 All right, folks, thank you so much for being here. I have a huge and special welcome to give to you. I was at this conference in 2018, and it was career changing for me. And I get the same feeling from this moment already, just from this morning, it's such a fertile ground for advocacy and our research. So I hope that you guys can have a great experience as I did in 2018 and since. So I am, for the next 75 minutes or so, I'm going to help us move through these five incredible presentations that you're about to hear on policy and governance approaches to the problems and opportunities that we're faced with here. I was in another panel a couple of panels ago, and the question was, have you brought any of these ideas to government? And an economist was struggling with that question. These folks have some answers, I think, to that question. So I look forward to hearing them. I'm just gonna announce or let you know the names and the affiliations of these folks. I won't read the bios. Obviously you have those, and then we'll get started. So Valerie Marcel is with the new producers group in Chatham House. So she'll be talking with us first. Kelim Shaw at the University of Delaware. Fergus Green, University College London. Michelle Bastamante, have I pronounced your name correctly? Close. Bastamante, excellent natural resources defense counsel. And then finally, Max Cohen, who is at the University of British Columbia. So I'm gonna turn it over to them with thanks. And by the way, my name is Angela Carter. I'm an associate prof at the University of Waterloo and also an energy transition specialist now at the International Institute for Sustainable Development. So it is a pleasure to meet you all. I hope we get a chance to connect. So, Valerie, please go ahead. So it's lovely to be here. I was also at the 2018 conference and really happy to be back here in person. It feels good. So I'm talking about a co-authored paper that's focused on emerging oil and gas producers in the transition. So I think our concern came from the fact that a lot of the supply side transition thinking is focused on established producers. And we felt that emerging oil and gas producers are really different subset and facing really different issues. And so we looked at the challenges that they face, the policy dilemmas that they face in the transition. And it's based on insights gained from interviews with government officials from these countries and also from workshops and trainings that we've organized through the New Producers Group. And briefly, the New Producers Group is a peer-to-peer government network like a South-South peer-to-peer program for almost 30 countries that are new to the oil and gas sector. And what we've seen in those discussions is really that they have a desire to develop their petroleum resources. They also have a desire to prepare for the transition and to build that climate resilience. So there's a duality there in their sort of policy focus. But that they really have some significant capacity and challenges in how to navigate either of those policy goals. So just to talk a little bit about who these emerging producers are. This is the list of countries that we work with. And almost half of them are in green and those are exploration countries. The ones in yellow are the ones that have made significant oil and gas discoveries. And the ones in purple are early producers. But in this paper, we were really more interested in the ones that are in the development stage or early production because they're at a really critical policy juncture. They're not yet dependent on the oil sector or the gas sector. And the decisions that they make at the beginning of this process are really important for their development path. So going back just to the group generally, many of them are low income countries or lower income countries. And so they're really pinning their hopes on the sector as a source of revenues. And that's really the focus that they have. They are different, as I said, from established producers because they're not exporting their energy needs, they're importing them. Many of them have very low access to energy. The African contingent is really dependent on biomass. The Caribbean small states in our group have very good access to energy, but a lot of it is heavy fuel oil. And so there's really an interest, I think, from a lot of the policy makers on wanting to generate domestically produced energy and to be cleaner than the current energy mix and safer. The group as a whole accounts for 1.7% of global GHGs, so really tiny climate footprint. One question is what happens to that when they develop their oil and gas resources, of course. But when you look at the per capita emissions, they're also extremely low. And you have the world at the bottom there, the world average, the Caribbean small states are generally higher per capita. And what's interesting is that several members in the group are carbon sinks. So they have huge force to land cover. And so they really have a duality in their policy drivers. They want to be oil and gas exporters and generate revenues from that. And they also want rewards for managing their forest and they want to remain carbon negative. So it's quite a different kind of policy situation compared to the established producers. The very vulnerable to climate impacts, the whole group are the ones that are in color in this chart. And so almost all of them are in the worst quadrant, which is high vulnerability and low readiness. And that includes all the countries that are developing those significant discoveries that I mentioned in the first slide. So they really need investment in adaptation. And I think what's interesting also to note is that because they are so marginal, the reserves that they have even are still marginal in relation to global numbers that any mitigation efforts that they make are not going to reduce their own climate vulnerability or their vulnerability climate impacts. So yeah, so basically the conclusion is they're really not legacy producers. So they have very limited dependence on the sector. And what's interesting is also that because they're starting today, they have the benefit of hindsight and they really are aware of resource curse risks. They are aware of transition risks. But we do find a big difference between officials like technocrats, government officials, and politicians, elected MPs think and speak very differently about those two types of risks. So there's really that desire to develop their petroleum resources for revenues first and foremost when you ask them about what is what, what are you hoping to get from the petroleum sector? It's revenues for growth in every case, but it's also domestic energy and to a lesser extent, linkages with the petroleum sector. So supply chain linkages, value chain linkages, like I think the interest in refining or processing the oil and gas is much less than it would have been before awareness of the transition. But they also are really driven by the idea of forging a new path of building resilience in the transition, so using revenues, export revenues for green growth or to build resilience. So it's an interesting kind of subset of countries. So the policy challenge that they have is essentially that they are, it's difficult for them to go down the low carbon route because they are not attracting climate finance, broadly speaking, they're not attracting transition finance or transition support. They're not, you know, Nigeria is going to attract a lot more interest in managing a transition than a small, marginal, new producer. So they basically don't have alternative pathways. So when we surveyed the countries, the governments on whether they had a plan B, whether they had a non-oil