Distinguished Speaker Seminar at MBA launch: Myles Allen
Tuesday 30 September 2025 09:00-10:30 BST
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Okay, good morning everyone. Um, so my name is Juliana Reiner. I’m a professor of management studies and um, faculty director for sustainability. You might have seen me at the debate last week um, which was a lot of fun. Um, so today I’m really really pleased to welcome you to the second edition of our MBA climate boot camp. Um, and I think that’s a really special moment um, for for us here because as you stand at the threshold of your MBA journey and um, you’re stepping into a world that is rapidly evolving and we’re in the midst of not just one crisis but many profound crisis and the one we want to focus on today is the is the climate crisis that is really reshaping our planet and threatening the very systems that our lives and businesses really depend on. Um, and I think it’s not just a problem for anyone else to solve. It’s really it’s really a challenge. It’s really a leadership’s challenge. So for those who aspire to lead, and that’s that’s you. That’s our new class of MBA students coming in in their second week of um of launch here at Oxford. Um, and so, you know, you will find yourself at the forefront of this challenge. And so we want you to be able to, you know, confront this challenge with a sense of um, you know, climate literacy that, you know, what is, you know, some of the science behind, what is the policy, what are the challenges from a business perspective, the strategic challenge, operational, technological challenges that are involved and we want you to step up with confidence and become leaders who can confront this challenge and contribute positively to it. Um and um so here at Oxford we’re very privileged that we’re part of a larger university where we have the worldleading experts who are really at the forefront of the science um exploring um different aspects of um of climate change um economics policy um and beyond. And so today as part of this boot camp, you will really hear from these experts today to really deepen your understanding um and um because the insights to tackle this doesn’t come from like just one discipline but through the collaboration of many. So um just to give you a little bit of idea of what’s happening today. So, we kick off this boot camp with um Professor Miles Allen, who I’m going to just introduce in a second. Um a leading climate scientist at um here at the at the university. Um and then you will break off into four different cohorts where you had some choices um to hear from four of our other experts. And I must really say this was really the dream team that I that I put together. These are really kind of um scholars who I deeply respect um and um who I really look forward to hearing what their latest research is. Um and that’s um uh Dr. Mary Johnston Lewis who’s a senior fellow in management practice here at the site business school and who’s um leading the Oxford sustainable business program. Um and with her co-director Alexis McGyvern who is the head of stakeholder engagement and research fellow at Oxford Netzero. Um then there will be Dr. Jimmy who just completed his doctorate on carbon accounting um and who will share some of his research insights with you. We have Dr. Benjamin Frantter who is associate professor of climate litigation and the head of the climate litigation lab. Um and um so these will be two sessions and um those who you don’t catch because you were in a different session they will be recorded so you can follow up on them. Um and then after in the afternoon we have a fireside chat with um uh Paul Pullman um former CEO of Unilever and the chair of the SPS um board. Um and um we will explore bring together what some of these challenges mean for for business. Um so um you know without further ado I really want to um introduce um Professor Miles Allen. It’s my absolute honor and pleasure that he’s joining us um this morning. Um he’s a leading client scientist who’s most known for his groundbreaking work on attributing human influence to climate change and his role in shaping climate policy. Um including serving on the um United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Um and in fact he’s often known as the scientist behind NetZero. Um and um um Miles is the director of Oxford Netzero which is an interdisciplinary research initiative based here at Oxford and professor of geosystem science at the universities of Oxford school of geographic geography and the environment and head of the atmospheric oceanic and planetary physics department and his research has really been instrumental in linking human activity to global um climate change. Um but I think he will also have um a message for you of how you can become um leaders who contribute to the solution of climate change and that’s I think it’s a very inspiring keynote lecture to kick off this boot camp um this morning with you. Um so I’m really grateful that you’re joining us and um the floor is over to you Miles. Thanks so much. Well, thank you and it’s it’s an honor to be here actually and seeing such a great class um of 2025. A lot probably feels like it’s changed over the past year on the climate issue. Um but but some things haven’t and I brought with me a little visual aid um to remind you of the things that haven’t changed about climate and climate change. So each of these little lumps of coal, it’s quite hard to find coal these days in the UK. Um each of these little lumps of coal represents half a trillion tons of fossil carbon. That’s enough if burnt and released into the atmosphere to generate almost two trillion tons of carbon dioxide and crucially cause one degree of global warming. So when we first discovered this cumulative impact of carbon dioxide emissions on global climate, we humanity had just finished burning the first half trillion tons. Started here in Oxford. I I did my doctorate in the Hook Institute. Robert Hook did the basic science behind the steam engine. So Oxford’s been at the heart of this for a while. Anyway, 250 years took us to burn the first half trillion tons. That was enough for one degree. 16 17 years later, we are 40% of the way through the second half trillion. And that’ll take us to two degrees. And there’s plenty more down there. Enough for three degrees, four degrees, 5°. It all just depends on the ingenuity of our geologists finding this stuff. So if I can convince you of anything, I want to convince you of this. I want you to remember this. We are going to generate more carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels than we can afford to dump in our atmosphere. if we’re going to get even close to limiting global warming to well below two degrees pursuing efforts to 1.5 degrees in the words of the Paris agreement. So the fundamental choice in climate and this is cutting right to the punchline of my talk just in case you fall asleep is the choice we have between dumping that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and disposing of it responsibly and permanently so it’s not a problem for future generations. That’s actually the fundamental choice in the climate issue between carbon dioxide fly tipping and responsible carbon dioxide disposal. The option of just not generating the carbon dioxide at all might have been an option back in 2009 when we first discovered as I said the cumulative impact of carbon dioxide on global climate. But it’s too late now. We’ve generated too much. We will generate too much. we’ve probably generated too much already and so we’re going to have to get rid of it. Getting rid of it at scale and that’s something I’m going to focus on quite a lot in this talk because it’s not really appreciated I think by many people who are dealing with the climate issue. So that’s a bit of overarching science to get started. And but before we sort of get into the implications of that, I’m hoping I have some slides. I do. So um I’ve given myself the title of various versions of the title around. Sorry about that. Um but um what the correct one is how we will stop global warming because I am convinced we will stop global warming eventually. The question is when? And to start on a positive note, I want to convince you that we could stop global warming in 30 years. I’ve been saying that for 15 years or more. It’s still true. We could have stopped. We could be halfway there by now. Okay? But we’re not. Okay? So, we could stop global warming in about 30 years. And crucially, that would limit the entirety of future warming to less than’s happened since 2000. And that’s quite encourage. You should find that quite encouraging. Okay? Because you’ll hear a lot about, you know, we’ve missed 1.5 degrees or we’re missing 1.5 degrees. I I hear businesses coming to me saying, well, we can’t do a 1.5 degree pathway now. So, what does a twoderee pathway look like? as if like, oh, we can relax because we’ve missed 1.5 degrees, so now we may as well just think about two. Okay, I’m sure you don’t measure your portfolios in units of 25% um of the of the of the number. You’d certainly lose a lot of money if you did. So, um we can limit future warming to less than that’s occurred since 2000. But, and this is the crucial but, it requires fresh thinking in climate policy. The kind of thinking that I’m hoping this class will bring to the climate issue as you get out in your careers. Whatever you do, you will be affecting climate both in your work and in your lives, but particularly in the companies you influence and the way in which you influence the world’s financial system. The world’s warming up. You’ve seen this a million times. That’s what it looks like if you look at monthly temperatures and notice they’re quite often bumping over 1.5 degrees already. And we’ve understood why for a long time. Um couple of weeks ago, um somebody um called me um I was one of those stupid people who was apparently got all our predictions wrong of uh climate. uh as in the words of uh Donald Trump uh from a couple of weeks ago. Um this is a figure from a paper published in the year 2000 um on looking at uh the drivers of climate change over the 20th century. Um and you can see natural drivers contributed some fluctuations but not the warming we see at the end of the at the end of the series. anthropogenic drivers capture that final warming but don’t capture some of this which happens in the middle. When we put them together, we get an almost uncanny um c uh uh reproduction of what was observed. The black line of course is what was observed and now um 20 years on we can add what’s happened. Yes, Donald, we got it right. I wish we got it wrong but we didn’t. And that was in 2000. We can go back a great deal further. 