 Welcome to the last breakout session of this fossil fuel conference. Thank you for being here. Let me kindly introduce our panel of this afternoon. It's about politics and fossil fuel supply, the politics of fossil fuel supply. We had many sessions about economics and now we learn something that politics indeed is also very important. We'll hear about the combination of modeling and geopolitics. I'm looking forward to this talk. We have some insights on how misinformation is sometimes playing into this combination of politics and fossil fuels. We hear about how trade unions and other political players have a role to play in fossil fuels and energy transitions. Then we move to, so to speak, case studies where our eminent experts here will illustrate some examples of voting behavior, for instance, in Norway or opposition to fossil fuels from the UK, for instance. We have a panel of five distinguished scholars and experts. Without further ado, I would like to invite our first panelist to the podium here. It's Dr. James Price. He's a senior research associate at UCL. With a passion for energy modeling and geopolitics and a PhD in physics from Bristol University. James, the floor is yours. Please. Thank you very much, Stefan. Today I'm going to be talking about bridging the credibility gap between energy scenarios and energy geopolitics. This is work that I've been doing with Matthew Blondiel from Warwick University. He's the geopolitical expert. I am the energy scenarios modeler. So if I say anything completely terrible, please forgive me. So a bit of an introduction first. As you'll all be aware that the future of the global energy system is highly uncertain, and one way we can deal with that is by developing scenarios of the transition, which are designed to explore potential futures using a consistent set of internal assumptions about key driving forces. And then people like me can take those qualitative scenarios and explore them and map them out using energy system modeling, which is a quantitative approach that typically produces smooth, least cost pictures of the evolution of a given scenario. And you can see that represented here by that chart. So we have a smooth rise in the deployment of renewables and a smooth decline in fossil fuels. And then these scenarios, both the narratives and the quantitative pictures that they paint are used by a range of stakeholders, fossil fuel companies, policymakers, etc., to understand how the future could evolve and also to make planning decisions going forward. But in recent years there's been growing critique about the global scenarios that are out there and the models as being overly technocratic and driven by heroic cost minimizing decisions that ignore the complexities of human behavior, of society, and of ecological systems as well. And coal is a great example of this. So if you look at the special report from the IPCC on 1.5 degrees there, scenarios would see a 75% average reduction in worldwide coal consumption between 2020 and 2030. So that's a pretty massive drop over 10 years. And yet from COP26, the Glasgow Pact, was the first UNFCCC agreement to mention coal. And here we had to settle for a phase down rather than a phase out. So there's quite a gap there between the proposed futures coming from some of those models and the reality that we might expect to see. And this is where energy geopolitics can enter in. It's a study of the real world of the energy system today and how it might unfold. And it can be key to understanding some of these gaps between the energy scenarios and the realities that they're trying to portray. And energy geopolitics contends that real world energy system transitions are complex and messy, i.e. not smooth, with winners and losers. And if not managed could lead to economic, political and social unrest. And so therefore it's a key aspect of the transition. And we can see that just by these two articles that I pulled out here, which recent geopolitical events, so COVID and the war in Ukraine, they've led to a rise in two potential narratives going forward. I mean, there are many more, of course, but these are getting traction at the moment. So our new Prime Minister in the UK, Liz Truss, wants to extract more oil and gas from the North Sea. Whereas other commentators suggest that it's better to go for energy insulation and low carbon tech as a way of responding to the crisis that we see at the moment. And both of these are framed under the context of energy security, but they're quite radically different responses. So what we wanted to do here is conduct a review with the objective of trying to help stakeholders. And by stakeholders, I mean people like me that work with these scenarios that develop them, that model them, but also people that engage with the scenarios as well. To get to grips with what's the current relationship between global energy scenarios and modelling and the real world of energy geopolitics. And this is in terms of design and implementation and of the analysis of the outputs as well. So what we did is we got together a set of publicly available scenarios, which are the state of the art from BP, Shell, Equinor, the IAEA and the IPCC. And then we developed a quantitative review framework based on Matu's paper from last year, which breaks the transition down into a high carbon transition and a low carbon transition. And you can see some of the topics that this framework covers. There are subtopics in that, but you can see on the left-hand side the high carbon topics and on the right-hand side the low carbon topics. So that's how we approached this. We took these scenario documents and we used this framework to break them down. And so now I'm just going to run through two quick sets of findings, firstly from the BP energy outlook from this year. And the first headline thing to note here is that the report doesn't actually mention geopolitics at all or any related term. They do, however, include a so-called delayed and disorderly scenario, which has a decade delay in mitigation, but no clear rationale from a geopolitical perspective what might actually cause that. And so what we found is that essentially there's a focus on the high carbon supply side of the transition, and perhaps that's not too surprising given the fact that this is BP. It's a fossil fuel company. They want to focus on their commercial