development plan, the pathway, and 80% of them said no. And that's even the countries that are at the exploration stage that are really frontier countries and have low prospects for their sector taking off. And they need revenues. So going down that low carbon route is difficult for them because they just don't have, it's not concrete and it's not going to generate revenues now. They also have difficulty going down the sort of midway route, which would be somewhere between developing your oil and gas as fast as you can and the low carbon route. So I think the challenge for that is that there is the element of political promises made about developing oil and gas and the kinds of windfalls it is going to generate. So there's a bit of a lock in to that kind of pathway, like a political lock in I should say. There's, I think, a lack of capacity to assess the risks of the petroleum sector. So to stress test their plans, fiscally, economically, that's a challenge. And then it's also that they're not getting support for basically how to develop their petroleum sector differently so it could be the lowest emission standard. So emerging producers theoretically would have the ability to develop, to establish a sector as lowest emissions but they're not getting support for that because there's been a general withdrawal of multilateral development banks and donor development agencies from supporting them. And they don't have support with mapping out a plan to net zero. So the risk is that by default, if they can't pursue those two plans that they go down the route of developing their oil and gas as fast as they can with the risks that are involved in that. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for having me here. So I'm gonna talk about some work that I've been doing for the last couple of years on institutional governance, institutional climate governance. And perhaps this is almost like a deep dive case study of what was just said in many ways. So I hope I'm not repeating too much. But I've been doing some work in the Guyana Shield countries that were mentioned. And just to remind us, as was said before, these are the countries that I've been focusing on. This part of the world here is South America, Suriname, Guyana, and then this little dot here is Trinidad and Tobago. And this is just illustrative of the kind of upstream investment that's happening. It's a very active, very dynamic field. And a lot of the major global players, as you can see, are highlighted here. All right. So almost, I'll start here. So this is always sort of my baseline in this particular part of the world in terms of small producers. Trinidad and Tobago are very small, but important producer in this part of the world. And it has a hundred year history of oil and gas. And it's almost like a poster child of a lot of things that could have been done better, right? And they're sort of finding that out now, given that they're now producing 70% less crude oil than they have been in previous years. And now there's a significant thrust by the government there to figure out how to diversify the economy away from oil. Natural gas is still pretty okay, but clearly you can see that GHG emissions is always notoriously cited with places like Bahrain and so on as highest GHGs per capita because it's so small, right? But to sort of my interests, it does have a deep institutional governance regime developed over decades for the energy sector. The climate piece is a little bit newer, but still there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle here. The NDCs, renewable targets, national climate policy that's more than a decade old, and so on. So it is reasonably robust when you start thinking about institutional governance for the energy sector and then sort of some of the environmental and climate mitigation pieces. Now, so then we have Guyana, which is a new kid on the block, a very new producer. First discovered in 2015, but significant amounts of reserves that brought the market over the next decade or two valued over $180 billion US dollars. And this is significant for a very small country, less than a million people. It's very, very, it's life-changing, right? At the conference of the Americas a couple of months ago with President Biden, the prime minister of Guyana said they have all intents to bring to market all of this. All right? So I guess the starting point here is not, what can we do to keep it on the ground? But sort of my starting point is, okay, if this is the situation, how can we do this in a responsible way? If that is even a possibility, all right? The flip side of this is Guyana has over 87% of natural forest reserves. One of five Amazonia countries in South America that's classified as high forest, low deforestation. And this carbon sink potential is valued, ecosystem services is valued at about 40 to 54 billion US annually, which is not insignificant, all right? So there's sort of two things going on here, right? The fact that the country is gonna go, is going guns to develop these oil and gas reserves and then the natural carbon sink sort of potential, but reality of the country and juxtaposing those two things. So the new government that came in in 2020, let's put together what they're calling a low carbon development strategy in 2030, which is meant to balance those two pieces, the carbon sink piece and then the exploration and bringing to market those reserves and using the dividends, as I said, using the dividends of marketing that for developing a low carbon development pathway for the country, all right? And there are four components of it, creating new incentives for a low carbon economy, protecting against climate change and biodiversity loss, aligning with global climate and biodiversity goals and stimulating clean energy and low carbon development. So they're always trying to do three things here. Try to monetize the ecosystem services of the carbon sink, trying to bring to market all of the reserves that they have very quickly and then translate that, those dividends into low carbon, clean, diversified development for the country, all right? So it's almost like walking and chewing gum, as they say, all right? So given that, I've been looking at, all right, so if that's the case, what kind, what's it evolving institutional climate governance regime like in order to achieve all that is being said here and avoid the resource curse and whatnot, as we well know in other parts of the country. So I've actually, over the last couple of years been working very closely with a couple of these agencies, the Office for Climate Change, which is directly under the office of the president, reports directly to the president's office, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment, which combines its forest-free function, its regulatory function, as well as a policy function with the Environmental Management Agency, and then sort of a multi-pronged National Climate Change Committee, which is really a sort of a technical committee that advises, so it has an advisory function, national advisory function, right? So looking at that, sort of thinking about the administration of policy, if you would, right? How do we go about doing that? So in this sort of framework of thinking about the progress, the progress along an institutional governance of climate line, right? I think about two things. One is, so within the operating environment, that sort of is the reality of the day, there's two sort of concepts. One is sort of a systemic level concept of institutional resilience, right? So how do we build a governance regime that has resilient institutions? That will face the test of changing political administrations and political philosophies and so on, all right? So that's one level. And the