19 in the in the 1970s, Bill Nordhouse published a paper in which he ran a model probably it took he ran it on an eniac. I think one of these computers the size of a room for the valves and things. But um um it was the first coupled climate economy model ever run. and he modeled what would happen if the world economy continued in the the the way it was evolving using the science and the physics of um how carbon dioxide affected climate came out of the work of Suki Minabi in the 1960s and you can see there’s there’s a there’s a solid line there which I’m sure he drew by hand and then the calculation was the dashed line and this was his prediction and you’ll see that at the time he made this prediction global temperatures were declining in fact the newspapers, although not the scientific journals, that’s that’s another myth. The newspapers were full of predictions of the oncoming ice age, but they knew, the scientific community knew that carbon dioxide was going up and they knew what carbon dioxide did, which enabled him to make this prediction. This is what’s happened up until a few years ago. I haven’t updated this slide, but as you can see, he got it right. He predicted we would reach one degree in the past decade, and we did. He would he also predicted we would see a significant acceleration in warming around now reaching two degrees um around 2040. We got to hope that that part of the prediction was wrong. Um because of course this was a prediction without any measures to do anything about climate change. This was just Bill Nordhouse imagining what would happen if the world economy just carried on evolving the way it was from the 1970s onwards. Um, and we have of course made a lot of progress certainly in talking about what to do about climate change and the Paris agreement has I think we can give it credit for stabilized emissions. It’s not started emissions going down yet, but emissions are no longer rising. So that acceleration that Bill Nordhouse was predicting that was expected to occur as a result of the ever increasing rise in emissions. um we have to hope is not going to happen. So this is real. This shows you temperatures and the different drivers brought up to date um from uh the the influence of natural drivers in blue influence of other pollution aerosols mainly which is you can see was cooling the planet but is now thankfully going away. That’s because large parts of the world um suffered severely from local air pollution which um while it did keep the planet cool um it also killed millions a year from from smogs and and uh uh and respiratory illness. So it’s good that that’s being cleaned up, but it does mean we’re revealing more of the underlying warming that’s caused by the greenhouse gases. So you can see we’ve reached 1.3 degrees or so and warming at the moment by between a quarter and a third of a degree per decade. That rate will reach two degrees around 2050, okay, 10 years after um Bill Nordhouse predicted we might um and over 3 degrees by 2100 if we just continue warming at the current rate. And remember this stuff, the carbon dioxide emissions on global climate are cumulative. So as long as emissions continue, the warming continues to rise. Every ton of carbon dioxide we dump in the atmosphere drives up global temperatures by another half trillionth if you’re into interesting numbers of a degree. But we’re dumping it in. That half a trillionth of a degree doesn’t sound like very much, but we are dumping it in at a rate of 40 billion tons per year. So the argument and interestingly I one thing about this sort of climate skepticism 2.0 that we seem to be going through at the moment is that it it doesn’t seem to be about whether it’s happening. Um, you know, a a few heads of state aside, most people t tend to accept that um carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet um and the carbon dioxide is arising from human activity. Um, if you want to talk to me afterwards about your theory about how it’s all volcanoes, feel free. Um, but I I hear that conversation a lot. Um, and and I’m always happy to to talk it through. Um but uh uh but but but we aren’t seeing fortunately a big change in the view on what’s driving climate change. What we are hearing is lots of comments on how well it’s not that bad you know and so when the 1.5 degrees report came out um we had headlines in the Guardian we’ve got 12 limits to to limit climate catastrophe was the Guardian’s head 12 years to limit uh climate catastrophe. Um and and this really this was in 2018 and this really triggered a lot of you know 12-year deadline rhetoric and now we’re sort of in 2025 5 years off from 2030. Um what what did all this um what we might call deadlineism um achieve? And at by by the way at the time we actually as as authors of that report um I was I was one of them. We actually worked quite hard to try and explain to people we weren’t setting a 2030 deadline. That was not what the report said but it was what the um journalists wanted to read in it. And the difficulty with this is that then you get the the sort of counterblast from the other side saying wait a minute 12 years left. Let’s let’s talk about this. And this is a tweet from Bjorn Lomborg showing various estimates of the impact of climate change on um on uh the world economy saying hang on a minute it’s sort of a few ten of a degree a few um uh percentage points of GDP in 2100 or as he would put it that’s a couple of years of growth um is all that climate change actually does to the world economy. Um now you know what I want to ask is how much on the sort of question of how much climate change matters do people actually disagree and this may surprise you because um it seems like an an issue where people disagree very fundamentally um on on the the the importance of climate change so to speak. Um but let me show you some evidence that actually the disagreements may be um not quite what they seem. We can argue about the numbers about how much damage um we expect climate change to cause at different levels of warming or um equivalently or or or how much uh to to value that damage, how to add it up that these are deeply contestable um uh uh questions. Um but everybody pretty much agrees on the shape. As you can see, I’ve just put this line over Lomborgs, and you can see it’s it’s got that curve shape. As you move away from a pre-industrial climate, we expect to see the rate at which damages accumulate increase per degree of warming. So, we see not only damage accumulating, but damage accumulating faster as you move away from that pre-industrial climate. And the reason for that, um, I quite often like asking the class about this one, but it’s a big class, so I won’t if you me. The reason we’re pretty confident about that is because we know that a lot of the systems of our planet, including our own agricultural systems and our economies are have been have evolved, have been built on that pre-industrial climate. So if we were to move away from it in either direction, it would cost us. And that means, you know, as a physicist, I’d love to use the phrase to first order, but that means um you know, to first order to to a first approximation, that’s the shape of the curve. Nothing else is really possible when you’re close to the the the the pre-industrial climate. As we get further away, of course, bad stuff could happen. The curve could go nonlinear, but at the moment, that’s exactly the kind of progression we expect to see. And if it that shape is the quadratic shape for the damage curve has some very simple implications. If we take Lombog’s word for it and 3 degrees of warming is 2 to 4% of GDP then one and a half degrees of warming would be a quarter of that because one and a half is a half of three and so one and a half squared is a quarter of 3 squared. Okay, it’s the most complicated bit of mathematics in this entire lecture. Don’t worry about it, but I’m sure you can cope with it. Six degrees of warming would cause 8 to 16% of GDP. And remember what I said about the shape about going towards global cooling as well. I reckon six degrees of cooling which is would look like this might cost more than 8 to 16% of global consumption. But you know, you can form a view. We’ve actually moved on a long way from the studies that um Bill Nordhouse was quoting in that in that uh in that paper in that we’re now using estimates of observations of economic activity relating them to meteorological variables to make datadriven predictions of the cl of the impacts of climate change um over the coming century. And this is an early example of this uh work uh from Felix Pretice, a graduate of Oxen, I think possibly a graduate of the MBA. Uh he did he did various degrees here, including a doctorate in economics. Um and he showed um if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees, how we should expect damage to accumulate in future even, you know, despite the fact that we’ve stopped the warming, we still see um the harm from climate change continuing to accumulate. but reaching around this is one and a half degrees in 2100 reaching you know a loss of some 8% of GDP as a best estimate um in 2100 we go to two degrees it’s over 10%. And you see in the colors here, the purple colors are the countries whose GDP um growth per year is adversely affected by is significantly adversely affected by a warming of two degrees. And you can see by why significantly here. It means even the data to date of climate fluctuations and their relationship with global temperature is enough to say these countries will be adversely affected by um by by uh further warming. Um, and so the other ones, if you’re in one of the gray ones or perhaps in a green one, if you come from a green one, u where the the evidence suggests a modest benefit from a small amount of warming, you can see the overall pattern here. But you can also see crucially the inequality of climate impacts around the world. the fact that the vast majority of countries that are adversely affected by climate change are the ones whose GDP is relatively low, GDP per capita is relatively low in the first place and also the ones that are overwhelmingly not responsible for the um uh for for the for the warming today for the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today. You