interests, but it's quite interesting about the lens that they're viewing these scenarios through. Just breaking this down into the high carbon side, you can see that there's a few points there. So BP reflects on how some exporters and producers may lose rents. There'll be a battle for market share between OPEC and non-OPEC states and with OPEC dominating by 2050 because it has cheaper resources and lower carbon intensity resources as well. And they expect the U.S. to become much less of a player in global LNG trade simply by the physical distance between the U.S. and the declining markets in Asia. So there's some coverage there from a high carbon perspective. From a low carbon perspective, it's pretty much absent. There's passing mentions of wind and solar capacity depending on such things as key materials, planning, social acceptance, etc. But really it's not clear how this actually factors in to the modelling and the scenario design. And then we have Shell. And Shell, of the three oil and gas companies that we look at, they take a more engagement with geopolitics. They have an explicitly geopolitical scenario which is called islands. And that sees a new geopolitical order developing which is a focus on national security and trade barriers. And that takes shape and as a result the world fails to achieve the Paris Agreement. Interestingly we found that there's a lot less engagement from a geopolitical perspective in Sky 1.5 which is their 1.5 degree scenario. And this we infer seems to say that geopolitics is being seen as being framed as a negative for the transition. It's an impediment to successful energy transition under climate objectives. From a high carbon perspective Shell clearly think that oil and natural gas are going to continue to shape geopolitics for decades to come which again gives a lens into how they think about these types of scenarios. Interestingly there's no mention of stranded assets in Sky 1.5 but it's covered in waves which also fails to achieve Paris as well. There's some mention of capital markets and how they become risk averse to fossil fuels going forward. So there's again some high carbon focus there but the low carbon transition it's fairly absent. Thank you. So from a Sky 1.5 perspective that's quite surprising because Shell rely on nature based solutions basically planting forests which covers an area of around 700 mega hectares which is a huge land area roughly equivalent to Brazil I think. And so to not consider the wider impacts of that seems quite strident shall we say. And then we've got China and the US being expected to work together to address pressing global issues which perhaps doesn't engage with geopolitical realities at the moment. So this is my final slide just some key takeaways from this. So we've seen that geopolitics is generally under discussed across these scenarios and where it is discussed it's focused on the supply side of fossil fuels and it's unclear if and how that actually shapes the scenarios that we're seeing. The second point I'd like to make is that geopolitics is mainly framed as a reason why a scenario doesn't achieve the Paris Agreement. So it's seen as a negative and impediment as I've said and it's ignoring some of the potential benefits which essentially you could imagine if we reorder away from the power concentrations around fossil fuels to a more diffuse concentrations around renewable energy that can be quite useful from a geopolitical perspective. And related to this what we found is that 1.5 degrees scenarios are worlds of cooperation and coordination and perhaps that's quite an idealistic view of the world and if that's the only way that we can envisage achieving a 1.5 degree world then that's slightly worrying I would argue. And then finally what we've seen is there's a lack of engagement with low carbon transition issues and the topics that do get some attention are critical materials and negative emissions which is perhaps again not too surprising given that there are three fossil fuel companies in our review. Thank you. Thank you very much James also for keeping almost on time but we employ tolerance here and next I would like to invite Miss Laura Peterson a corporate analyst and advocate for the Union of Concerned Scientists with a background in investigative journalism and a professional experience in the U.S. Senate where she sat on the oversight committee and she will talk about climate risk disclosure and disinformation in the U.S. Laura the floor is yours. All right so as you said I'm with the Union of Concerned Scientists and I'm with the Climate Accountability Campaign which focuses on holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their contributions to climate change. Now this has changed a little bit since I initially you know wrote my proposal six months ago that was somewhat overtaken by events which is how it is in public policy. So we are going to be looking but we are I do still want to start with climate risk disclosure which a lot of you may be familiar with. This is basically the concept of publicly listed companies having to disclose the risk that climate change poses to their bottom line to disclose to investors I should say and the chief financial regulator in the U.S. is the Securities and Exchange Commission and just to do a very quick overview the U.S. has been making halting steps toward implementing a climate risk disclosure rule over the last decade. The SEC put out a guidance on climate change risk disclosure sorry in 2010. There was a shareholder vote in 2017 that forced ExxonMobil to start producing something like a climate risk disclosure report. There was a bill introduced by Democrats in Congress in 2021 which did pass the House but it wasn't until the Biden administration came in in May 2021 that things really started rolling. He put out an executive order that basically got a lot of federal agencies looking at climate risk disclosure and then the SEC put out a draft rule in March of this year. So a draft rule means that you put it out there's 60 to 90 days for the public to comment. Then they take these comments think about it and come out with the final rule. So at this point the cutoff for comments was July late June early July. They haven't come out with the final rule yet. But this is a very long very lengthy very substantive rule. It would do many things but most importantly