other sort of intersecting level is that organizational level of how do you think about the value-creating bureaucracy itself, right? So this is sort of the administration of policy piece, okay? And sort of like folks in public administration call this the new governance model, all right? How do we move away from all sort of stuffy bureaucratic structures to more dynamic, flexible, agile kinds of structures as well? So to create this dynamism in the overall sort of climate governance, all right? And what we find really quickly, especially when I look at those three climate-focused actors that I mentioned, the five things that we see happening that there's pros and cons or strengths and weaknesses to institutional governance progress. One is sort of internally the legalities and the mandates of different actors in that governance network, right? There's a lot of contentions around legal mandates of ministries agencies, boards, special committees and so on. That tends to disrupt the effectiveness and the efficiency of how governance works. The other one is coordination. So that's also sort of linked to that, right? So coordination of the numbers of primary actors, secondary actors, tertiary actors, then all of the stakeholders outside of formal governance as well. That coordination element is sort of, you know, if you right now, right? And there's also an external and a domestic dimension to coordination of a governance regime. Domestically, we can understand sort of the coordination of the key actors. But if we think about externally, for example, there's a situation where Guyana is a South American country but it's also a member of the Caricum, which is the Caribbean Common Market, right? For historical and cultural reasons. And geography, right? But many of the Caribbean Island countries have moved towards zero carbon statements, have moved towards marketing themselves, for example, that tourism sectors as green islands, green economies and so on, right? While Guyana is moving fully into the oil and gas sector. So how does this mesh in that kind of regional kind of situation? How is that coordinated, right? So there's issues like that can arise. Alignment, alignment is another issue. Agency and access, for example, the office for climate change, which is directly under the president, which can raise a lot of questions about transparency and accountability and then resources and power. So I'll stop there and I'm happy to take questions more specifically on that later. Thank you. Great. So I'm going to be talking about why we need a new norm against new fossil fuel projects. And this is joint work with my colleague Steve Pie from the UCL Energy Institute. And just to be clear, our paper is going to cover both fossil fuel demand and fossil fuel supply, though I'm mostly going to talk about fossil fuel supply today for obvious reasons. So I want to do three things. I want to talk about like the case, like why there should be no fossil fuel projects. But I'm going to fly through that very, very quickly, largely take it as red for this audience. We can maybe discuss some of the nuances in the Q&A. Second thing, just to sort of briefly give a kind of crude political economy model of why there aren't new fossil fuel projects being developed. And again, that's going to be sort of fairly quick. And then talk about why we should concentrate on building a norm against new fossil fuel projects. So again, I'm going to, so I'm going to fly through this pretty quickly, but clearly there, this is coal-fired power stations, lots of new coal-fired power stations in development, sort of pre-construction and construction. Lots of companies with developing new oil and gas reserves. So new fossil fuel projects are a big sort of problem. And basically the case against them is pretty straightforwardly, a lot of recent research saying that if we want to get to 1.5 degrees, we shouldn't be opening new, at least not opening new fossil fuel production projects. And the International Energy Agency, so we heard from Christoph this morning, made that very, very clear last year. And so the basic, in short, the basic case is that new fossil fuel projects are inconsistent with low-cost pathways to 1.5 degrees. And the basic sort of point about the low cost is that, at least in the IEA's model, the existing projects are sufficient to meet the demand in their scenario, subject to recent developments. And basically that it's more efficient to invest in combination of clean energy and maintaining existing projects than it is to create new projects. And then there are additional problems, standard asset risk and other reasons why countries might not want to do that. But that's the basic sort of climate case for no new fossil fuel projects. Right, I said that would be sort of basically quick. There are some potential objections. I'm just gonna kind of post these again fairly quickly and sort of move on. So one is that we might need new supply to meet projected demand and to reduce energy prices and enhance energy security. And this is why we're not just focusing on the supply side, but also talking about no new, at least large scale fossil fuel combustion projects as well. And so clearly there is a need for concerted demand side action. And Kristoff's talk this morning, I think spoke to that nicely. There's a potential equity objection. I'm just gonna, it's kind of complex and it's gonna take too much of my time. So I'm just gonna like park that. If you want to talk about that, please ask me in the Q and A. Clearly as Valerie's talk mentioned, well, both talks really, there's kind of complexities there, but just to kind of note that that's a possible objection. And one is that focusing on no new projects is only a partial solution. To which the response is, yes, it is only a partial solution. I'm not pretending that it's the full solution, but it's nonetheless, I think a valuable partial solution. And just to substantiate that a little bit, I'm gonna sort of compare the argument for like focusing on a full phase out versus for focusing on new projects, at least as a first step. So we know that getting to 1.5 will require phasing out existing infrastructure before it's economic lifetime. We're not just disputing that, that's clearly necessary. But we also know that stopping new projects will get us a long way to where we need to be. And also stopping new projects would kind of precipitate a sort of fossil fuel industry death spiral like it would accelerate certain financial dynamics in the fossil fuel industry because declining industries struggle to attract new capital, their valuations fall and so on. So that would likely affect existing projects as well. But sort of, so it would get us actually a long way where we need to be. But also it has these other benefits, right? Basically stopping new projects is much politically easier than stopping new projects and phasing out existing projects. And this is a key sort of attraction of kind of as an interim measure at least focusing on new projects. So of course, new projects don't have capital invested in them and workers working in them and communities dependent on them. And whereas existing projects do and of course they lobby to protect them, new projects often upset vested interests like land owners and so on who have an interest in not having new fossil fuel projects. And to some extent may even be possible to get incumbents on board because they benefit from excluding new entrants through the price effect. So it's politically easier than sort of trying to argue for a full phase out of existing fossil fuels. Oh yeah, and then their investment treaty complications with existing projects as well. But it's still difficult, right? So it's still, as we know, very, very