had a question on this one. Can you help us contextualize when you talk about I know that there’s so much Um it is a metric but I’m curious if you give us a storyline about the effect on food supply that’s okay if if I could dodge that one that’s a whole lecture and I commend you um so so um uh Ben Franta for example who some of you will be hearing from uh uh shortly uh works on precisely this sort of identifying actual harms from climate change. So um if I can if I can I I but there are people in the room who know I I can give that lecture but it’s just not the lecture I was going to give. Um but but yes um there’s there’s you know that’s that’s how these harms are manifest um through impact on food supply and through impact crucially on on a globalized economy. Um which is why um this kind of research um which is it’s backward-looking research. It looks at how climate has affected the economies of different um countries around the world over the past 40 years to say something about the future. And that’s why we should be careful about, you know, like any um um advert for for for a stockpicking um program. You know, the past is never a perfect guide for the future. Um we need to be careful. For example, if we’re in a country that appears to be um not in the front line of climate change impacts, we also live in a fully globalized economy and um we are therefore going to sort of experience the impacts indirectly of other countries. And within this uh paper, Felix sort of separated out and we just zoom in here just for your interest um because I know there’s it’s a very um multinational crowd here. It’s always worth zooming in to find out who’s in line um to to who’s in the firing line, so to speak, from climate change. Interesting. You’ll see Saudi Arabia right near the bottom there. Um uh you know, you might expect to see Bangladesh and Djibouti, but Saudi Arabia, what’s what’s that doing there? Well, this is a a a measure of the direct impact of the warming on economies. And of course Saudi Arabia’s extremely exposed economy to warming because it’s a very hot place in the first place. Um and uh it’s not of course accounting for the impact of the drivers of the warming on the economy. So which of course as you all know um uh has has a major impact on Saudi Arabia as well. So um what we can’t say as scientists about the cost of climate change is you know putting numbers on things that are inherently um subjective. So what is what you know what is the statistical value of life? Um you know are poor lives worthless? You how can you even ask that question? But if you actually look at um indeed empirical studies of the impact of climate change on GDP, if you really drill into the assumptions that underly those studies, you will find an implicit assumption that poor lives are worth less because they’re not earning as much. If a poor person dies, their impact on global GDP is less than that of a rich person. Now, I’m not saying this is I I’m I’m I’m just emphasizing this sort of shocking way of thinking to shock you, to make you think, okay, well, that that that you you shouldn’t be thinking that way. Um but that makes it inherently challenging to add up the impacts of climate change. If you just look at, you know, impacts on GDP, you will without thinking about it inherently in accidentally value poor lives less than rich ones. And the social impacts of climate change to think about as well. If we have mass migration from poor countries to rich countries, that actually increases global GDP. Yeah, I’ll I’ll leave you to think about why. Okay. But it has other consequences as well which we’re seeing in the politics of Britain and Europe right now. Then there’s the big question about time. Climate change primarily affects the future. Dealing with climate change is something we need to do now. So the relative impact of damage on future generations relative to costs on this generation is obviously fundamental to this. and also the value we assign to risks, planetary scale risks, low probability events like tipping points, you know, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheets, um sudden rapid sea level rise and so on. How do we value those things when we don’t know when and if they’re going to happen? Um and yet if they did happen would have very very profound consequences. But what we can say is both the risks and the impacts of climate change go up faster the further you go away from pre-industrial climate. So whatever it is, so I don’t know what the number is, call it D. Okay, one degree of warming, what we experienced in the 2010s caused, you know, a certain amount of damage. You know what it was because you felt it. Well, just, you know, think think about the past decade. That’s the amount of damage we’re experiencing at one degree of warming. 2 degrees will cause four times as much at least because that curve is getting ever steeper. One and a half degrees would cause two and a quarter times as much. Again, I’m just doing the numbers in my head. And that means one and a quarter degrees, which is roughly where we are now, or where we were um a year or so ago, um would be 1.6D. So just doing some maths here, you’ll realize the difference between 1.5° and 2° does the same amount of damage is expected to do the same amount of damage as all the climate warming we’ve experienced to date. So I don’t know what the number is for the total value of that damage, but it’s at least the same again as to what we’ve already experienced. And that’s just the difference between one and a half and two degrees. And that’s the case fundamentally why we do need to stick to our guns, to stick to the Paris Agreement target, to limit warming well below 2° and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5. And what that means is very simple. Again, you don’t need a complicated scenario or a climate model to work out the implications of that. Yes. as I as as I as I stressed um you I mean in principle yes because I don’t say what the value of D is I’m just saying what the shape of the curve is and that’s what I’m trying to stress to you we can agree on the shape of the curve we can argue till the cows come home about exactly how big the curve is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the difference between one and a half and two degrees is at least as bad as what we’ve already experienced. So when you’re out talking to people about it, saying, well, you’ve these days it’s it’s kind of easy to talk about climate change because everybody’s experienced it. We’re all feeling it. Okay? And so and we’re feeling the impacts. We’re seeing the impacts economically and we can say with confidence that that that difference seeding two degrees if you like is going to cost and is going to cost at least as much as we’ve already experienced to date. So that’s just to put it in context and why I would argue that nothing has changed in the in the fundamental case to actually go for the goal of the Paris agreement which is to limit warming to well below two degrees pursuing efforts to 1.5 you know and and this is where it you know the rest of this lecture will be about how um and um and so but I’ll just this this first part should motivate the sort of how fast question because um again you don’t need a climate model to know that if we’re warming at quarter to a third of a degree per decade at the moment if we want to stop the warming at a particular level we’re going to have to hit the brakes and if you can remember your your driving theory test um if you’re driving along and it’s you know a second before you reach the junction if you hit the brakes immed immediately you’ve got two seconds to stop. Yeah, the two comes from the fact that you’re slowing down. Okay, you probably remember drawing drawing curves integrating under the speed curve anyway, all that sort of thing. Um, so exactly the same logic. If it’s 5 years before we reach one and a half degrees, we got 10 years to stop if we want to limit warming to one and a half degrees. So that’s kind of where we’re at at the moment in terms of the underlying rate of warming. Um, could we stop climate change in 10 years? We probably could actually. Um, technically. Um, will we? I doubt it. Certainly, they’re not planning to. But conversely, if it’s 25 years before we reach two degrees, if we want to limit well below two degrees, we need to stop the warming well below 50 years. So, we’ve got much less than 50 years to stop the warming. and aiming to stop the warming in 25 to 30 years time is as I said at the beginning entirely feasible. Um but it means a clear understanding of what we need to do and some fresh thinking in how we set about it. What does it take to stop the warming? Well um this is the this was the uh phrasing in that 1.5 degrees report that summed it up. Um some jargon in there. So anthrogenic means human induced and when we say declining net non CO2 radative forcing which is a bit of a mouthful what we mean is other emissions mostly methane. Okay so we need to get to net zero global humaninduced carbon dioxide emissions and we need to get methane emissions on a decline. They’re currently rising rapidly causing a lot of warming. Um, and that would be enough to halt carefully chosen word that one humaninduced warming on multi-deade time scales. We weren’t able to predict that it would stop the warming forever because of course forever is a long time and you know the long-term adjustment of the system is is still um uh much u unclear um but it would be enough to to to stabilize temperatures for a matter of decades. So what does this mean? So here you are. this is what it takes. Um, carbon dioxide emissions. So, I I mentioned methane there and um, again, those of you who who’ve heard my lectures know there’s a whole lecture on methane. Methane is very important. It’s very important we get methane emissions under control. Um, and they’re currently out of control. Um, and so, uh, that’s that’s an important part of it, but it’s not the one I’m going to focus on because carbon dioxide ultimately is the driver of climate that is accumulating in the system. that is our principal legacy that we pass on to future generations. So, if you’ll forgive me, I will focus on carbon dioxide on the carbon dioxide challenge for the rest of this talk. And what it takes to stop global warming um in terms of carbon dioxide here is we have to reduce the net emissions from energy and active and I bold-faced active there deforestation to zero. And that results in a at the