it would affirm materiality of climate risk to investors. Materiality is this legal term that basically means it would help investors make decisions with mandate emissions disclosures including scope three. Oh look I can use this I don't have to point. And it would bring the U.S. in line with existing international frameworks. So they got a lot of comments they got about 15,000 comments 10,000 of those were form letter comments. So you guys know what form letters are and so the SEC counts that as only one comment but 90% of those were in support of the rule. An analysis by the accounting firm KPMG found that of the 4,000 individual comments they were broadly supportive. The opposition from fossil fuel industry and trade associations was basically on the lines of this does not fit. This is outside the SEC's mandate. The mandate was given in 1934 by Congress and that it's too difficult to basically to measure scope three and that companies shouldn't be held accountable for that. That's a very very basic way. So I'm raising their comments so we can talk more about that later. But investors have shown that they are very very supportive through you know letters that they've written and their comments. All right so on to the opposition. So the first thing that happens well what many things start happening. This is attorney West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrissey. He is involved in something called Raga Republican Attorney General's Association. He leads 23 other Republican attorneys general filing a comment opposing the rule. I'm saying basically the same complaints as the comments that the trade associations and fossil fuel industry had written in a more full-throated way basically saying that this is administrative state overreach government overreach etc. That it's just completely illegal to try to regulate something that is unregulatable and that Congress has not empowered the SEC to regulate. And then I don't know how many of you have been outside the US have been tracking this we can talk more about this later but the Supreme Court. Made a decision that basically said that EPA couldn't regulate couldn't enforce the Clean Air Act which prompted another letter along the same lines. And things start to get very strange and. Around about six months ago this American legislative exchange council known as Alec, which some of you may have heard of this is a nonprofit organization funded by fairly far right wing funders such as the Koch brothers. And they draft model legislation which they then distribute through at the state and local level. So they first come out with something called the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act. Which basically it's and it's pretty direct it says any business like any company such as like an asset manager or bank etc. That discriminates against fossil fuels should not be given state money basically. And then in May the SEC comes out with another couple of rules that's trying that are trying to basically rain in which I'm sure a lot of you who work on ESG knows this sort of a Wild West of ESG funds you know there's a lot of not a lot of regulation. People can kind of call anything ESG so they have some frankly pretty loose regulations there that also prompts a strong pushback. And then there's another bill approved the state government employees retirement Protection Act which basically says that. pension funds should not be going government contracts should not be going into funds like BlackRock etc that are that are woke that support these you know liberal. You know progressive ideas such as divesting from fossil fuels. And this is our former president Mike Pence talking about woke the woke wolf of Wall Street. All right so here's a this is our you know the definition of disinformation from our website. Just just to distinguish between opposition and disinformation so they can they can you know obviously sort of affect one another but we're seeing some fairly blatant disinformation. In some of the discussion of the rule and ESG. I also want to make the point that the this ESG regulation and the. Okay my timer is still going. This is the ESG rule and the climate risk disclosure rule are really being lumped together by opponents so so it's all getting thrown together in in far right communications vehicles as well capitalism. So even though they're very different issues they are sort of being put in the same basket of progressive social ideas that are now being becoming entrenched in government. So now here's just a couple of examples of disinformation that we saw about the rule. The American Farm Bureau very conservative organization falsely claims the rule would force farms and ranchers to disclose personal information in business data. And this has been repeated by not even particularly conservative lawmakers actually in their you know on the floor and that kind of thing but but lawmakers from rural areas start repeating this a lot. And social scores this is an idea of. This also comes up a lot in far right messaging about how China has a federal social credit score which can be used to punish citizens and companies that. Are not living up to thank you to their duties and so who's pushing this disinformation these are all very these might be very. Familiar actors to some of you these are all groups that have deep ties to far right funders a lot of them have had ties to the fossil fuel industry in the past although. After a lot of pressure a lot of fossil fuel companies have withdrawn their support and Heartland Institute in particular has been very active in pushing some of this. Disinformation which I can give you an example of later so the takeaways are basically you know the far right is including risk disclosure and ESG investing. This culture war idea of. And I think that that is really encapsulated well I know you can't read this down here but this is this guy's Jerry Taylor he used to work for the Cato Institute which is a libertarian think tank. In Washington and he was sort of their frontline guy in the 90s that was taking taking on climate change you know doing a lot of climate denial work. And he's sort of he's a little bit of an apologist now and this is from a documentary that he was in recently that the black gold documentaries and some of you may have seen where he says. We realize we didn't need to change minds we