politically difficult even to stop new fossil fuel projects. So, and sort of the basic idea, the sort of basic model here is pretty intuitive, right? Which is that firms have financial interests in expanding production. And there's sort of I think two main reasons for this one is the sort of profitability under current conditions. So market prices with current regulatory environments where there's lots of subsidies and insufficient taxation of externalities and of everything, they're profitable. But also even a lot of unprofitable projects, I'm thinking here of particularly coal-fired power generation in places like China where they're actually unprofitable but they're being produced anyway. And that's because of kind of perverse incentives for the firms to grow. And then the basic idea is that states behave more or less in the interests of their fossil fuel firms either because the firms are state-owned or they're kind of state parasitic for all the reasons we're all familiar with that they have exert disproportionate influence on policymaking. But there are some interesting patterns across different types of democratic systems and capitalist systems. And this is kind of the bridge to the talking about norms is that ideas are also important and particularly sort of the idea of like the social license of different industries kind of affect their political influence. So what can we do about new fossil fuel projects kind of just continuing this sort of issue of the political challenges? Well, at the project level, you can challenge individual projects on a project-by-project basis. But that's hard because new projects are assessed individually and often they're subject to like if they're subject to environmental analysis at all, it's on a marginal basis and often even scope three emissions where relevant are excluded. And so they often go ahead because they only have like sort of a marginal contribution to global emissions and even courts really, really reject them. At a national level, we have all of the domestic political incentives that I spoke about on the last slide whereas well-familiar problems on the climate side with free rider problem and sort of short termism means that these projects go ahead. And because at an international level, there's no global sovereign, so participation in treaties is voluntary. So all of the national level problems and incentives basically infect the development and design of international treaties. And there's just simply insufficient appetite currently for any kind of fossil fuel treaty among countries. So the idea is that we should sort of focus our efforts on building a norm against new fossil fuel projects. So there's already a lot of actors calling for action to stop new or and or phase out existing fossil fuel production or fossil fuel projects more generally. UN Secretary General has been big on this, lots of NGOs, experts and so on calling for that. And our argument is really that this effort should in the near term concentrate on new projects for the reasons I've outlined and to basically try and build a global moral and potentially legal norm against that. So a norm is basically just a standard of behavior that's expected of a particular actor and can apply to states. And the basic idea is that you build a norm through non-state actor mobilization. So articulating and framing that norm. And here, like the idea of no new fossil fuel projects is really easy to frame. It's very powerful. It's very simple. It's a very kind of intuitive idea. So that has lots of benefits in terms of framing the norm. And then of course, applying political pressure at these various levels on governments to kind of implement that norm through bans or through other kinds of legislation. And then of course, crucially, it requires states to adopt the norm both rhetorically and through implementing it with consistent practice. And this can be aided by pressure from other states, the sort of norming effect, like the normalization of the norm and by institutionalization in international legal texts. So this is basically just sort of my final point is that what kind of effect could this have? Well, it could, yeah, this last slide. So basically, courts could reject and be more likely to reject new fossil fuel projects if there's an international legal norm against new projects. You could potentially tip the political balance so that there's governments are more likely to regulate it. And then that in the longer term would affect the likelihood of getting an international treaty and actually a treaty that just banned new projects would actually be really easy to monitor and enforce. And I can explain why in the Q&A. I'll leave it there. Thanks very much. So that was the absolute perfect setup for my talks. Thank you for carrying a lot of the heavy lifting on setting up the background. My name is Michelle Bustamante. I am a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where we as a group of scientists, legal scholars and advocates work to protect people on the planet. And specifically, I am trying to take on one of the difficult challenges that was identified of providing a tool that can help to evaluate and push back on individual fossil fuel projects, making the case for why there is opportunity to do that in existing US law. So specifically the context, this is one of the things I hope to provide today is that the current practices in the United States have been found by courts to be ineffective and insufficient for meeting the legal standards of the US's bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Here individual projects for the most part are how decisions are being made. We all know the science problem that we're trying to solve is how do we align our actions with limiting warming? But in the policy context, we have to figure out how to make those individual decisions at the level of, say, pipelines or new oil and gas leases, reflect the fact that it's not just a drop in the bucket. This is typically what the conclusions of environmental reviews at agencies will tell you. And one of the main reasons this is about their current approach is to benchmark emissions from the project at an annual level to what is being emitted today and look at that as an indication of its significance. They get a really tiny number as a percentage and essentially conclude that there's no significant impact, ignore the climate significance. This reflects incomplete accounting of sometimes downstream emissions, as was pointed out, provides this really unhelpful comparison to where we are now versus where we actually need to be going and lacks any kind of objective basis for determination. So what is a big number? And as I said, courts are increasingly finding that the approach is insufficient to meet these standards, but the agencies have been able to come back and say, fine, we don't have a tool. We don't know how to do this. So that's where the work that I'm trying to do comes in, specifically within that tiny gap, we have an opportunity to design an analytical climate test, which is what would be needed to assess the significance of these individual projects and their greenhouse gases using the science that's underlying these high-level goals, but taking it down to the level where these decisions are being made from the individual fossil fuel projects. So taking in things like a well-field, plans to do drilling, a gas pipeline, oil pipeline or a power plant. The test is mathematically asking this question of, is the project consistent with the constraints and the characteristics of limiting or warming to one and a half degree world? And the way that that is being evaluated is by looking at two questions that take in information about the one and a half degree