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With a week to go before COP26, blame is on the rise. It’s China’s fault, it’s the West’s fault, it’s Australia’s fault, it’s the fault of oil companies, it’s the fault of long-distance travellers, or meat eaters, or people with large families. If there is one thing that we are generally very good at, it’s finding reasons why it’s someone else’s fault.

Oil company responsibility

Ten days ago, Shell’s CEO Ben van Beurden was on a 3-person panel at a TED climate conference in Edinburgh alongside hedge fund founder Chris James and a climate activist named Lauren Macdonald. At least briefly. After denouncing him as one of the most evil people in the world, Lauren left the stage, giving the moderator Christiana Figueres quite the on-the-spot challenge. (Which she dealt with superbly.)

According to Shell, the company can reduce its operational emissions but not the (ten times larger) emissions associated with using the oil itself, because it cannot control its customers. Well, it might not be able to control its customers’ behaviour, but it can certainly limit its output. It just chooses not to. The company also argues that its traditional business is needed to support its developing green business, which is a bit like saying I need to rob a bank in order to support a charity.

We are brainwashed into thinking that economic forces are as irresistible as natural forces. Consumers have to be supplied with whatever and how much they choose, and if there is a shortage – as has been seen recently with the global bottleneck on the supply of natural gas, and will occur more in the future if oil companies behave responsibly and limit their production – then prices inevitably rise. Actually, companies can choose to cap the price they sell at as well as the amount and nature of the products they sell.

Shell, like other companies in all markets, wants to make money and not lose market share to its competitors. But these ‘forces’ reflect human desires, that can be overcome if we have the will, not ineluctable ‘laws’ as they are often presented.

So come on, Shell, take more responsibility and commit to reducing your output of oil and gas.

Consumer responsibility

But what about the individual consumer? Recently, the BBC reported an interview with Prince Charles in which, according to the report, he agreed that it is very difficult for most individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. No it isn’t. It’s very easy for most individuals to reduce their carbon footprint. Granted we might not be able to run our car on cheese and wine like the Prince, or afford a ground source heat pump – but there is no reason at all why we need to eat meat most days (the Prince has cut down to 5 days a week but how about 1 day a week?); or take holidays that involve flying; most car owners can drive less if they set their minds to it; and nearly everyone – small children excepted – buys stuff they do not need. Maybe in the run-up to Christmas we could think about that as a society.

So come on, most of us, let’s take more responsibility and commit to reducing our carbon footprint.

Government responsibility

It would help, of course, if the Royal family and UK government could lead by example. The Prince’s love of trees would be more convincing if the Duchy land had more than 6% tree coverage by area. The government would have more gravitas if its members were less hypocritical and more prepared to do anything even remotely politically difficult when it comes to climate change.

It is much easier for our leaders to blame others than take meaningful action. So of course it is China’s fault for burning all that coal – ignoring our own heritage, our reliance on China for our way of life, or the fact that it’s simpler for us to give up something we no longer use than for the billions of people around the world who are still dependent upon it …

Yet I am in danger of plunging down the rabbit hole I am trying to avoid. Better to be positive, non-judgemental and enthusiastically active than to sink into some sort of misanthropic malaise. Casting blame and making comparisons are of little value now. The only way in which COP26 can succeed is if everyone, be they a green activist or an oil executive, an American or a Chinese or African, a government minister or an ordinary citizen, is willing to take responsibility and do what they can to confront climate change. And positively support others who are trying to do the same.

Today, 9th September 2021, BBC news includes a report which claims that most remaining fossil fuels – 90% of coal, 60% of oil and gas – must stay in the ground, “scientists say”. The UCL study is reported in Nature.

“Scientists say” suggests that scientists all agree, something the BBC frequently implies. In this instance, it’s curious that a recent episode of the BBC Sounds series on 39 Ways to Save the Planet is entitled Polluter Pays, in which the Oxford scientist Myles Allen argues that essentially all we need to do to sort out climate change is to force oil companies to suck CO2 out of the air. If he is right, then there is no need to keep the remaining fossil fuels in the ground – we could dig them up, use the energy, capture the CO2, and store it underground. Capturing the emissions at the point of combustion is cheaper than extracting them from thin air, but most of the emissions (about 90%) associated with humanity’s use of oil and gas occur far away from the refineries – in the vehicles we drive, the planes we fly in, and the buildings we heat. So in order to sort out climate change, the industry will need to rely primarily on thin air retrieval, also known as direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).

As variously noted – including in this blog in March 2020 – Allen’s idea requires a lot of money and energy, quite apart from international regulation of the oil majors and international agreement on how and where to store all the CO2. Money: based on the Committee on Climate Change’s estimates for the costs of DACCS of CO2 (6th carbon budget), we would be looking at thousands of pounds per person on the planet (more for rich Westerners presumably). Energy: to suck an amount of CO2 from the atmosphere that is comparable to what we currently put into the atmosphere (about 35 billion tonnes per annum) would increase global primary energy consumption by 10-20% just to operate the vacuum cleaner.

In the Polluter Pays podcast, there is the curious suggestion that if oil companies try to push up prices to cover the cost (several trillions of pounds per annum), they could be out-competed by renewables. Which alas would defeat the whole purpose, as they wouldn’t be around any more to remove the CO2. For this to work, everyone will end up paying as the cost dwarfs oil company financial reserves; “polluter pays” is largely a myth, even if we use oil company reserves as an initial down payment.

To be fair, no-one knows how much CCS capacity (including DACCS) will be in place in 2050. The UCL study is probably more sensible, and certainly more mainstream; and it avoids one of the pitfalls of Allen’s idea, which is that no-one else does anything because they believe in a technological miracle put into effect by oil companies. Either way, it’s a striking coincidence of diverging scientific opinions, which the BBC doesn’t seem to notice in its reporting.