didn't need to reach out and when people over who are ambivalent. What you need to do is appeal to the Republican right and mobilize them for war. And it's part of a longer quote where he talks about putting these issues in the same basket as guns and abortion and other cultural issues that kind of allows them to to weaponize. You know, to weaponize the sort of emotional reaction that a lot of Republican voters have to these issues. It's a dangerous strategy because it negates science in facts and removes the need for understanding like he's saying you don't actually have to educate anybody you just have to sort of, you know, create this emotional reaction. And I try to leave a positive note because I hate it when people just give you a litany of woe, and with no idea about how to make it better. I will say that there has been some I think very effective op-eds just in the last few weeks. A recent examples went from Michael Bloomberg in the Wall Street Journal who said something along the lines of these guys need to be a crash course in capitalism. So reminding having fiscally conservative voices reminding people that this is actually a very anti free market idea. And that's kind of what conservatism started as like that might help it might not, but one can hope. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you very much Laura. Always nice to hear how creative American lawmakers are with giving names to bills. The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act. On this note, I'd like to invite our third speaker, Christian Downey, an associate professor at Australian National University, who advised several Australian governments and agencies and also is also a prolific writer of academic papers on energy issues. Christian, the floor is yours please. Good afternoon everyone and thanks for coming along to this final session. It was nice to end on a positive note, but I'm just going to compound you now with more negativity about the United States. So in recent years, I've been thinking a lot about, I guess, the role of business and how you overcome the entrenched incumbent interest that we've just been talking about. So it's in that context that I want to talk about a paper that I'm working on with a colleague, Professor Bob Brawl at Brown. And we've been thinking a lot about trade associations. So as we've just seen, it's been a really good example. There's increasing empirical evidence about how business actors in the US have been thwarting efforts to implement climate policies. We know a lot about what's going on in the US now. We know a lot about what's going on in Western Europe as well. But there hasn't been as much about the role of trade associations, which bodies that represent firms and do a lot of the dirty work for them. The second kind of gap in the literature is that in political science, especially most studies of business activity, the unit of analysis is the firm, and it's operationalized typically by looking at lobbying or political contributions. But we know that that's the kind of only part of the issue. There's a whole range of other things they do. So what we try and do in this paper is do a bit of an exploratory analysis of who are the trade associations, what's their funding, where are they spending it, basically to try and follow the money. And I'll say a bit more about in a moment, but basically we look at the years 2008 to 2018. So that decade period, trade associations that we look at spent $3.4 billion trying to shape the political environment around climate change. Okay, so a few things that I want to do. One is talk about who they are, how much money do they have? The second is to look at where they're spending that money. And then third, to try and explain why, because we see big variations in the types of things they're doing. And that's just some of the logos of the big ones. Actually, the American Coal Council just changed its name to America's Power, but you will be familiar with many of them. Before I do, let me say a little bit about our methods and data. So we've got a sample of 87 trade associations across nine sectors of the U.S. economy. They were derived basically by just looking at some of the existing qualitative studies that are out there and also looking at who appeared before Congress. And then what we did is we basically went through their tax data. So they've got, the U.S. is quite good on this. There's much better disclosure practices than in my own country, Australia. So you can look up their 9.90 forms and look at how much money they've got and where they're spending that money. And they disclose a bit of it. One of the nice things is that that allows you to disaggregate the data by type of political activity. And then the second thing we did is interviews with which we've been targeting vice presidents of government affairs or government relations because they're the ones that typical make the decisions about strategies. And actually I just spent the last week in DC doing some more interviews for this paper. We've been talking to folks like the Farm Bureau who interestingly spend a lot of time cooperating with API as well. So yeah, it really interesting to hear that. So that's a bit about how we've gone about it. Okay, so who are they? Well, this is us looking at their revenue. Basically every sector in the US economy has one big trade association and then a series of smaller ones that look after different parts of the industry. So that if you look at that purple box, that's the gas and oil sector. So each box is a sector. So in the gas and oil sector, the main trade association is the American Petroleum Institute. And then some of the smaller ones there, like the American fuel and petrochemicals, that represents refiners, western states petroleum. That's just all the oil companies working out in Oregon, California, they're represented. This is by total revenue. So you can see there that the purple box that oil and gas has by far the largest revenue. That box there is just $4.6 billion. Pete trade associations, Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, they also have revenues in excess of $4 billion for the decade that we're looking at. And then you come down to this little box here, that's the renewable energy sector just down there. So you can see some of the differences. In fact, if you think about the climate change