moment about half of the carbon dioxide we dump in the atmosphere stays there every year. The other half is taken up by the oceans and the land biosphere. And this is where this talk is going to start getting a little bit techy. But I’m ready to bet that all of you are going to leave this course this year and get into carbon trading in some form. And so it’s really important that you understand what I’m about to tell you about the way we’re setting up setting up carbon trading. So um about half of the carbon dioxide we dump in the atmosphere every year stays there. The rest is taken up naturally well semi-naturally as it were by the um oceans and the land biosphere. When I say semi-naturally, they wouldn’t be taking up that carbon if it weren’t for the fact that we’d pumped out an awful lot historically. Yeah. I mean, back in the 18th century or 17th century, natural carbon fluxes into and out of the oceans and the land biosphere were in balance. But of course, we pushed the system so far out of balance. There’s a steady flow of carbon dioxide into the land biosphere, trees, plants, soils, um, and the oceans right now. And it’s 20 billion tons a year. It’s very important that this is happening. If it wasn’t happening, we’d be in even bigger trouble than we are now. And we expect that phenomenon to continue after the date of net zero. That so-called passive uptake, that response of the land biosphere and the oceans to just more carbon dioxide in the system continues for centuries drawing down atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and stabilizing global temperatures. So crucially, stabilizing atmospheric conc concentrations of carbon dioxide, which was the goal of climate policy for many years up until the Paris agreement, isn’t enough to stop global warming. You actually have to have carbon dioxide emissions, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the level of carbon dioxide in in the atmosphere coming down. And you achieve that by reducing emissions. That’s the sum total of emissions from fossil fuels and industry and active deforestation up to net zero. This was established back in 2009 and was really marked a big change in the focus of climate policy from focusing on stabilization. We shifted in a remarkably short space of time, the Paris agreement was only six years later to acknowledging the need for net zero emissions. And the way the Paris agreement acknowledged that was in article 4, in order to achieve the long-term temperature goal of article 2, which is limiting warming to well below 2 degrees and pursuing upsets to 1.5, um the parties agree to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century. That was what the Paris agreement agreed they were going to aim to do. Yes. How certain are we um for for low levels of warming i.e. sort of one and a half to maybe 2 and a half degrees we’re pretty confident um we we understand the carbon cycle and the ocean response pretty well. It’s a very good point. The higher the level of warming, the less confident we are that we won’t somehow irreparably damage the oceans or the land biosphere such that they just can’t do this service, provide this service for us anymore. And that’s actually one of the big risks at higher levels of warming is that the the the biosphere in particular just collapses. Um and so so um but but at at at low levels of warming it’s a prediction. Sure. We’ve never tried reducing emissions at that rate. It’s one which we hope we will test over the next few decades. Um but uh but it’s one where at the moment all the modeling evidence is it you know it is model modeling evidence because as I say we’ve not observed this but these are models calibrated with the observation things we can observe. Um and we we believe that that that that’s uh that that that will that will occur. And as a result of that Paris balance commitment, countries, many countries since Paris have made net zero commitments. One uh notably has um stepped away from its net zero commitment. Um and uh you can see you can see what’s going on um in the uh net zero tracker um which is maintained here in Oxford. And I just want to draw your attention to a few countries um that are blue in this map. These are countries that have achieved net zero already. And um uh with apologies to any gy present, I’m going to um focus in on Guyana as an example because it’s a really interesting one to challenge our thinking on what we mean by net zero. Is anybody from Guyana on this course? I mean, it’s a tremendously impressive country doing a huge amount on climate, but it happens to illustrate some of the challenges we have in understanding what net zero needs to mean to deliver what we said it would deliver in 2009 to to halt global warming. Because Guyana, in case you didn’t know, is also a very substantial producer of oil and gas. They’ve recently discovered very significant oil and gas reserves which they are as they are fully entitled to do um providing to the world. Um so what’s going on here? How can Guyana claim to be um a net zero country already while being a major producer of oil and gas with the associated emissions in the oil and gas industry? Well, the answer is the way we’ve defined um balance or specifically um how what people mean by balance and net carbon dioxide emissions in the context of the Paris agreement. So people like me um IPCC authors, carbon cycle scientists and so on um mean emissions miners what you remove as a result of active ongoing human intervention um for the UNFC the the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and just about everybody else including all the companies you’re going to go and join next year. It also includes carbon uptake on what’s called managed land um that is con that is happening indirectly as a consequence of past emissions and suddenly lots of land is managed. So Guyana has declared large parts of their forest managed land because they’re protecting it. They’re doing a very good job protecting it. It’s a very good thing that they’re protecting that forest. But that allows them under the rules. I’m not suggesting for a second that Guyana is not doing exactly what it’s entitled to do by the UNFC accounting rules. That entitles them to claim all of that carbon that’s being absorbed by Guyana’s forests as a result of historical emissions as if they were actively taking it back out of the atmosphere. This is happening. We are seeing these are photographs of the same place in an African savannah. You can see from the background it’s the same photograph from 925 2011 to 1993 and 2011. You can see how the vegetation has been transformed and Mitchley and Bond have studied this and shown that that is that’s happening not because of any change in local land use practice. They they chose this because it was an area where the land use had been it had been left alone um for for unchanged for the past hundred years. but because there was just more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So, it’s a good thing it’s happening and it’s a good very very good thing that countries like Guyana are protecting their forests to allow this to happen. But if we take advantage of this as if it was a negative emission fully compensating for the impact of our ongoing fossil fuel use, we see interesting things like this. Canada’s forest sink, even with the occasional forest fire, um over the past um over the 20 years, 2001 to 2019, was almost a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year just because Canada’s forests were growing faster because of all that extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Canada’s emissions were about threequarters of a billion tons. Um um I I’m not suggesting for a minute that the present government of Canada um has any intention of saying, “Hey, we’re net zero, so let’s not worry about it.” But if things had gone the another way, um uh earlier this year, we might well be seeing a government of Canada um that that uh that was saying, uh we don’t need to worry about net zero anymore because Canada can claim by just declaring all Canada’s forests managed, Canada can claim to be net zero already. So, I’m I’m emphasizing this because it’s got a problem. You know, we have a problem here. Um, it hasn’t started yet, but it could. If you want to make money, start selling carbon offsets based on managed oceans. Remember, 30% of the world’s oceans are in somebody’s economic exclusion zone. Couple of you are smiling at this point. No, I didn’t mean that. Please do not. Now, because if we do, if we classify all of this natural uptake of carbon dioxide by the land and oceans as removals, then we would need to drop emissions well below zero in order to stop the warming because we then would have to be, as it were, pretending we were actively drawing down that con those carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. You can see here that this is the same graph, but just taking the the gray above the line is the same as the green below the line. So, we’ve just renamed all that green as if it was a negative emissions, making our net emissions much lower. Hooray. It seems to be a great result. On the other hand, what it means is we then have to go well below zero in order to stop global warming because, you know, adding up all of these emissions, we need to be drawing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide down if we’re going to stabilize global temperature. And if we reclassify passive uptake as a negative emission and then just aim for net zero, which is probably what most people think they’re going for, all we will do is stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, bring the net flow of carbon dioxide into the air to zero, and that is not enough to stop the warming. You can see the temperatures carry on rising. Um, even more extreme, you could say I’m getting a bit carried away here, but you know, hey, it’s not far off what’s happening. Um, con stabilizing concentrations allows more warming. If we fully exploit article six to maximize the amount by which we rely on passive uptake through the international offset markets, we could actually defer. We could pretend we were on a path to net zero in 2050, but actually defer reducing any active emissions at all for 15 years and end up with even more warming. End up well north of two degrees by 2100 even though we’re nominally on a path um to net zero by 2050. Yes. So when you talk about stabilizing atmospheric carbon concentrations and warming rise is that to some or is