world we're describing, which is how much of any one and a half degree carbon budget does this particular project consume? And then how does that compare to its function, what is providing this energy contribution? Is it providing a similar, a commensurate amount of energy to the demands that we would find in the same one and a half degree scenario? If not, it could be argued that it's taking us off course from meeting those policy goals that have been adopted at the highest levels. So the test is really looking at whether the project emissions impacts towards one and a half degrees outweigh its energy contributions and creating a metric that can be used within these environmental review processes now to inform decisions. So what I just described is boils down at the end of the day is a really simple metric of the project emissions impacts over the energy contribution. We're both referring to data coming from climate energy system modeling on emissions trajectories at the U.S. level and energy demand at the U.S. level for fossil fuels. And what's behind this, I'm gonna kind of flick through in the interest of time quickly is parallel metrics that take in information about the project. So life cycle emissions of the project and compare it to context of our one and a half degree world taking into account the fact that there's already existing infrastructure. So for project emissions impacts that looks like comparing the project's life cycle emissions. So all the way from taking the stuff out of the ground through combusting it and comparing that to the emissions trajectory over the time period that the project would be operating. And then in that same time period looking at what's being eaten up of that carbon budget from existing infrastructure and committed emissions. You're still gonna get some percentage. You're gonna get some number that, say it's 4%. Is that big or is that little? There's really no way to say that objectively or in a reasonable way unless you provide a comparison point. And so we're taking cues from life cycle assessment methodology to look at its function. This project's proposed to provide energy. So how well is it doing that and are those two things in line? So it looks at the energy supply, the energy that the project supply and it compares that to the demand for fossil fuels in this climate scenario taking out existing supply from these committed sources. And in practice, please don't worry about looking at all the details but I wanted to just kind of give you an idea that what I'm describing here is a methodology but it's also a tool that provides all these calculations and you can go in and put in your own data for these climate scenarios, for the project emissions. We modeled it on an example gas pipeline project and have submitted this methodology and this demonstration case for review for publication which is currently undergoing. And found that from the data in our literature review that the project would consume about 4% of the remaining carbon budget that it would only provide about 1.6% of the energy contribution and that it gives you a score of about 2.5. And so one thing that I kind of glossed over is one of the things that is really strong about this approach is it gives you a simple and easy to interpret decision point of one where emissions impact and energy contribution should ideally be aligned, meaning that the project is consuming an equal share of both. In this case you get a number that is clearly over one, about 2.5, tells you its emissions impacts are 2.5 times what they should be and that it therefore has significant impact in driving further warming. But it also tells you information about how far off it might be from where it would need to be aligned. So this gives us the ability to compare between alternatives to consider things like emission, mitigation for projects and to work within the system of review. So one of the things you may be thinking right away is, well there's a lot of, there's a projection-based activity so there's a lot of things about the future of how the project might operate or what the exact details of the climate scenario might be that are uncertain, Michelle, what, how can you know what it will be? So to sort of not run away from that to lean into it, we did a Monte Carlo analysis where I varied everything from how long the project operates to what specific climate scenario you're looking at to what percentile of the emissions impact for the life cycle assessment this project would provide and found 10,000 simulations, only about a little bit over 1% for a gas pipeline example in the US could theoretically be considered consistent with a one and a half degree scenario. And what are those, all those scenarios have in common? It requires the pipeline only to operate for about four years. So I sort of throw that to the policy makers to decide is that reasonable? Is that something that is a worthwhile investment? So as I mentioned, this is a methodology but also a tool. So right now it's in a beautiful little spreadsheet model that I have made myself, but it allows you to jump in there, customize your inputs, provide default values and provide scenario options for the people who are working at these agencies to use directly to help them in making these decisions. Generates these results pretty much instantaneously, it's not doing any climate modeling itself, it's just using existing scenarios. So you get fast results and clear interpretation with all of the calculations provided in the document. You can see it for yourself. So I wanna just highlight quickly before my time is up that we applied this recently to a real project and submitted it to a comment docket where we found for the Willow Oil and Gas Project in Alaska and were able to make the argument very clearly that the only alternative of those proposed that would be not creating significant climate impact would be the no action alternative. Unsurprising but true and we were able to sort of robustly show that. So ultimately we're just trying to help end the curve by stopping individual new proposals and there's a lot of further work to do including some of the future stuff I wanna do in economics and local impacts. And I will stop. So thank you. I'm Max Cohn, I'm from UBC University of British Columbia. This paper is on fieldwork I've been doing in Shetland Islands which is the most northerly region of Britain. As two months of fieldwork there interviews with local community members and members of local government. And the papers title comes Geographies of Delay. Delay is a sort of, it's a term that's emerged in recent critiques of the fossil fuel industry of postponing action, climate action into the future. And so the argument I'm making this paper is that delays also sort of embedded in the everyday geographies of local places as well. And it's not just a top down strategy of fossil fuel companies. And so I'm interested in how that's working in Shetland. Shetland is also, so I'll outline my outline here. I'll situate Shetland within what I call Britain's fast political economy of oil since the 1970s. Then look at the geographies of delay and the energy transition. And of course there's some concluding thoughts. Shetland is also the windiest place in the United Kingdom. And so they're developing a lot of wind farms there at the current state. So Shetland is located about equidistant between Norway and Scotland. It's an old Viking settlement. And a local journalist calls it a sort of more of a transatlantic crossroads than a British backwater. It's been home to sort of international movements from Viking traders to anti-active merchants to fishing the vessels to oil companies and now to renewable investment. And so it's quite an interesting, important