politics and all the industries that typically oppose climate change, oil, gas, coal, rail, steel, and you add them up, you're looking at $14.3 billion revenues for industries against climate change versus $580 million for. And that's not including Pete trade associations. And we know from qualitative studies that they typically come out opposed to climate action. We saw that a lot during Obama's attempts to implement a series of legislation regulation. And that also wasn't including agriculture there. And we've just seen how the Farm Bureau is involved in this too. Okay, so that's their revenues. What about where are they spending their money? So as I mentioned over that 10 year period across all sectors, $3.4 billion was spent. It's about 13% of their revenue is spent on political activities. By far the largest, as you can see in the middle is oil and gas. They're the ones spending the most, followed by the peak trade associations, as I mentioned, like the Chamber of Commerce and others. Again, if we compare spending by industries typically opposed to climate change versus four, $2 billion being channeled with activities to essentially obstruct climate action versus $74 million for. So $2 billion versus $74 million gives you an idea of why we're sometimes losing the battle. We also know from political science, right, that firms spend more on political activities than trade associations. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly, you can see what they're spending their money on. Oil and gas are spending more on advertising and promotion. And that's the largest. So actually this graph makes it a little bit clearer. So you can see the vast majority of the money is being spent on essentially on PR. So total spending on advertising and promotion is $2.2 billion. Lobbying, you can see there as well, $729 million. Interestingly, because this is that political contributions are only a really small amount for trade associations. And this kind of highlights as well, I think it challenges some of the conventional assumptions in a lot of political science that lobbying and political contributions are the main political activities. Because actually when you follow the money, at least for trade associations, what you're seeing is that grants and advertising and promotions, two things that we often overlook in the literature, are bigger than lobbying and political contributions by a factor of about three to one. And I can say a little bit more about why this is the case and also about the types of campaigns. So the types of campaigns that we've just heard about, that's where some of these funding is going. A lot of that PR money is going to firms that set up PR campaigns, astroturf groups, et cetera. And that's what we're digging into with some of the interviews. So the final thing that I wanted to understand a little bit about was, so why are they spending so much on PR and less on lobbying and so forth? And that's what we're still digging into. There was four kind of possible determinants from the literature or four hypotheses that we tested. You know, one is it because trade associations are a little bit different? Is it to do with their role and functions? A second explanation we looked at is, well, to what extent is it by nature of issue? Do they spend differently on different issues? Or is it the characteristics of industry or the effectiveness of different strategies? So we've done about 20, I think about 25 interviews so far. And when you go through the interview data, the key kind of empirical relationship that stands out is that it's to do with the role and functions of trade associations. That's one of the main explanations for why we see so much spending on advertising and promotion. And that's because, as you can see in this quote, basically members, so that's the firms, that's your ExxonMobil, your ConocoPhillips and whoever else is members of the API, for example, they see trade associations playing a role as managing their reputation. So they do that in two ways. One, they run positive campaigns. For those of you yesterday that went along to some of the panels that we're talking about, some of the PR campaigns, they've run positive campaigns about, you know, how these companies are going to be the solution to climate change. But they also run negative campaigns attacking either other industries or NGOs or pieces of legislation. The reason they run some of the dirtier campaigns is because firms don't want to be tarnished by coming out against climate change necessarily. And so they'd rather pay a third party like their trade association to do it for them. If it's a particularly kind of pernicious campaign, sometimes it'll be a third or fourth party. So by being less directly involved in some of these political activities, that protects reputation, particularly for branded companies. The other thing that came out in the interviews is that a lot of the, so VPs for government affairs that I spoke to, they often thought that lobbying and advertising and promotion were more effective. Now, trying to test that quantitatively is a little bit tricky, but often they saw political contributions, as you can see here, political contributions quite small, they saw as less effective, which I think is important because a lot of the literature tries to look at the impact of political contributions, say on roll call votes in the US Congress. And in fact, not a lot of money's going to that. So I've got the nice wrap up things. I'm going to wrap up just by saying that two quick takeaways. One, trade associations are a big part of the problem. You know, $3.4 billion arguably spent trying to obstruct climate action. And two, whether you're thinking about the climate domain or other domains like social policy and so forth, I think we often overlook the role that trade associations play. And there's a huge, you know, there's a huge gap in the literature and it merits a lot more scholarly attention. Thanks everyone. Thank you very much, Christian. Always interesting to see numbers and figures to these kind of behind the scenes maneuvering. Next on presentation schedule is Guru Bang, associate professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and former director of the Norwegian Research Centre, Cicero, and an international expert on international governance. Please, Guru, you have the floor. Actually, not