that after a few centuries it would restabilize? I’m talking about it would thanks that’s a good question. Um but just just to simplify it’s easiest to think of stable concentrations gives you ongoing warming roughly.3% per year. Um and and um yes eventually you know it would asmtote but exactly where it would asmtote to is because it’s a multi-entury prediction is really hard to predict. I know when carbon is like taken out of the atmosphere after a while like what’s the car? No. No. Again to be fair on Guyana um their forests are growing and if they keep looking after them that carbon will stay there. Um the the I mean you could you could sort of make it’s sort of it’s safer to make jokes about Canada because there’s probably plenty of Canadians in the room. Um you could argue that if Canada works the same trick with all the forest fire activity that’s happening in Canada, it’s a lot less safe. Um so so so but you’re right there’s something fundamentally uh unsafe so to speak about carbon stored at the earth’s surface because as the climate changes um the the viability of those forests may change um let’s hope we don’t change the climate enough to affect the viability of Amazonia for example but that is one of the risks people are looking at that and of course if the forest dies because of global climate change then you could say well it’s not the fault of Guyana that was just climate change, but the net result is that the carbon still ended up in the atmosphere. And so that’s the difficulty with this sort of this this this this pretense if you like that we can compensate for ongoing fossil fuel use by just planting trees or protecting trees. Important though it is to protect trees anyway. So the point is we need a like forl like balance if you can remember that phrase between geological sources things like burning fossil fuels and geological time scale syncs that is disposing of carbon dioxide permanently on multi-entury to millennial time scales. We’ll talk a bit more about what geological time scale sinks needs to mean in a minute. Yeah. Uh, it uses the UNF C one. Um, okay. There would be people and maybe talk to Jimmy about this. Um, there are people trying to fix this, but at the moment the new NFT C1 is it’s I think it’s fair to say it’s kind of in reach. So not everybody uses it, but you can probably get away with it. Yeah. So even though there will be people who tell you firmly, no, we don’t use that definition. It’s like, yeah, but you could. And when a market is sort of efficient, people tend to gravitate towards the the easiest option. And it’s obviously a much easier definition of net zero than and and certain markets definitely use it. Um and of course Guyana will argue they are actually making steps to actively regrow their forests as well as um uh protecting the forests they have. And so it’s you know it’s a as ever it’s always a little bit complicated um because you know I’m I’m not suggesting that the markets are you know fraudulent in any way. I’m just pointing out this big um black hole as it were in carbon accounting. people like we need to do two things. We need to achieve this like forlike balance. If we’re pulling it out of the geosphere, pulling it out from the ground, we need to be putting it back or getting rid of it permanently in that way. And we need to protect these passive carbon sinks. These are ands, not all. And the problem that they have at the moment is by focusing on just the flow of carbon into the atmosphere, we’re kind of muddling these things up. And if you’re interested, um, this is the state of geological net zero that we talked about in the paper just appeared earlier this year. Um, which was making the point that we need geological net zero. We need this balance at the Earth’s crust. If you’re taking carbon out of the Earth’s crust, you need to be putting it back or disposing of it somewhere equally permanent. And we need to separate out the accounting for land sinks so that we can ensure that we are taking steps to protect these vital natural sinks to ensure they continue to provide this carbon disposal service we need into the future. So that’s the sort of um that’s the science part of this talk. Um and I’m now going to sort of crack on with um what I think the implications are for policy. Um, and I’m going to start with a quote, um, and which is I I I would argue is is is a quote that illustrates why this quote and the reaction to it illustrates why we need a fresh approach to climate policy and it’s a challenging quote intentionally so um and comes from um presidents the president of COP 28 uh Sultan Aljaba who’s also the he was secounded uh to to the COP uh from his role as chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Corporation. this COP 28 which happened in Dubai a couple of years ago and shortly before the COP um uh Sultan Al Jaba was in a an interview um and a discussion on you know online um and um he he said this there’s no science out there and then I think he corrected himself said no scenario out there that says that the phase out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 degrees and I I think it’s fair to say when the Guardian sort of did an expose of this on day one of the COP, the world went a bit nuts and all piled on saying what a terrible thing for him to say. He’s denying the science. You know, this just goes to show we shouldn’t have held the cop in a pro state and you know, etc., etc., etc. What’s interesting about that statement apart from the fact that it caused this and those who’ve heard this lecture before perhaps um backtrack on this comment on what he’s said. Yeah. So, it’s true. The Guardian in a subsequent article said they could only find one scientist in the world who was willing to acknowledge this statement was true. No prizes for guessing who that scientist was. The reaction from everybody was no. No, we got to phase out fossil fuels. This is how we’re going to achieve our climate goals. It’s not. It might have we might have achieved our climate goals if we’d started trying to phase out fossil fuels in 2009 when the climate goal was two degrees. Remember that was Copenhagen, but we didn’t. And we show no interest in phasing out fossil fuels to this day. So that’s not how we’re going to solve this problem. And it’s not how we solve this problem even in the most optimistic scenarios that meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement. These are the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the most recent report showing you global primary energy generated from oil. And you’ll notice it comes down the thick lines are some um uh scenarios from from the International Energy Agency, but don’t don’t worry about them. But you can see the the gray lines um show a substantial reduction in the amount of energy we generate from oil between now and 2050 or so. and then it stabilizes at maybe twothirds or a a third to a half of the level it’s at at the moment. Gas is even more confused. Some scenarios go down. Others actually show an increase in energy generated from gas over the course of this century. The one clear message that does come out of these scenarios is coal. We do stop using coal and if we don’t stop using coal, we won’t stop global warming. I think that’s a pretty unambiguous message, mostly because coal no longer makes economic sense anyway and the countries that are having to invest in it are doing so because of economic drivers beyond their control. If I add these things up, the red lines here show you the carbon dioxide that’s generated from fossil sources in one and a half degree scenarios. And as you can see, we do burn less. We replace fossil fuels with wind and solar and thereby avoid generating some two to three trillion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100. Okay, that’s another of these mind-bogglingly big numbers. Don’t worry about the number itself. Just remember two to three as a unit. Okay, that’s what we avoid generating by replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar in these scenarios in in the scenarios that meet the goals of the Paris agreement. So the red lines, none of them go to zero. Some of them get a little bit close in 2100. So you’re probably thinking, well, what’s what’s going on here? I mean, I was telling you we need geological net zero to stop global warming. I was telling you we can’t do it with the biosphere. Um, so so what’s happening? How is it that these scenarios still um that these are the scenarios that actually limit warming to 1.5 degrees, which means stopping the warming shortly after mid-century? Well, I’m showing you here the carbon dioxide that’s generated by burning fossil fuels. That’s not the same as the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. This is the carbon that is captured and stored geologically in these scenarios back underground. captured with um plants like this schematic here, although there’s there’s real plenty of real ones out there where the the carbon dioxide is captured uh where it’s generated, purified, compressed until it’s a liquid, at which point it has much the same density as the hydrocarbons it probably came from and reingjected back into sandstone rocks underground. Exactly the kind of rocks where the hydrocarbons were to start with. In fact, quite often when they drill to look for hydrocarbons, they find liquid carbon dioxide because it looks just like a hydrocarbon in the seismic uh data. So, um they then of course they’re very disappointed because it wasn’t what they was looking for. But, but the point is um we know that carbon dioxide there’s a lot of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s crust naturally. Um and we know it’s therefore possible to put carbon dioxide back. Um, and we also know it’s possible because the industry’s been doing it for decades at a pretty small level around 40 million tons per year. Um, uh, and and the vast bulk of the CO2 that we inject stays there. Um, and if you choose the location right, you can make sure that it all stays there. So in these scenarios we get rid of we dispose responsibly of roughly one trillion tons of carbon dioxide restored to the geosphere put back underground by 2100. So two to three avoided one disposed of. Okay. Yeah. We’re going to come to this but but let me take that straight away. If you do it badly, like if you inject too fast, um after all what you’re doing here, you’re injecting fluid under pressure into rocks, which is also known as hydraulic fracking in a different