place in Britain's history. It was handed over to Scotland in the 15th century as a dowry payment by the King of Denmark at the time, Christian I. He didn't have enough money essentially to pay Scotland. And so he gave Shetland to Scotland. Shetland is roughly about 60% or 67% of the UK's claim to North Sea oil. And so if that king had enough money and Norway would have about 60% of the UK's North Sea oil. And so it's a really important part of the UK's North Sea story. And I argue actually it's caught between a sort of Norwegian history and our North history and the British one and through the oil era ended up taking a bit more of a Norwegian approach to managing oil and gas reserves than a British approach through oil field welfare and local industrial development. So just the context of that was in the 1970s, UK was the sort of sick man of Europe and really had to get that for a lot of interviewees, told me they had to get the bloody oil show, I was sorry to be too late. And in 1973 is the oil international oil crisis and Shetland becomes sort of indispensable to the oil companies and the UK because to build a pipeline from the North Sea to the UK mainland it costs between a half a million and a million pounds per mile. And so the cheaper option was to land at Shetland first and so they built an oil terminal called Sulem Voh, it's this big oil terminal here. And it's fine in the middle of certain Brent fields. I'll just go back, sorry to the side just to kind of contextualize this a bit more. But in the 1970s as well as 1974, Scotland also has a kind of oil nationalism which arises at this time. And the Scottish National Party when they first made their 11 seats in the parliament on the basis of a kind of, this is Scotland's oil campaign. And so this is the kind of political context of this terminal. It's a, basically this terminal is a trans shipment port. So the oil and gas is piped ashore from the Ninian fields and the Brent fields. Brent is a really important crude oil. There's kind of marker on international world markets. People talk about Brent oil. And then international tankers come in and take it away but there's no oil refinery on Shetland. And so Shetland has some of the highest fossil fuel costs in Britain and actually some of the highest rates of fuel poverty is a, it's a very cold and windy place. And so a lot of the housing stock is badly insulated which adds to that. But because the oil and gas is exported and imported back, it experiences a lot of energy poverty problems as well. Oil created a lot of transformations and I don't have time to sort of run through them all on the islands. Sort of spatial transformations. A lot of the towns like the capital were transformed into service bases for the oil industry. This is something I'm really interested in. Shetland has a really unique ecology. It's got a lot of wildlife like otters and birds. And a lot of local ecologists were hired by the oil industry since the 70s to monitor Shetland's wildlife and to facilitate extraction. And this was a video made by BP which sort of details a sort of symbiotic relationship between the terminal and Shetland's wildlife. It's a really fascinating video you can watch. And I'm writing a paper on the kind of ecological angle to the relationship between Shetland's understanding of ecology and how oil influenced that as well. Shetland is a massive, people call it a massive peat bog. And this is really important for thinking about the transition. Peat is only in the past 10 or so years been recognized as an important carbon sink as well as an important biodiversity source. And when the oil era arrived in the 1970s, they could basically just chuck the peat away and make way for the oil terminal. But wind farm developments now have to have a sort of peat management process or a peat reinstatement project. And there's a lot of debate over whether the carbon payback from digging up that peat is enough for when the wind farms are being developed. A lot of the wind farms are also being connected to the oil and gas infrastructure to electrify the platforms for extraction and to turn the platforms net zero. There's also one more peat example. It's trying to tie it all in, there's a gas plant. It's built in Sulunvo oil terminal that pipes gas ashore and they're doing a really total on that plant. And they have hired a PhD student to basically put all the peat in a massive box in a big container and set in their own kind of water on it and keeping it alive. And they asked the PhD student whether this is, and then they're gonna chuck the peat back into Chetland and reinstate it. And their question to the PhD student said, is this still a peat bog when you reinstate it? And he'd spent four years on it and I asked him, he said it's not a peat bog anymore. But you can go and visit this big box and it's a massive box of peat. It's a really fascinating thing that's going on. So there's the ecological transformations as well. I'll skip this. The Chetland has three traditional industries and they were all affected and lost a lot of labor to what people call the golden handcuffs of the oil industry. But they play a really important part in Chetland's economy today as well. This is the Chetland Charitable Trust which was developed in the 70s to manage the oil money. So the council negotiated a deal in the 70s which was for every barrel of oil on shore. They would take a third of a penny and today this Charitable Trust distributes the oil money throughout Chetland society and sort of arts, culture, heritage, a lot of environmental sort of initiatives as well. And it's worth half a billion pounds now. And so it's a similar sort of welfare fund which the Norwegians have which is roughly about a trillion. And so the UK's oil and gas economy has been referred to as a wasted windfall because the UK government essentially didn't save up any of the oil and gas money. The Thatcher government essentially spent it on tax cuts and welfare payments during deindustrialization and restructuring in the 70s whereas Chetland saved a sort of trust. And so they've invested and will invest a lot in the wind farm developments. And these are quotes which sort of capture that alternative trajectory of development which I quite like that second one, which is quite good. But this has to be contextualized and really taken by a pinch of salt as well because Chetland has some of the highest rates of fuel poverty in Britain and also has some of the highest fossil fuel costs in the UK as well. And so it's not a utopia. That's what I'm trying to portray in these quotes but it's an interesting sort of alternative trajectory. Okay, so I don't know how long we'll get left but I'll try and catch with some of this. There's a lot because Chetland is the windiest place in the UK, there's a lot going on with the transition, a lot of wind farm developments. And I'll just focus on one case study which is the Viking energy wind farm. These are protests which are happening over an oil field to the west of Chetland which was actually was originally a shell project and they pulled out after some norms arose in civil society and government but the project's been taken over by a small and independent firm. So the context of the transition is it's being sort of extraction still happening and a lot of the oil companies are funding a lot of the research into it. So this is a picture of me at the wind farm and the reason I've put it up is because it's a lot of the oil and gas companies used to do a lot of PR exercises and I went to visit the wind farm when I got given the suit to wear and it was the very shiny suit and I looked very different from everyone else who was at the wind farm and it was a brilliant bit and I got like a photo taken