the director, but the research director is the lower level. But, you know, anyway, thanks for that kind introduction and I'm glad to be here. I'm talking today about this paper that I'm in the process of writing together with Fergus Green, college colleague from the University College of London on oil politics and comparing the causes and effects of anti-fossil fuel mobilizations in Norway and the UK. So the backdrop for this paper was that we had observed over sort of this similar tendency in both Norway and the UK, starting after the Paris Agreement in 2015, but also increasingly visible around the time of 2020 and 2021, with more politicization of oil and gas supply, especially the issuance of new licenses for oil and gas exploration in these two countries. And so the issue was transformed from a state of quiet politics or not so visible politics into a hotly contested political issue in this period. And in Norway, especially, we saw this increasing focus on the paradox of aiming to be a climate leader, but at the same time a major oil and gas producer. So this paradox was very much in focus at this time. So this is the backdrop for the study. And in the literature, we see what is politicization and the literature on agenda setting and issue attention points to three factors, which we are sort of looking into in this paper, where salience, increased salience, means that the issue receives more attention from policymakers and the public and polarization, referring to these ideological and policy positional distances between actors involved in policymaking. And also an expansion of the actors and audiences that are involved in the debate. So this is the sort of the background for the study. And first we did sort of descriptive research to map the type of politicization that has been happening in Norway and the UK around the time that we were looking at. So we were doing media analysis and timelines for both the Norway and the UK. I'm just referring to the Norway case here. As you can see, there was a big attention top around 2021. So there was attention in the media, newspapers, etc. More op-eds on the topic of issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses, press releases, also a lot of policy processes that were referred to in the media and protests and direct action that were sort of spoken about and given media attention. We see this top in attention in 2021. And also if you see by quarter to the left there for every quarter of the year, you see a specific attention around the fall of 2021, when there was a parliamentary election in Norway last year. So this is the Norway case and also we did the same for the UK, as I said, for a media analysis. So this was establishing the fact that there is politicization going on in these two countries at that time. And so the next step is to identify the causes and the consequences of this politicization. So we had two research questions that we are looking into. First, what factors may explain the politicization of fossil fuel supply in each country? And second, what were the consequences of this politicization? And our research design and methodology, we're doing single case studies of Norway and the UK. And this is the stage where we are at right now doing these case studies. We have finished the timelines and the desktop research. We are preparing for quantitative text analysis using the findings that we had from the databases that we looked into on media and then media attention. And then we are preparing also for doing semi-structured interviews with around 15 experts in each country. And we have done some of these interviews, but we are preparing to do more of them. And then they are covering NGOs, labor unions, business representatives, government officials, and political party representatives. Trying to target the same type of interviewees in each of the countries. And then we're going to do a cross-country comparative analysis as well. So now, what can explain or what are the causes of this observed politicization that we have seen? So we have focused on events that were used in a way as agenda-setting tools. And also these broadening coalitions that had introduced shifting ideas about supply-side climate policy and just transition. And specifically this minority subset of this pro-climate alliance or coalition that have introduced fossil fuel supply ideas into the coalitions. So interest group mobilization and combination of these events, where they used events to introduce new understandings of the problem, to include fossil fuel supply elements and also proposing new solutions. For instance, like including stopping new oil and gas licensing and a managed face-out of oil and gas. Including policies for just transition of affected workers and regions. And also the tactics. So targeting particular oil and gas projects and licensing rounds through direct action and media and litigation. So for the Norway case, that would mean that we saw several events that led up to this politicization process. With new oil and gas licensing process that were very controversial. Specifically the whisting field which is very far north up into the Arctic Ocean at the Barren Sea. And also this combined with the COVID tax relief package in 2020 that sort of made the whisting field development possible. That made it economically viable. And a couple of reports that brought new knowledge into the process. The IAA net zero report, IPCC report last year. And also this combined with the parliamentary election campaigns that were going on over the summer and the fall. And interest groups mobilized through using the climate lawsuit that was ongoing around the same time. So they used those campaigns or that campaign in combination with responses to the reports from IAA and IPCC. And mobilized to stop the whisting field. And this is still ongoing because the whisting field decision is going to be made later this fall. And interest groups mobilized in collaboration with some political parties. Green parties that mobilized to stop new oil exploration in the election campaign. So four minor political parties in Norway are behind the idea of not issuing more new licenses. But they were not able to form a firm coalition during the election campaign. So only the Green Party put down an ultimatum on this topic. The other ones were sort of willing to negotiate. Whereas