Dodge , who both gave fantastic presentations. Tsimafei Kazlou was our very well-informed and thoughtful moderator.

The topic of this panel is the 'global view' of refuelling transformations. So, let's think about the globe, and the part of it we live inside - the atmosphere. The more greenhouse gases we pump into it, the hotter and more unlivable it gets. The worse the heatwaves, and the fires, and the crop failures and disasters.

And despite the flurry of 'net zero by 2050' commitments, the single metric that matters the most is not when we get to zero, but how fast we get there. The slow pathways cause triple the damage to life and livelihoods than the fast pathway:

Nudging us off the slow path and towards the faster ones is essentially where I exist. My day job, my writing, my social media posts, my articles - everything I do, I do to try and lend my hand to many hands collectively pushing for us to go faster.

To illustrate a prominent illustration of a failure to go faster, this morning, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a fascinating interactive dataset of country pledges, with unreliable and problematic land-use data removed. Looking at Norway, we have to reduce our energy-related emissions 12 times faster than we have last decade to hit our goals.

I often hear about how Norway is a "leader" in climate action, but I rarely see our failure to even slightly reach our original 2016 target laid out so starkly.

What 'faster' means, and how we get there

Here's something I've been thinking about: how do we go faster? Where are our efforts best placed?

There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that once we pass peak fossil fuels / emissions, the downward curve has its own energy - a sort of gravity, that'll pull us along. I think this is the most common mode of thinking, particularly from a techno-economic perspective.

The less common conceptualisation is what I'm going to call the 'downwards Sisyphus' scenario: even as emissions and fossil fuel use fall, we can never really stop pushing hard; taking constant actions and paying extremely close attention to any stagnation or signs of missed opportunities to go even faster. Even with the benefit of cheap machines, the societal barriers are so great that we can never really be complacent.

The view that climate action would teeter past a tipping point is a relatively new one. An early factor has been the real sense of reproach among my fellow renewable energy folks, feeling that the technological capabilities and affordability of wind and solar have been badly underestimated over the years.

For some time now, I've seen claims that the IEA has been systematically underestimating renewables, particularly solar power. You would have seen some version of this chart, showing 'no new policy' scenarios against actual solar installations:

We have a better benchmark than 'what if we randomly stopped implementing all new policies'. Everything will outperform against that standard.

Since 2021, the IEA has been publishing a 'net zero' scenario that works backwards from temperatures goals, rather than just imaging no new policies, or following pledges.

And amazingly, we are roughly on track with those scenarios for both wind and solar generation, globally:

Okay: renewables are going gangbusters. What about global emissions? Well...let's hear from my buddy Glen Peters :

While we are no longer on the wild, unstoppable rise that was predicted for global emissions pre-Paris, we are still way, way above the 1.5C changes we should see to limit warming.

What is going on here? Let me explain with an example. A paper came out a few days ago showing that we've reached a "tipping point" for solar power. I doubt you missed it:

What you almost certainly missed is that the scenario the researchers examine in their paper, which sees massive growth in solar, doesn't have all that great an outcome for climate.

Consider the 2050 mix they forecast in their model, compared to the IEA's three scenarios from last year's 'World Energy Outlook' (the next edition is due out soon):

The paper's model is roughly in line with the worst-case scenario in the IEA's model; with power grid emissions still worryingly high in 2050.

It isn't reflected well in the headlines, but this is a smart paper that identifies something important: the fight for climate doesn't stop once we teeter over the peak. The authors examine un-modelled barriers to deployment in detail, and write:

"A tipping point towards solar dominance however does not solve climate change mitigation or achieve climate targets, as it does not ensure a zero-carbon energy system. Solar-dominated electricity systems could become locked into configurations that are neither resilient nor sustainable with a reliance on fossil fuel for dispatchable power"

Down the long road ahead, there are many, many barriers.

Here's something important: we are already encountering them; with patchy renewable energy performance in many high-carbon regions going some way to explaining why fossil fuels are not being pushed out of power grids as fast as they should be despite, a general rapid growth rate for clean power.

A 2021 paper by my co-panellist Jessica Jewell highlights that many countries are hitting a plateau on their 'S-Curves', far too early:

There are many reasons for this, including more recently a rise in political instability and uncertainty, and fossil fuel reliance making supply chains more expensive, and slower. The most salient to me personally are the utterly unsolved issues of developer / community friction at large-scale clean energy sites, such as the protests againsts human-rights-infringing wind farms here in Norway, or stalled projects in Germany.

One telling consequence of this, I think, is the growing prominence of over-forecasting clean energy. Consider the U.S. Energy Information Administration , known for its wild over-forecasting of coal output (and currently in the process of revising its entire model):

Yet, for the past few years, US solar power has generated less electrical energy than recent forecasts predicted:

We certainly see the same, for Australia's recent government projections:

On top of this, there is the very simple fact that rapidly rising demand can result in an effect where new renewables have no downwards pressure on fossil fuels; something incredibly clear in the much-touted renewable powerhouse state of Texas, in the US (the highest-emitting state in the country, by far):

Outside of the power sector, ultra-cheap clean power helps a lot, but remains worryingly insufficient to knock fossil fuels out of the system. We know, for instance, that transport and heating are far cheaper than existing fossil systems when electrified and powered by clean sources - yet, a global conflict-driven fossil fuel price spike has had startlingly little effect on accelerating this shift. The capitalists and the corrupt would very much prefer to keep us reliant on the expensive stuff.

This really complicates the techno-optimist vibe that wind and solar will be perpetually under-estimated by laggards and luddites. Or that solar in particular (which always seems to be singled out as particularly loaded with momentum) is so powerful that, to some degree, we can sit back and let the free market cure itself of its climate curse.

Yes: wind and solar got cheap. But cheap machines are insufficient when it comes to hitting climate goals. Deep and pervasive social, societal and geopolitical issues will need multi-decadal work to solve; power sector or otherwise.

Speed is the heart of our movement. It is the determinant of how much heat we feel on our faces; how bad the floods and fires get, how much life is lost, and how much is saved.

When global emissions begin to fall, and when fossil fuel use begins to globally decline in a systemic and irreversible way, we'll be beset by what I'm going to call 'downslope complacency'. A sensation that because we're heading in the right direction, we must be going fast enough. Honestly, in some parts of the world, I feel like it's already instilling a false sense of security. I think this ties in with and interacts with the 'climate solution tipping point' thinking.

It is so vital to keep pushing down on the curve. This work is meaningful, and materially quantifiable. The faster we go, the more lives are saved. The harder we push, the lesser the disasters. This will never not be true.