It's game over for oil and gas

If only Richard Nixon could go to China, then maybe only the United Arab Emirates could host a climate summit that yielded a unanimous agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. No, COP28 in Dubai didn’t produce the sort of ironclad pledge to eliminate the use of oil, gas and coal that so many scientists, environmentalists and country representatives in attendance wanted to see. But it did commit the nearly 200 countries in attendance to move “away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Denmark’s Climate and Energy Minister Dan Jørgensen said, "We're standing here in an oil country, surrounded by oil countries, and we made the decision saying let's move away from oil and gas."

And yet, for all the talking that occurred over the two weeks in Dubai, few people seemed willing to call out the oil and gas industry and its thousands of representatives at COP28 for the contradiction that lies at the heart of their shared conceit. Whether it’s ExxonMobil or Saudi Arabia, they all seem to believe they can reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050 but maintain or even expand current levels of production. Somehow, by affixing huge volumes of carbon capture technology (heavily subsidized by governments, of course), they’ll get to have their climate cake and eat it too.

But of course, upwards of 80 per cent of emissions associated with the combustion of oil and gas come at the tailpipe, and that’s the part governments committed to their own net-zero targets must address. As those emissions are phased out in major economies like the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan, global oil and gas production will necessarily have to follow suit. This is as plain as day in the International Energy Agency’s forecast, which shows that in a net-zero global economy, the volume of oil consumed would fall from over 100 million barrels per day in 2023 to 24 million barrels by 2050. Natural gas demand drops just as precipitously, from 4,150 billion cubic metres per day to 900 billion in 2050.

These are stunning, staggering declines in demand, and yet they’re ones that nobody seems willing to acknowledge will actually happen. Take Mark Cameron, vice-president of the Pathways Alliance and part of the large Alberta delegation in Dubai. As he told The Atlantic’s Zoë Schlanger, “We can’t control the way that our product is used once it leaves our plant gates or our pipelines.” To climate activists, this probably sounds like a cop-out. To me, though, it sounds more like a confession — and a pretty consequential one at that.

Cameron is right about the fact that the companies his organization represents can’t control the way their oil and gas products are used once they’re combusted in the engines of people’s cars and trucks or the furnaces that heat their homes and businesses. But they also can’t control the increasingly attractive economics behind things like electric vehicles and renewable energy. They can’t control the rapidly growing demand from both consumers and businesses for products that reduce or eliminate the need for fossil fuels. And they certainly can’t control the behaviour of major fossil fuel-importing countries like China, where growth in both zero-carbon energy and electric vehicles continues to outstrip even the most ambitious projections.

They are, in a word, powerless. This probably sounds crazy in a country like Canada, where oil and gas companies exert a massively disproportionate influence over the national political discourse — to say nothing of places like Alberta or Saskatchewan, where they essentially control it. But the truth is that the energy transition is already well past the point of no return and all the slow-walking in the world won’t change the pace at which it unfolds. Even geopolitical events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which the fossil fuel industry has tried to weaponize for its own purposes, simply serve as a reminder of why true energy independence is so important.

Given that, there are two possible explanations for the fossil fuel industry’s apparent indifference to the consequences of its own stated objectives. The first is that these companies have no real expectation of anyone actually meeting them and are simply using events like COP28 to stall for time. The second is that it will be someone else’s problem by then, and they’re simply trying to extend their window as long as possible. Both are different versions of the same bullshit, and both need to be called out as such.

Now that the world has declared the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel age, it’s time for the oil and gas industry and governments in its thrall to act accordingly. They must plan seriously for a world of declining demand and adjust their own forecasts to match. Companies need to either actively plan for a transition away from selling as much oil and gas as they do today to some other line of business or embrace the idea of winding down their operations over time. Governments that depend heavily on revenues from the fossil fuel industry should wean themselves off it as quickly as possible. In both cases, pursuing business as usual is a form of deliberate sabotage that will leave future generations shouldering the highest price.