majority parties around 60 to 70 percent of their parliamentary majority, these four major parties, they mobilized in sort of opposition to this green mobilization and to continue new oil exploration. So there are also some elements on the UK case. I won't have time to go into all of that. And also it's Fergus that has done the research there. So you can ask him in the break. But the cambo field was definitely one element that drove the politicization in the UK in combination with the upcoming Glasgow COP and the role of the UK as the host country. So moving on to the consequences of politicization in the Northern UK. Here we have sort of, we're going to lean on the interviews to do this assessment of consequences. And just going very quickly through this, we're looking at how coalitions, if and how coalitions have changed, whether political party positions have changed, whether we can see actual supply side policy outcomes. You can see some of the results here. I won't have time to discuss them, but one interesting element is this emerging rift in the labour movement in Norway, where we see attention in the labour party between the labour party itself and its youth organization and also within the labour organization like the labour union association in Norway. So we will have to go come back to this under questions and answers. But what I can say is to the same, the last point here, supply side policy outcomes. We say no for each, both of the countries. And one of the main explanations here is the shifting context that we're seeing since the fall of 2021, which is the Russia's war on Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis in Europe. Very much changed circumstances where oil and gas is now in demand, especially gas and Norway has become the reliable partner for Europe in delivering gas in step with Russia's close down of North Stream 2 and gas supply. So this is all done under this great project under JPI climate, socially just and politically robust decarbonization with great partners in several countries in Europe. And we have a nice cartoon also to show you. And thank you for the attention. Thank you very much. Without further ado, I come to the last presentation of our panelists. That is Mr. Florian Egli from ETH Zurich, an energy finance and energy renewable finance expert, and right of an award-winning thesis. So please, the floor is yours. You have minus one minute. And also I have a very difficult spot. So it's the last talk. We're going to talk about Norway after you've talked about Norway. I have no clue about Norway. I'm not Norwegian, but they're Norwegian co-authors on this. So don't ask me too many particular questions about the case. The question that we're trying to answer here is I think one that has popped up in many, many discussions that I've been having. I'm constantly so it's basically politicians wanting to do something about this transition, asking themselves, if I do it, what's the price? So we're living in democracies and politicians want to be reelected. And a lot of them ask themselves, can I actually afford to take ambitious measures to phase out fossil fuels, for example, or what are the price that I'm going to pay two, three years down the road in the next election? So that's kind of the motivating bit here. And that's 60s. That's okay. So why phase out? I don't need to talk about this, but I just always like this graph. I think it's fantastic. You see how different energy carriers basically build up the CO2 concentration that we have today in the atmosphere. A bit more on why Norway. It's interesting, first, because it's a multi-party democracy. So you're going to have several parties with its similar studies on the US, for example, where you have a two-party system. It's very clear like who's in favor of renewables or against, at least on a federal level. Whereas in Norway, you're going to have a lot of different parties and they can position themselves on a spectrum, which is interesting. And the second thing that is interesting is it has a very built out social welfare state. So if you see a negative response to a decline in fossil fuels from voters in Norway, then that's kind of bad news, right? Because there is a lot of protection here and a lot of kind of safety nets that you wouldn't have elsewhere. So it's in that case, if we see something in Norway, that's reason for concern. I'm going to skip over that. This is to show you a bit like the political science literature where this is rooted in and how the traditional left-right spectrum of parties is being broken up. And it's coming more on issue politics. So there are different issues that really frame the political divide or discussion in democracies. And the question is here the fossil free economy is the next of these divisions. And is that going to lead to reinforcement of a left-right division that we've had traditionally? Or is it going to sort of lead to new cleavages and different party positionings on this that are not a traditional left-right? So I think also that's for context on the left. So there is a lot of work on phasing in in the political space, not so much on phasing out. The two questions that we're interested in here is one, how do these parties position themselves in Norway on the issue of oil production, continue or not, continue extraction, continue production, etc. And how do voters reward or punish these positions in times of distress? So we're going to use an event in 2014 where actually quite a lot of jobs in the oil industry in Norway were lost. And we're going to look at, you know, was there a reaction of the voters to these local job losses in local communities. So we're covering five national elections. Given what I've just heard, we should extend this to 2021, I think, because it was a very, I mean, we've had these discussions many times. It was an extremely relevant topic, I think now, right now, like, or last year in the elections. These are the eight parties that held at least one seat in parliament in 2017. And what we're going to use as information is party manifesto. So each party basically for each election has a manifesto where they, you know, specify the position they take on different subjects, including the fossil industry. And that's how that looks. So here you see kind of one party. That's the example is here, the Green Party. This is done for each