context. Um it can trigger seismicity. But there is a crucial difference. When you’re injecting for to get stuff out, you want to break the rock. You want to fracture it. That’s the point. When you’re injecting to get rid of the CO2, the last thing you want to do is break the rock. You want to keep it intact because you want the CO2 to stay there. So you inject under a very different pressure regime. It’s so it’s it’s a it’s a different process to fracking. Even though it involves much of the same technology, the objective is different. And if done well, you can store the carbon dioxide there indefinitely. And they’ve been, as I say, there’s there’s projects which have been doing this for decades. And they can monitor under the underground plumes of carbon dioxide, see where they diffuse to and see what happens. And it’s we know this works. Um not not only do we know it works, we also know we’re utterly counting on it to meet our climate goals. And the big danger is how many people in this room knew that we were planning in our 1.5 degree scenarios to get rid of one ton of carbon dioxide back underground for every two to three we save by replacing fossil fuels with wind and energy. that level that that that that this part of this I know the people who’ve heard this lecture before will should better put their hands up at this point but um but the point is how many of you knew that it was that big in our climate future you know it’s it’s a minority okay most people don’t like to talk about this stuff because it’s kind of seen as a nasty end of pipe solution you know we’d much rather talk about solar and wind’d much rather talk about avoiding deforestation everybody loves trees of course And in these scenarios, we do save about4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide by reversing deforestation uh by by stopping deforestation and starting to reverse it. But again, look at the numbers. Two to three avoided, one back underground, less than half a trillion through reversing deforestation. Without that geological storage, we’re not going to meet our climate goals. Yes, might be getting to this further lecture. Yes. Yes. And I will I hope uh Okay. No, it isn’t. Um and you’re thinking about air capture and we’ll um so Okay. Um and yep. existing tested at scale. Uh tested at scale is the difficult one of course because what do you mean by scale? I mean as I say we inject um a million 40 40 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Um we need to be up at the billions. So no, we haven’t deployed carbon dioxide um uh geological carbon dioxide storage at scale uh at the kind of scale we need to deploy it. But that’s just what happens. I I do wonder before the London sewers were introduced, did anybody ask, have sewers ever been tested at scale? Okay. And the answer would have been well no, but it’s still a good idea. Um so so so I think that’s but um the Guardian routinely I think they have an editorial policy that whenever they mention carbon capture and storage they put in brackets an untested technology. Okay. Which is simply a lie. Okay. Sometimes they say untested at scale which makes it not quite a lie but still very misleading. Okay. Um as you can tell I’m not a fan of the Guardian’s coverage of carbon capture and storage. And of course coming back to somebody’s question around here um earlier on um if we store carbon at the earth’s surface it’s vulnerable as the climate continues to change to end up back in the atmosphere. So if we just look at the sort of scale of the challenge, if we want to the the contributions to avoided warming by 2100 in Paris compliant scenarios, 65% of it is from avoiding producing carbon dioxide in the first place, 25% of it from getting rid of carbon dioxide back underground, and roughly 10% from reversing deforestation. And because it’s not happening, we’re not on these scenarios at the moment. We’re not reducing the rate at which we generate carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Some of that slack will have to be taken up by more geological storage because the biosphere, we’ve only got the one biosphere. We can’t say, “Oh, well, don’t worry, we’ll just plant more trees.” We’re already counting on the biosphere to do a lot of the work for us and we’re counting on it doing even more in the future because of its the need for the biosphere to mop up the carbon dioxide that we’ve generated historically. Yes. Uh it’s it’s it’s very significant. Um and it’s another lecture. I’m sorry. I’m going to I’m going to start using that response. Um uh and a very interesting lecture, I can assure you. But um but but but if you don’t mind because I I sort of said we’d worry about methane. I kind of Yeah. But it’s part of the methane story. Yes. talking. Yes, it is absolutely which is why we’ve got that huge hole in accounting and why you need to all worry about that part of this lecture when you go out and learn about carbon accounting from Jimmy Gia and then subsequently go on to probably work in the carbon industry uh in the future. um go back to that part of this lecture and really think about it. Maybe even read the paper behind it um because it’s such an important issue about that that that fuzzy dividing line between what’s actually a consequence of ongoing human activity and what’s happening because of historical emissions. It’s it’s a dividing line that I would argue we just can’t make. And therefore, we need geological net zero, which is means we need a like forlike balance between what’s coming out of the Earth’s crust to what’s going back in. One thing’s for sure, nothing comes out of the Earth’s crust by accident. I mean, yeah, there’s a small flux from volcanic activity, but you know, we know what comes out of the Earth’s crust. You know, we know where this came from. And we absolutely know what’s going back in. Not very much at the moment, but again, it’s very easy to measure. Have you disposed of carbon dioxide permanently? If you’ve injected it back underground, you can measure that. If you’re talking about storing it at the Earth’s surface, it’s harder to measure. Yep. um far away. You could, but okay, that’s a really it’s a really interesting question. I would argue that it doesn’t make sense to do so because you have to add so much energy to turn the carbon dioxide into something useful. You’re actually much better off just sticking it underground, which takes relatively little energy, and burning a fossil fuel. Yeah. So, um, yes, there’s a lot of enthusiasm about so-called e- fuels. So basically fuels made from carbon dioxide captured from the air and uh uh and uh with renewable and and using renewable hydrogen um to turn them into fuels. Um but I think as long as energy is not free until you get to the point where renewable energy is free I just don’t think they make any sense because of the energy penalty of of of of turning carbon dioxide into the problem with carbon dioxide is it’s so stable. I mean, this is why it hangs around for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s a really really boring gas. Yeah. You can’t do anything with it and and that’s why we’ve just got to accept the fact we just got to get rid of it at scale. I mean, it doesn’t mean there aren’t some uses, interesting uses and so on, but again, at the scale we need, there doesn’t seem to be much option apart from just permanent disposal. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Um I I I somebody over here has had a question for a while. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I I I think that’s it’s a great question. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when the sort of 1970s population boom projections were being made and in many ways the great good news story of the past 50 years has been that those predictions didn’t come true. Okay, global population is still rising. Um, it’s it’s rising at a at a at a frightening rate in certain parts of the world and that’s, you know, a cause for considerable concerns. I’m not saying I’m not at all pushing this back to you saying that don’t worry about population. Of course there are um demographic trends that we need to to be concerned about. Um but I guess the best I can say is well it’s a lot it could have been a lot worse. Um and actually I think it’s one of the great good news stories of the past 50 years. What I love about this story is that overwhelmingly it’s as a result of decisions made by literally billions of women in developing countries and not particularly by men in suits making policies. Um, and I think that’s actually a a real sort of something to remember about things that humanity has got right um over the past 50 years. Uh, we got plenty wrong. Um, those men in suits have been good at that. Um but uh but but we are getting some things um right. Um it’s an MBA course. You’re going to be thinking about investment and I pointed out to you that geological disposal is 25% at least 25% of the solution and it’s getting less than 1% of the investment in the transition. So from Bloomberg New Energy Finance here um if I highlight all the investment that’s relevant to avoiding producing carbon dioxide like things like power grids, investing in electrification, electrification of transport, so electric cars, um uh renewable energy, the big blue bar at the bottom, these are the big ones. These are all about avoiding using fossil fuels. There’s two little ones in the middle there, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage that you might say are remotely relevant to scaling up the amount of carbon dioxide we dispose of. So this is the problem which is why I focus on this is that you know why is this why are we why are we investing why are we not investing in something when we know it’s such a huge part of the solution. We need people to recognize the need for geological materials. That’s this like forlike balance between carbon dioxide we still produce from burning fossil fuels and we will still be producing carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels to 2100 and beyond with the carbon dioxide we capture and dispose of permanently back underground. The catch of course is this is expensive. At that rate, you know, just the sort of mid-range scenario for disposing of carbon dioxide in the middle of this century, we would be spending 1 to3 trillion dollars a year alone on carbon dioxide disposal, sticking carbon dioxide back into the Earth’s crust. It’s an expensive thing to do. And in context, um, the Brits present will sort of