Chapter 1 - Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero

1.01 Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero Intro (11 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 Embedded Carbon (9 min.)
1.03 What is an "Energy Transition"? (19 min.)
1.04 Getting to Net Zero - Part 1 (14 min.)
1.05 Getting to Net Zero - Part 2 (10 min.)
1.06 Regulatory Review, Stakeholder Engagement and Public Support - Part 1 (7 min.)
1.07 Regulatory Review, Stakeholder Engagement and Public Support - Part 2 (12 min.)
1.08 Walking the Talk (12 min.)

Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero / Chapter 1 - Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero

Lesson 1.01 Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero Intro

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero Intro 02. Course Overview 03. How did we get to this point?

01. Lesson 1.01: Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero Intro

Hi, I'm Paul Griss and welcome to my course on Climate Change, the Energy Transition and Net Zero. This is a complimentary course to my other SAGA Wisdom course on Sustainability, ESG and Performance. Both designed to navigate you through terribly complex issues where there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation and trying to give you useful information you can use to help move your company forward in this ever evolving space.
This is a very technical and complicated space and there are no shortage of people who will make it as technical and complicated as you want it to be. Of necessity because I'm going to be covering a lot of issues very quickly, this course is going to be very much an overview, very much generic. I'm not going to delve down into details. And I will provide some references that you can follow up on your own at a later date. If there's anything in the material that you'd like me to elucidate or elaborate on in a little bit more detail, I'm happy to take your questions either directly or through the chat function on the SAGA Wisdom site.

02. Course Overview

So this course is being offered as 5 lectures. The first one is this one which will cover the ground of climate change, the energy transition and net zero at a fairly high level. The next module will go into the energy transition and what that entails. Then we'll get more specific into the role of net zero and how that contributes to the energy transition. In Module #4, we're going to look at some of the major policy and regulatory and societal barriers to moving forward that you're going to have to navigate is an organization that wants to commit to net zero. And then in the final module, we'll wrap it up with a generic path forward for how your organization can move forward on a commitment to achieving net zero, which will, as I said at the outset, obviously be generic, but should give you a basic understanding of what it is you need to consider if you're going to embark on this journey.

03. How did we get to this point?

So how did we get to this point? We've been working on the issue of climate change and the threats it poses to human society and to the environment for over 30 years. And there's been a lot of noise and confusion about what it is, what the impacts are going to be and when those impacts are going to occur, how we're going to control it, and a variety of other aspects to the issue. It's important that we just go back a little bit to where this issue came from and how we got to the point of talking about an energy transition to net zero.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted over 30 years ago. Since then, on a regular basis, the signatories to the convention meet for what is called the Conference of the Parties, at which they scope out what actions the international community is going to take to help implement the convention. The most recent of these was held in Egypt in late 2022, which focused in to a large degree on how countries in the developed world which are seen to have benefited from introducing carbon into the atmosphere can compensate the countries that are perceived to being victims of that change in the environment due to rising sea levels or whatever that may threaten even the livelihood of the country as a whole. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted 30 years ago. It provides a framework for all countries in the world to coordinate their actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Since then, there have been regular meetings of what are known the conferences of the parties, the governments that are signatories to the convention. The most recent one happening in late 2022 in Egypt. But there have been milestones along the way. One of the first ones was in Kyoto in 1988, and the so-called Kyoto Protocol arose from that meeting in which countries around the world made commitments to drop their greenhouse gas emissions X percentage below 2005 levels into the future. That's been superseded by agreements at other conferences such as Paris and Copenhagen, the 2 major ones. What it's boiling down to is a general agreement based on the information coming from the scientific community that in order to avoid major damage to the earth's ecosystems and human societies and economic activities, we need to limit global increase in average temperature to approximately 2℃ below pre-industrial levels by the year 2050. And there's even a campaign to take it even further down to 1.5℃ to allow a greater buffer in going forward. So that's where the momentum for these societal shifts that we are experiencing is coming from. On the one hand, there's an activist community that's putting out apocalyptic scenarios where if we don't rein in climate change, it's going to destroy the entire planet. On the other hand, there's the climate change deniers who say that based on geological evidence, the world has been a lot warmer than it is now in the past and what we're experiencing now is just a blip and is not evidence of any major long term changes in the climate. The vast majority of people are in between but are in fact influenced by the rather negative scenarios played out by the activist organizations. And that is causing great concern, particularly among young people, about what their future holds.
The reality is the scientific community bases all of their projections about what might happen on probabilities. Different scenarios have different probabilities of occurring and the probabilities of those scenarios occurring change over time, as we get more knowledge and more experience and more data. Therefore, the likely impacts of climate change are somewhere in between those 2 extremes that are presented to us. And it's an issue we have to try and continue to understand and wrestle with and do whatever we can to manage.
Management is extremely complicated because there's so many different ways in which humans put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the size of the challenge can be overwhelming. I don't know how many presentations I've seen where people have laid out all the potential consequences of what's going to happen if we don't take action in terms of desertification of parts of the globe, massmigrations of humans, major die offs, species extinction. And then when they talk about what we're going to do to try and prevent it, they come up with things like, well, we have to change all of our systems and all the way we do things, which is very impractical advice because I don't know of too many times in history where we have changed all our systems. And in order for us to do something like that, the evidence would have to be staring us in the face that this has to be done and done now. And despite the efforts of activists who present the most extreme scenario for what is going to happen, there is not widespread agreement that is exactly what is going to take place. And a good expression that I heard a number of years ago and applies in this is, I'll believe there's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis. So while our world leaders are gathering at these conferences of the parties and agreeing that there's some global crisis in front of us, their actions are not matching up with their words. And so consequently, everybody is confused. And they can make jokes about people flying on private jets to greenhouse gas emission conferences with perfect honesty because the walk isn't matching the talk.
So where does that leave companies who are pressured to deal with this? Particularly those who are in the energy sector where they're so closely associated with greenhouse gas emissions. Well, the one thing you can't do is ignore it and hope it's going to go away. It doesn't matter what your position is on climate change, nobody is ever going to be proven right on this issue. Again, there's a range of scenarios out there. They're all based on probabilities. The probabilities change all the time based on new information. Therefore, coming up with a definitive answer on whether the climate is changing because of human activities is going to be virtually impossible, even though all of the current scientific evidence suggests that it is and that is what the world is basing its actions upon.
Climate is the average of conditions at a particular location, at a particular time, over an extended period of time. So for example, I could tell you that on December the 13th in Calgary, Alberta, you should be expecting the temperature to be 2℃. And that's based on multiple years of observation. Now, that doesn't mean that on December the 13th, it can't be 15℃ or -15℃. The point is that climate tells you, as the saying goes, climate is what you expect, weather is what you get and it fluctuates constantly. And so we're only 30 years on since we did the Framework Convention on Climate Change. We're just one generation on with the massive investment in resources that's being assigned to measuring and monitoring climate change that wasn't there 100 years ago. And I have faith in the science. I think very smart people are doing very good work. But the point is, nobody's ever going to be proven right until centuries from now. But it's not going to go away. And the reason is we're investing trillions of dollars in actions to combat climate change. Hundreds of thousands of people have made their careers in this space, and it's being reflected in policy and regulations all over the world. It's not going away. So even if you don't believe in climate change, or maybe you don't believe that human activities are causing climate change, it really doesn't matter. It might make you feel good to argue the point, but the point is for the rest of your life and for your children's lives, climate change and trying to address greenhouse gas emissions are going to be a large part of what we're talking about.