and stuff. So it's a really interesting sort of PR exercise of what's going on but this project is gonna be the biggest onshore wind farm. Yeah, one of the biggest in the UK, 445 megawatt turbines which will be equivalent to powering 45 Chetlands. So a big part of this project is they're building an interconnector between Shetland and the UK grid. So Shetland is not connected to the national grid. A lot of home and it doesn't, so it's not connected to the gas network as well which contributes to a lot of the highways fuel poverty as well. And so this interconnector will connect the excess supply of electricity, take it to Shetland and then they'll re-import electricity as well. And because there's so much electricity from it, a lot of the electricity from that as well is based on electrifying offshore oil and gas rigs. Now this project was planned in 2003 but due to 17 years of protest because it's going right through the middle of Shetland it's sort of ripping the spine as they call it, some of the protestors are calling it and they've also raised the peat issue is that it went to the highest court in the UK and eventually it was passed. That body, the Shetland Charitable Trust who are the oil fund, had a 50% stake in the wind farm but because it eventually became unprofitable for them to keep their stake and they've pulled out so it's now almost 100% owned by a company called a multinational company abroad. So it's interesting lessons to be learned there about renewable investment as well. So I'll just, I'll stop there, thanks. Okay, thank you very much. So we've got about 15 or so minutes to have an open discussion and just to kind of, some of you came in a little bit later just to give an overarch of what I was hearing. We've been looking at emerging producers who are trying to manage that tension between oil and gas and transition readiness. Callym showed us how that's being manifested deep dive with the Trinidad Tobago and Guyana cases. Max has shown us how a well-established producer is now seeking to take off those golden handcuffs. I love that phrase. And maybe along the way, re-entrenching oil development through, for example, using wind power offshore. Fergus is telling us about the need for a new norm to stop new fossil fuel projects. His presentation included my favorite phrase of the conference so far, which was the fossil fuel death spiral. I'm gonna take that one away. And Michelle is showing a tool on the ground to assess these new projects and hopefully contribute to being able to stop them as that norm develops. So what I'm gonna do is take a batch of like three or four questions and hopefully there'll be enough for everybody to dig into here and we'll see how time goes from then. So I am going to start right from the back so the person right there, you please. And then you next. And then we'll, let's do these three here. Okay? Okay. Okay, hi. Hi, I'm Chloe Ferrand. I'm a journalist. I write for Climate Home News. I've got a question for Valerie but I think Fergus maybe might want to join in as well. It was really interesting that you said that 80% of the countries that you were talking to were saying that they were, there was no alternative to this oil pathway or oil and gas pathway that they were considering. I mean, what kind of process should be put into place internationally to develop alternatives? Who should be doing it? How might it be set up? Like what is the way that means that these countries and government officials could be on board? And I guess kind of that maybe links into this norm. I don't know if Fergus, you might just want to explain a bit how that links in and just kind of clarify the legal status of it as well. I don't think I've got that point. Thank you. Okay, great. And then into the center here. And then we have a cluster of three in the front so it'll be nice and easy. Okay. I actually had a few questions. I hope it's all right to mention them. So on the Guyana project, I know that there was a department for Amerindian affairs in Guyana and I wondered if like how that's been integrated into the sort of assessment process. On the shutlands, I wondered if it was, there was ever a consideration of doing like a collective ownership of the wind farm, like modeling on the welfare sort of model for oil and gas. On the sort of assessment tool for new oil and gas infrastructure, I wondered if everyone understood correctly, it's for new projects. So is it not, maybe maybe you already kind of covered this, but is it not possible to say no new projects in your sort of context that you're working in? And yeah, how, if it's like secondly or separately, how does it integrate sort of like whose emissions should be part of that 1.5, like come budget sort of thing? So sorry, thanks for indulging. I know it's great. I don't think there's a quota yet, a question quota. All right, I'm there and there's three folks here in the very front stack. Thank you so much for your help. All right, Kathy. This is fun, this is fun. We could juggle it later. Thank you for the presentations. This is all like so interesting. This is what I'm gonna limit myself to one for Michelle. And I can say fun, and I think this is fantastic. And I love the way you've set it out. It seems very likely that no project is ever gonna clear that, which gets me wondering whether the fact that sort of the reality of the world we're still living in and where we wanna be are so far apart will actually just invite judges to say, well, that can't be. Or will they somehow just reject it out of hand because they live in that current world? Mm-hmm. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I'm a PhD student from the University of Southampton and Economics. And so thank you all for your presentation. I actually have a question for Dr. Bo Green, Green from the UCL. And I'm curious about the economic challenges for developing countries for them to phase out from the new fossil fuel projects or just stop new fossil fuel projects. And because I have noticed that you have mentioned much about political challenges, but I wanna know more about the biggest economic challenges they have and maybe your advice for them to stop the new fossil fuels projects. Thank you. Hi, my name is Adrienne. I'm with RMI and I just wanted to thank you for your presentations. My question is to Michelle. In your equation, I noticed the numerator is the lifetime of the project. I was curious how you determine the time scale for the denominator of your equation and how you account for projects that retire within that time scale or their emissions number or energy they produce change within that time scale. Okay, so who would like to take the first crack? And I should say we only have about 10 minutes left. So let's be satisfying yet brief. I'd like to go first. Do you wanna go? Okay, please go, hold on. Thank you, just to remind you, the question was around the alternative pathway. So plan B, I think it's a really good question because what is needed and who should do it? Maybe it's hard to find the match between that, those two. But I think what is needed is like a country-specific industrial pathway, like a green industrial pathway. So or a country-specific decarbonization plan. And those are far and few between because they're sort of off the shelf, ill-adapted to the national realities, politically, economically and whatnot. And I think the other issue is that the countries that I was talking about don't attract that kind of interest from donors or MDBs or the development agencies because they're not yet Nigeria's and of the world. So there's little interest in doing that for them. But I think also in the what, it would need to be done as an open process to actually capture the interest and the political