may remember this incident a few years ago. Um, if you just work out the UK’s share of the carbon dioxide disposal challenge in 2050, it adds up to about 350 million pounds a week. Now, this was the number they put on the side of the bus to convince us to leave the European Union. And I can assure you that the benefits of membership of the European Union would have been a lot more were a lot more tangible to the British voting public than the benefits of a carbon dioxide disposal program. So we have a problem at the moment that although people acknowledge yes we need carbon dioxide disposal. Oh well I suppose the government will pay for it. Will it? We need other ways of thinking about climate policy. Yes. Yes, there absolutely are and I’m just coming to them. So, so that’s that’s a great question because it cues up the rest of this lecture. Okay. So, how do we get to geological net zero? What’s what’s the sort of most defensible what’s a defensible pathway to it? And the difficulty with it, I pressed it um is that if we look at these scenarios and we try and sort of read off what companies should do from them. And there’s a whole game doing this. The science-based targets initiative issues lots of guidance to companies on if you want to be aligned with 1.5 degree scenarios, this is what you have to do. You have to reduce your this that and the other and so on. Um and you know, you can imagine company directors looking at these and thinking, well, it looks a bit like wy coyote who says running along and then sort of goes off a cliff and you know, collapses. Um, it just doesn’t make the scenarios themselves don’t look realistic. So, how can you as a realistic CEO, nobody, no CEO would want to be an unrealistic CEO. How do you align yourself with something that doesn’t itself look like a realistic prediction of what is going to happen? So, what can we use these scenarios for if we don’t sort of immediately believe them as what the world is going to do over the next few decades? Well, we can look at what’s underlying them. What what’s driving the transition? How can we understand what’s happening in these scenarios by just looking at what happens between the red and the blue lines? So, um this is introducing something you you may not have come across, but called the net geological carbon intensity of the fossil fuels we still use. And this is the fraction of carbon dioxide that’s generated by burning those fossil fuels. not not the emitted but the amount that’s the fraction of the carbon dioxide that’s generated by the burning of fossil fuels that is left above ground that is not captured and reinjected back into the earth’s surface. So right now that fraction is one we leave it all above ground well 99.9%. Okay. So, so um and we know to get to geological net zero, we need to reduce that fraction to zero. And you can see that’s what happens here. This is one minus the blue over the red, which as everybody knows makes purple. Um um these are the lines that show you that ratio in these scenarios. And you can see they all head towards zero. They head towards zero is still a bit of a sort of spaghetti. There’s still a bit of a mess. So it’ be quite difficult to look at those and say I need to be at a certain point in 2040. You could say, well, we could be all over the place in 2040. So that’s not very helpful, is it? But wait a minute, they all start declining at different times. So if I correct for that, if I just slide them around left, right, so they all reach 5% at the same point, then well, they certainly start to tidy up a bit. And then you’ll notice they’re still fanning out at the end because they’re all reaching net zero, geological net zero at different times, too. So we can correct for that as well by instead of plotting against year, we plot against time remaining to net zero. Yeah. And suddenly from this whole spaghetti of scenarios you started with, it’s almost like you’ve uncooked the spaghetti and it’s come out nice and straight and and stiff the way it came from the uh shop. And in fact, it’s shown up a shape that’s exactly what you’d predict if you were a physicist saying, “How do you get from A to B in the shortest um with in the sort of, as it were, the lowest energy pathway, what we physicists like to call a geodessic?” Okay, if I was to throw this off the dice, I’m not going to do it. um um it would follow a parabolic path down to the ground because that’s it’s following the lowest energy path and the lowest energy path for the global economy to get us to geological net zero is to start where we are now and follow a quadratic another I told you there was only one bit of maths in this lecture but here it’s come again maths is useful um it it follows a quadratic curve down to zero so we know what it takes to stop fossil fuels from causing aing global warming. If we want to do that by 2050, we need 4% capture by 2030, 16% by 2035, 36% by 2040, 64% by 2045, you can see what I’m doing. I’m just squaring the numbers as I go up. And finally, 100% by 2050. It’s that simple. If we don’t do it 100% by 2050, if we did 100% by 2060, it just means we’re going to end up a bit warmer. We still got to get there. because one day as I said at the beginning we are going to stop global warming. Now the exciting thing about this is for Britain at least we could be at 4% by 2030 with the projects that this government is now investing in in T-side and Murzyside we are starting finally having been gone on and on and on about it for 20 years we are finally starting to reinject carbon dioxide back under the North Sea to get all the way to 100% we need to go further and we need to start recapturing carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere and this is a plant that’s being completed in Texas to do just that. That of course is a much more expensive operation. But this is what happens in the scenarios. This is how in the scenarios where we meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, we stop fossil fuels from causing global warming in the second half of this century. And by the way, I know those um thinking about this um project in Texas, um the ownership of that project is particularly interesting. Um one of these um chief executives has a plan to stop the fuels they sell from causing global warming by 2050. It’s a plan, not a commitment, I should say. So bless um any any prizes for guessing which it is that they’re also unusual in one other way as well. Um yeah Vicky Hollib is the only um uh CEO of any oil and gas company in the world who happens to be a woman. Um accidental are also the only oil and gas company in the world that happens to have a plan to achieve geological net zero. Uh there is a catch though. Vicky Hollib is the CEO of a shareholder owned company. she has to keep her company profitable. Um, and we still really haven’t worked out how to pay for geological disposal. So, that’s the big the big policy question that I’m going to end on. Um, and I’m probably going to overrun how much can I I mean, there have been a certain amount of questions as we went along. Um, five. Okay. Yep. Okay. Um, because it’s a really really important question. How do we pay the bill for geological carbon dioxide disposal? At the moment, it’s paid for by government subsidy. Here in the UK, it’s a direct sub. It’s effectively a direct subsidy from government. It’s something they dress it up as something called a contract for difference or regulated asset base, but in the end, it’s the taxpayer who forks out and takes the risk. Um, in the US, um, under the last administration, they introduced something called a 45q tax credit. Um its status is sort of wobbly at the moment but seems to be continuing. Um but um it illustrates the danger of relying on the the the the transition in policies in the US illustrates the danger of relying on government handouts to pay for this kind of thing is the next government can just decide no we don’t want to do that. So neither and the other problem with government handouts is they’re extremely inefficient at discovering what things actually cost. If you ask an industry, how much do you need to get rid of your carbon dioxide? They’re bound to say, you know, a lot of money. Um, and and they also involve a big drain on public finances, which of course we don’t have at the moment. So, the big question I want to ask you is how can we make carbon dioxide disposal and this is where I think the question on um uh the circular economy um and and other waste disposal challenges was particularly welcome. How can we make it become something other than a low margin subsidydriven u public service? And the answer actually I think is exactly what you suggested in your question implicitly um which is to bundle the obligation to get rid of carbon dioxide in with um the uh the benefits of generating it in the first place. So just to sort of illustrate the idea um this is where we are now. Um this is a sort of schematic of the carbon economy. We have carbon the blue arrows throw show either actual or embedded carbon dioxide coming into the economy in the form of fossil fuels by an extractor or an importer of oil, gas or coal. Um they pass those fuels on to industry to industry um who make products that go to consumers and it all ends up in the atmosphere. So what’s happening? Well, at the moment, the only entity in this um uh economy that’s really affected by climate policy is the industrial point sources there in Europe and UK at least they’re being um given uh they’re being uh subject to a substantial um carbon price through various mechanisms. Um so they’re grumpy and thinking of moving to Malaysia or places where they think they might get a lower carbon price. Consumers are generally confused about how climate policy is working. The atmosphere is sweating. Um, over here we have a geological storage operator. This is somebody who set up a business to put carbon dioxide back underground. But as you can see, they’re sad and lonely because there are no arrows pointing towards them. Nobody has any real incentive to avail themselves of their services. Um, the government is fast asleep and the extractor importer is laughing all the way to the bank. So, what can we do to change this? Well, the current UK funding model is to throw lots of money at the geological storage operator, taxpayer subsidies, who would then acquire carbon dioxide from the industrial point source. So, probably some of the money flows through to the industrial point source. That makes them happy, but it makes the government cross u because it’s having to spend all this money. Um, probably makes consumers cross too because they’re the ones paying the taxes. And why should we be spending all this money on this um highly profitable industry anyway? because of course the geological storage operator is almost certainly a division of a fossil fuel company in the first place and the atmosphere is still sweating because most of the carbon dioxide is still going back in the atmosphere anyway. Um and the geological the extractor importer is still laughing that that that that goes without saying. Um there’s another idea um we impose a requirement on the industry to get rid of its carbon dioxide. