Can A Divided World Tackle Climate Change?
Description
One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, The Energy Podcast investigates the impact of recent events on the global energy transition, drawing on Shell’s two latest Scenarios: Sky 2050 and Archipelagos.
Presented by Julia Streets, featuring László Varró, head of Shell’s Scenarios team, and Dr Nat Keohane, President of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
Read more about the Energy Security Scenarios here.
The Energy Podcast is a Fresh Air Production for Shell, produced by Annie Day and edited by Sophie Curtis.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Julia Streets: Today on the Energy Podcast...
MUSIC BED COMES IN
Dr. Nat Keohane: The energy security concerns from the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually accelerate the pace of the energy transition.
Laszlo Varro: There was no single global response. Europe is the eye of the storm. It is Europe where the energy crisis had by far the biggest impact. This is a situation where the average European consumer needed no explanation that there is a crisis.
Julia Streets: When Russia invaded Ukraine, the world was already facing a challenging set of circumstances with post-COVID- 19 austerity looming, energy prices rising and security tensions growing. The invasion amplified many of these challenges and brought the need for secure supplies of affordable, sustainable energy to the very top of the global agenda. Today, we will be exploring the tensions that have been unleashed just over one year after the invasion, with security issues, global energy supply and geopolitical alliances all in flux. We'll also be discussing how these tensions could be resolved in a world that needs to decarbonize, drawing on Shell's latest scenarios research.
Hello, I'm Julia Streets and today on the Energy Podcast, can a divided world tackle climate change?
MUSIC ENDS
Allow me to introduce my guest today. Our first guest is Laszlo Varro, who joined Shell in 2021 as the VP of Global Business Environment, looking at scenarios and pathways. He joined, after 10 years at the International Energy Agency, where he was most recently their chief economist. In his role at Shell, he leads up the scenarios team, which explores how the global energy system could evolve right the way through to the end of the century. So Laszlo, it's great to have you on the show.
Laszlo Varro: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Julia Streets: And joining us today is Dr. Nat Keohane, who is the president of C2ES, the Center of Climate and Energy Solutions. Before taking on that role in July 2021, Nat served for eight years as a senior vice president for climate with the Environmental Defense Fund where he led all of EDF's climates work in the United States and globally. So Nat, thank you so much for being with us.
Dr. Nat Keohane: Thanks very much for having me.
Julia Streets: So Laszlo, in the introduction, I mentioned that you lead the scenarios team at Shell. Can you talk us through what we mean when you talk about these scenarios?
Laszlo Varro: Scenario analysis came out of Cold War strategic assessments. Shell was historically the first company to use it for strategic analysis, so we are continuing a time- honored tradition. Scenarios have decision makers navigating uncertainties by reflecting on plausible futures. The Shell scenarios are not Shell's predictions, they are not Shell's commitments and they're not Shell's strategy. They are part of the information base that the leadership had navigating through the uncertain world.
Now in 2022, it's fair to say that history was teaching us some very tragic lessons about uncertainties. Even before the war, there were tensions and fissures in the energy system. The post- COVID recovery in 2021 was exceptionally energy-intensive. Global carbon dioxide emissions stabilized at a level which is entirely unsustainable. Geopolitical intentions were already emerging, and debates were already emerging on the future of globalization.
Now, on top of these existing tensions, the Russian aggression against Ukraine is not only a human tragedy – most importantly, it is a human tragedy – but it was also a geopolitical energy shock, which hasn't happened since the 1970s shocks of the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution. It created a new energy reality. Some of the impacts are helping the energy transition, other impacts are hindering the energy transition. There are regionally divergent responses and, basically, we were assessing the regionally divergent political, social, economic responses and asked the question how they can shape the energy system in a direction where humanity would like to go.
Julia Streets: So let's explore these scenarios a little further if we may. So there are two that I think are particularly salient today. Could you just talk us through those two scenarios? Then I'd love to bring in Nat for your reaction and your thoughts. Laszlo.
Laszlo Varro: We felt that, in the world of 2022-2023, social and political priorities on security are a given. They are just a fact of life. But the two scenarios, the two pathways, are distinguished by what is the actual interpretation of security. What do we mean by security and how do we try to achieve that? In one of the pathways, we call that Archipelagos, security is achieved by sticking to the existing well understood conventional energy system, energy infrastructure and capital stock, and security increases the importance of domestic hydrocarbon resources or hydrocarbon imports from friendly countries. There are signals and signposts in that direction. Last year, we have seen a surge of domestic coal production all around the world. China, for example, expanded its domestic coal production in energy terms by seven exajoules. Just for the sake of comparison, all the oil and gas that Shell produces worldwide is around six exajoules in energy terms. So the increase in domestic coal mining in China last year was more than the entire hydrocarbon production of Shell.
Now we also designed another scenario - we called it Sky - in which the interpretation of security is very different. In this scenario, society regards the fossil fuel dominated energy system itself as a security risk. Very clearly, the fact that it was Russia, a major oil and gas producer which launched a geopolitical aggression, it reinforced the already existing political and media narrative that oil and gas are the problem and renewable energy is the solution. This is a scenario in which society flees forward and achieves security by an accelerated transformation of the energy system.
Julia Streets: Thank you for setting out those two scenarios because what strikes me is that one of them very much starts with the premise of where we are today and where we're headed, and that is the Archipelagos. The second, Sky, as you call it, starts with a future point and then works backwards from that. Nat, I know you've looked at these. I'd love to get your reactions.
Dr. Nat Keohane: Any scenarios like this are primarily useful for making comparisons. Any individual scenario is bound to be wrong in the details, so these aren't crystal balls, but by comparing the scenarios and looking at where they have consistent themes and where they diverge, we can learn a lot. So that's how I want to be approaching these.
So under both scenarios that Shell has released, renewables increase while fossil decreases. The difference is how fast. And because of those dynamics, as well as similar consistent transitions in transport and industry, in both scenarios, we see global CO2, carbon dioxide emissions peaking and starting to decline within a decade. One interesting finding in fact from the Archipelagos scenario that Laszlo mentioned is that the energy security concerns from the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually accelerate the pace of the energy transition.
It's also important to note this isn't the only evidence we have for this. The International Energy Agency in a recent report and the other oil major BP, and it just published Energy Outlook, both found similar conclusions. In other words, even under projected trends, we're turning the corner on fossil fuel consumption and emissions in the near term. The low carbon energy transition is no longer a matter of if but when.
And so this is where it's useful to look at the divergence
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