interest in the country. So not just to have the answers ready, that the outcome has to be, you will leave it under the ground. But to have a more nuanced discussion about what actually fits for your country and can minimize damage for the climate globally. Yep. Should I follow on from? Please. So yeah, to Chloe's question. So just to follow on from that, but maybe taking it from starting with the norms question. So if you think about norm is really just a standard of behavior. And ideally a relatively clear standard of behavior. There are other international norms against nuclear testing, against piracy, against landmines. And there's often a kind of close overlap between these sort of moral norms as they're promoted usually initially by sometimes international organizations, but usually by NGOs. And eventually states take them on and states, and that's sort of crucial to them becoming legal norms is that states endorse them and then states adopt them and implement them. And then the other states feel pressure to adopt them and implement them because it's becoming normal. So to answer sort of the last part of your question about so far this is kind of just an emerging norm. It's being promoted by NGOs and others, but sort of not as clearly as I think it could be. So I think there could be a kind of laser-like focus on that norm and then getting countries to kind of endorse it and adopt it would be sort of crucial to its sort of development as a certainly as a legal international legal norm. And then that connects to the, how that connects to the sort of first part of your question about the plan B that Valerie spoke to for these countries is that for a lot of countries to endorse that norm, it would have to be part of a wider package of negotiations about, okay, well how are you going to actually support us so that we can develop and we can meet our legitimate needs for energy services and so on. And that gets to sort of the equity question. And so in practice, for a number of states to endorse and implement that norm, there would have to be a sort of wider set of negotiations. And I think that's where those two questions line up. Yeah, those two issues kind of meet one another at that point. Go ahead, Glen. Yeah, so I'm going to get to the Amerindian question, but just I wanted to add to that point that Valerie made on the sort of Taylor development pathways, decarbonization pathways Taylor to some of these countries. And that's exactly what I looked at and worked on in the Guyana small producer context. So between 2015 and 2020, there was a different political regime in that country. And there was still sort of the new oil fines at that time. And I actually was commissioned to do the country's national climate change policy at that time. The UN folks were in there also advocating for a green economy strategy around this. Then all of that was done, the national climate policy was done, a green economy strategy was done, and then the government changed. And those things were shelved and the new government brought in its own Taylor development plan, which was called a low carbon development plan. So sort of it, but it took elements of the previous government's plans. It's just the new government wanted to stamp its own sort of reputation on a new plan. I think so, so these are things that happen. Now, the bigger issue for me here is that regardless of which political administration came into power, and even if that flips again, all of them are basically on the round the same route. We are going to fast pace the oil and gas sector and user dividends to charter low carbon of green economy. There's no political philosophy held by any party in that country that says otherwise than that. So that's sort of an interesting play there. With regards to the Amerindian affairs question, yes. So all of the oil and gas activities currently offshore and there is the plan in there to onshore natural gas and there's also a plan. So in this, the geography of this country is that the most of the urban settlement, 80% of the population is near the coast within 20 miles of the coast. So, and this is below sea level. So with rising sea levels, the idea is to move a lot of these folks inland. Now that's going to affect, depending on where they go, this is going to affect the Amerindian communities that live further inland. So that is a question. There's also sort of a flip side to this where prior to oil and gas, the main economic active drivers in this country have been gold mining in the interior affecting Amerindian communities and bauxite mining again. So very deleterious to the forest environment but also sort of having significant sort of health issues, mercury and so on for the Amerindian communities. So conceivably, and this is conceivably, if the economy shifts to gaining some dividends from the oil and gas offshore and transitioning to cleaner economic activities, whatever that might be, services, what have you as we move forward and they move away from those natural resource extractive industries in the interior where the Amerindian communities are, conceivably that could be a plus, right? But all of this is sort of theoretical at this point and it's left to be seen. So we literally have one minute, Max. And Michelle, would you like to share that one minute between you? I'll do it in 10 seconds. Go ahead. I think we have 30 seconds each, but. Scott, I have a collective owner's question. As for the question I was asking as well. So there is one community on one farm in Shetland and they've got a really successful project. It's quite small, it's five turbines and they sell it to the Shetland grid and then reinvest the money in their local community and that's quite successful. But the big triking one was the way that what they wanted to get community benefit was the government had, the local government had the 50% stake. But because of the protests of 17 years kind of delay and eventually it became, there's the way that the UK government subsidizes contracts through something called contracts for difference and it's basically a subsidy for people to enter into a new project. These contracts tend to favor people with deeper pockets and companies with bigger companies. And so the council said that after the protests it became unaffordable for them to have their stakes they pulled out and now it's 99% owned by a multinational. There's a lot of blamegaming in Shetland a lot of people in the council blame the protesters for delaying the project. But I think which is true but there's also the UK government kind of prospect kind of context which is not actively facilitating community ownership which I think we could do a better job of. Yeah, okay so I'm gonna try and combine some questions I heard but basically on this idea of can't we just say no fossil fuels? I would love that to be possible just on the basis like I said we all saw the IEA report but in the US the specific legal context is such that it's sort of been tried by the Biden administration to ban or to stop pause offshore leasing and courts did not uphold that ability. So in the absence of further legislation this is sort of the situation we're at and what we hope to do with the tool is to be able to answer the question that the agencies do have to answer and to confront them with this information and force them to defend how they can still make that conclusion to approve a project if it's three or four times taking us off the goals that the same administration has committed to elsewhere. Happy to follow up on the more specific question Adrienne afterwards. All right, thank you. It was been such a pleasure learning from you and there's a coffee break now until quarter past so continue the conversation, okay? Thank you both. Thank you.