Crude Awakening

Whilst it's unlikely you read about it in much of the mainstream press, preoccupied as they are with celebs, “wayward” royals and the Great British Bake Off, something symbolically significant happened in October of this year. Boris Johnson publicly apologised.... No, not for any of the affairs, lies, xenophobia, cronyism, barging of small children or practically criminal mishandling of the pandemic, but he did apologise for “disturbing your Saturday with more news of Covid”. He then announced a second national lockdown, which really took the heavily sequinned shine off that evening's Strictly.
Of course the announcement followed months of elite hypocrisy, chronic ineptitude and mixed messaging, arriving long after the government's all-but ignored scientific advisors deemed its implementation essential to flatten the curve, amid spiralling controversy over private firms raking in millions from the £12 billion wasted on a test and trace system which couldn't trace a fart in a lift... but at least he apologised.... for disturbing Saturday night.

Barely concealed, partisan griping aside, a public apology by that self-serving, under-qualified, over-privileged, opportunistic, useless, faux-stuttering, mock-tousled, lying narcissist (ok, not remotely concealed) is not actually the symbolically significant event referred to. In a year which by all accounts has been... hmmm... less than stellar, renewables finally trumped fossil fuels in a battle for the energy industry's hearts and minds..... who are we kidding? Not hearts and minds as such, but investment dollars on the stock exchange. Still, like a vapid Saturday night apology from Bojo, shutting the gate after all four horsemen of the apocalypse have bolted, it's a start.

This October, the world's largest wind and solar power generator, Nextera Energy Inc. became more valuable than oil behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp. The latter was once the largest public company in the world, worth some $525 billion in 2007 (you could buy THIRTY not-fit-for-purpose test and trace schemes off your party donor mates for that much!!... or like, end world hunger or whatever...), before the growing success of alternative energy sources and various market forces began to cede its dominance. Then, like hundreds of millions of ordinary people, Covid's given it a further kicking, its shares plummeting more than 50% amid the pandemic. 

As our everyday routines have been upended, flights grounded, factories and businesses shuttered, huge numbers working from home, or not working at all, global fuel consumption has mercifully dropped. Until very recently, we were burning through 11 billion tons of oil from fossil fuel reserves each month. That was nearly 1.4 TONS attributable annually to each person on Earth going up in highly toxic smoke. Of course, not everyone's been taking advantage of their annual “allowance”, whilst others are practically bathing in the stuff. Geography and GDP play crucial roles here, but even the standardised consumption average is obscene. 

With demand for oil shrinking some 20% through the pandemic, the barrel price collapsed to around $40. This was bad news for petrostates like Saudi Arabia who need a base of $70-80 to balance the books. Remember some years ago when the news reported supermarket price wars had hardworking British farmers losing money on every pint of milk they sold? Well this is similar, but substitute Barbour wellies for Armani sunnies, 20 year old tractors caked in mud for brand new Rolls Royces plated in gold, chickens for diamonds, cows for gold-plated diamonds and pigs for ANYTHING but pigs you insensitive dolt; this is Saudi Arabia! ...Substitute sympathy for smirking. Smirking might seem harsh but at this late stage of our assault on the planet it legitimately qualifies as gallows humour. Big oil is anything but the downtrodden underdog in this story.

Renewables commercially overtaking the black stuff is a significant milestone on our path towards a sustainable planet – a passing of the torch (always take care when passing burning torches round billions of tons of fuel) whose stock market reckoning will undoubtedly catalyse further investment, innovation and restructuring of the industry towards wind and solar. In the words of Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood's sociopathic oil tycoon, NextEra just reached across the room with their straw and drank Exxon's milkshake. And with any luck, NextEra's own milkshake will bring all the boys to the yard.

It's a process which seems to be under way in earnest. In February of this year, analysts predicted renewable energy capacity set to increase by 50% between 2019 and 2024, based on the recent acceleration of wind, solar and hydropower project rollouts. Of course that prediction was made before the entire world got turned on its head and chucked into a reality blender (again, I'm talking about the pandemic here, not Boris saying sorry for something), but if the new global energy pecking order can weather these storms of uncertainty (and turn storms both figurative and literal into clean power), we may even see that estimate exceeded.

Of course, a rapidly shrinking oil industry means unfortunate redundancy (Exxon has some 74,000 employees around the world and they're clearly not all driving gold-plated Rollers) but with estimates stating our current fossil fuel reserves will be dry by 2060 - not long from now, but long after our current consumption trajectory blasts us past the relatively safe 2C level, irreversibly affecting the climate - we can't afford to be too sentimental. Seismic change is often uncomfortable, but then so are seismic waves, hurricanes and tsunamis. Mass job losses are regrettable but in the long run, preferable to mass extinction.  Rethink. Reskill. Reboot. as our Government would say. 

If the reboot comes in the form of renewable energy, from a utilitarian perspective, we have to consider that a good thing.