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for this sort of thing. Just regulate industry to make it get rid of its carbon dioxide. The result is you end up with an industry that’s very cross and thinking of moving um uh even faster um away from uh whatever jurisdiction um is imposing climate policy. We have a real problem at the moment that climate policies tend to push carbon generating activities away into regions with weaker climate policies. If you think about the world as a whole, what we need is to crowd carbon dioxide generating activities into regions that have stringent climate policies because that’s where we need to generate the carbon dioxide. And yet the vast bulk of climate policy does exactly the opposite. And a real challenge for you is to try to work out how can you craft a climate policy that actually would make Europe or Canada or Australia or whatever country is implementing this climate policy a more attractive place to generate carbon dioxide than a less one. I’m going to tell you a suggestion for this, but I’m think you should also think of your own suggestions as well because um we we um um because this is this is one of the big challenges we face. My suggestion and something we’ve been advocating for a while now is something called a carbon takeback obligation inspired directly by the kind of obligations placed on waste disposal um in circular economy uh measures that you were referring to um earlier on. So what what happens is the government um requires the green arrows here show sort of um uh compliance requirements. uh the government requires the geological storage operator to the government requires the extractor importer of fossil fuels. Anybody wants to sell fossil fuels in the economy is required to produce some evidence, a carbon storage unit, a certificate of some sort to say that a certain fraction of the carbon dioxide that those fossil fuels will generate has been captured and securely disposed of back underground. So the geological storage operator generates these carbon storage units, sells them to the extractor importer or perhaps more likely they are different divisions of the same company in order for them to carry on selling their fossil fuels. What happens? Well, the indust the industrial point source suddenly discovers they can sell their carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide becomes valuable as opposed to a pain. So, they’re perhaps intrigued. Consumers would still be confused. Um, that’s a fairly safe bet, but also the impact of this small obligation on the industry to get rid of carbon dioxide wouldn’t actually feed through into any significant impact on consumer prices. So, it’s something you could introduce gradually over time without the public getting immediately upset about it. The atmosphere is still sweating. We haven’t made any difference the amount going into the atmosphere, but the geological storage operator at least is happy because they have a business. Um, and the government has its nerd glasses on because it’s learning how to do it, how to monitor, report, and verify this whole process. And the extractor importer is probably rather cross because they now have an expense that they didn’t have before. Um, I described this to a uh a senior executive from Exxon Mobile. I’m no not shy about naming names here uh a couple of years ago. and he listened carefully and he said, “Yeah, no, we got to work on it.” Um, as we scale over time, we scale up that stored fraction. We draw down the net geological carbon intensity of the fossil fuels passing through the economy, we’ll get to a point where the geological storage operator starts to run out of carbon dioxide. They’ve hoovered up all the all the available accessible carbon dioxide that’s being generated by cement plants and steel factories and whatever remaining power stations are still using fossil fuels. And so they actually have to resort to that’s a good that’s a good problem to have. We want to be we want industry to be out there searching for carbon dioxide not sort of avoiding it as hard as they can. And so you have a new element here that those fans there that’s a direct air capture operator. That’s somebody who’s actually taking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. By this time carbon dioxide has become really valuable because it’s expensive to take it back out of the atmosphere. So point sources of CO2 would be making a lot of money out of their carbon dioxide. Very different from what their carbon dioxide is costing them at the moment. Consumers are still confused. That’s that’s for sure. The atmosphere is feeling perhaps a little bit better because the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is slowing down. The geological storage operator is now making serious money. The government’s still learning what to do and the extractor importer is perhaps seeing that this could work out for them not quite as badly as they first thought. Finally, we get to 100% net zero geological net zero as achieved by you’ll notice the thickness of the arrows. The blue arrows denote the amount of carbonis. Notice is now as much going back underground through the geological storage operator as is coming in from the extractor importer. You’ll notice the economy as a whole is using less fossil fuels. Of course, if you include the cost of disposing of the carbon dioxide into the cost of using fossil fuels, then we will definitely use less of them, but we probably won’t use zero. So, what happens? Well, the geolog the industrial point source is happy, no longer thinking of moving to China because they can sell their CO2. They don’t have to pay for it. Um, consumers are happy because we stopped global warming. The atmosphere is breathing a sigh of relief. The geological storage operator is still making loads of money. The government’s feeling awesome because we finally found a climate policy that works. And the extractor importer has saved the planet. The surprising thing about this is it’s totally affordable. If we look at what carbon capture costs today from a clean point source like a refinery or an ammonia plant, all you have to do is compress it, liquefy it, and stick it back underground. $50 a ton will do it. If you have to recapture it out of the atmosphere and you’ve got 30 years of technology development, they can probably get that to $250 a ton. At the moment, if you had to pay Oxy to do it for you, you’d be paying north of $600 a ton. And if you had to pay Clone Works to do it for you, you’d be paying north of $1,000 a ton. So, it’s it’s nent technology, but these are first of a kind plants. And the people who work on that Stratos plant in Texas are very confident that as they roll these plants out, should they get the right policy environment to to allow them to do so, they’ll be able to get costs down. And you know getting cost down by at least a factor of two from your first of a kind is is is normally you relatively easy lift for an industry. Okay. So that’s what it because we that’s what that’s the red line there. The actual cost of capturing carbon dioxide through the transition. Of course because we only require a certain fraction to be captured. the actual impact on the fossil fuel consumer is much less because you start off um only requiring a small percentage to be captured and stored. In fact, even by 2040, the stored fraction is only 36%. Remember that curve and the way the geological carbon intensity of our um continued fossil fuel use has to fall over time in order to achieve geological net zero. So 36 storing capturing and storing 36% of the carbon dioxide generated by continued fossil fuel use in an advanced economy like Europe or the UK would cost probably less than $50 a ton, less than what we currently pay in carbon taxes. And if we look at it in the context of historical fuel price fluctuations, it’s even more striking. That’s what that looks like over the past 25 years. Six depends on a liter of petrol. If our Tony had decided he wanted to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming within a generation, he could have done it by now. The technology has been there all along. We just haven’t had the policies to make it happen. So to sum up, we need to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming. That you’d say is obvious. We need to do it before the world stops using fossil fuels. That may feel discordant to you, but it’s true. And you’ve got to think through the implications. Halting global warming requires one ton of carbon dioxide safely and permanently disposed of for every ton still generated by burning fossil fuels in the 2050s. So we need a credible CO2 disposal plan that applies to all emissions including scope 3. So including the emissions resulting from the products companies sell and aiming for 10% by 2035 and 100% by 2050 would be a great start. A long time ago um I quoted Sultan Aljaba earlier on. I’m going to end by quoting uh another um oil minister from that part of the world uh the Saudi oil minister Shik Yammani from the 1970s and he loved to say that the stone age ended before we ran out of stones and the oil age will end before we run out of oil. And I’d like you to remember that global warming must end before we stop using fossil fuels. And I hope that’s given you some things to think about. Thank you. [Applause]
3 Comments
Great…
Thanks so much for conversation, explaining, focusing and sharing this conference…
🌐🙋♂️☘☘☘☘☘
the tv says that if we pay more money to the government and eat bugs the weather will be more gooder
How to stop climate change: Get the governments to stop using directed energy weapons systems to burn everything and stop them using chemicals and biologicals they spray the world with constantly to change the world climate to destroy everything and to get rid of everyone soon.