party. And here you see the five electoral periods, you know, between the elections that we're covering. And then you have statements. So the green statements here are possible pro-phase out statements that have appeared at least once in any of the manifestos over time. And if it's a filled in cell here, that means in this period, the Green Party has mentioned that investments in renewable for reduced petroleum production is something that they, you know, are invested in that they campaign with. And basically that's how we can then build kind of, you know, how parties position themselves towards the industry and over time. There is a couple of neutral ones and then there is, here is the ones on the fossil fuel industry. Here are some of the results on the first question on how parties position themselves. So what you see here is basically from zero to one here for green. So for phasing out and here for for grace or for maintaining an oil industry. And if it's a one that means in every time period, this party has mentioned every possible statement there is in favor of the fossil fuel industry. So that's point eight is pretty strong, right? So that's a very, very strong position. So what you see is a very clear ordering. So you see, there are three parties that almost never say something against the oil industry and very prominently and consistently say something in favor of maintaining the industry. And there are three that are really completely the opposite and two in the middle are kind of a bit unclear. Now, the first thing to say here, this is not aligned on the right left spectrum. So if you remember the previous slide, because of course you have all the eight parties now and the abbreviations in your mind. So this is the Labor Party, traditional left party, right? Which kind of corresponds to what you've been saying that there are cleavages starting to appear within the labor movement. But for the period until 2017, it was very clear pro oil. And here is the liberal party that had a very pro phase out position. So we don't see this traditional left right. It's kind of like starting to break up, right? And parties try to find their positions on these issues. And the other thing is what you see in red here is the coalition that was in government most recently. And so it's not really that there is a huge alignment in the government coalition. And next one I'll show you the results, how people actually voted. You'll see that it's not that people just voted against the existing government, but they actually had quite fine grained choices depending on what the party's positions on the fossil fuel industry was. What's also interesting is it's very constant over time. So that's a bit contradicting what you said before. We're like, I mean, until 2017, we see that these positions are super stable over time. These are the error bars here that you see over time. So it's really like a little variation, which is surprising. So parties don't really reposition themselves on the issue. I think I'll go quick on that. So what we're using is basically we're using a shock, an oil price shock that led to a lot of job losses. So perhaps just look at the graph to the right, which is interesting. And you see on the on the y-axis here, you see the relative change in petroleum jobs from 2014 to 2017, which is after the oil price dropped and which is before the 2017 election, which we're going to look at. And so this is the zero, right? So you see a couple of municipalities that have a few more jobs. So that's in percent. So 50% is a lot, right? But then you see a lot of municipalities, the vast majority that lost jobs, some 100%. So for some municipalities, basically it's just that's it. There is no person working in the oil industry anymore three years afterwards. And here on the x-axis, you see the fraction of petroleum workers as a share of the local workforce. Because you can say, yes, you know, you lost all of your jobs, but you know, I don't know, it was like 1% of the local workforce. So it might not be that dramatic. But if you're here, that's 15% of your local workforce. And if you lose 25%, then that's like 7% of your local workforce that lost a job. That's a lot. So basically, they're basically so these are the ones where we'd expect to see a reaction, right? So the industry is important locally and there were substantial job losses. And you'll see from the color codes that it's mainly like these provinces in the in the southwest of Norway. So it's very locally concentrated. And that makes it possible to identify an effect. And I'll quickly, I'll not talk about that. I'll quickly talk about effect sizes. So here again, you see the ordering, right? These are the three petroleum parties and the two neutral parties and the three parties that were prophesied out. And for now, I mean, ignore this, these are like thresholds. How important is the local workforce? So you'd expect like as you go up there, the effect to be larger. So if it's 3% of your local workforce, you would expect a higher effect as opposed to if it's if it's 1% or even less. And what you see is that, you know, there is a positive reward for the pro petroleum parties. So affected communities tend to vote more in favor of the pro petroleum parties if they lose jobs, not for this party. This is the progress party that just heavily campaigns against immigration. So the voters of this party just don't care about the issue. They vote for this party for immigration reasons and not for for fossil fuel reasons. And, you know, you see a very interesting picture here. So these are the greens, no response to the greens, a bit of negative here to the liberal party. And I forget what SV is socialists left a bit of positive here, but that's roughly, you know, around the zero. So parties are not punished for taking a pro phase out position, even in local communities where jobs are lost. But parties that don't take a position are punished. Right. So and that's actually encouraging news because you say, okay, if you're straight and if you have a position, you might not even lose in the communities that are very affected. But if you're very like blurry, nobody knows what you actually want to do. Then you might pay for like a large, a large structural transition. So here are some of the some of the kind of discussion or conclusion points. The first one I think it surprised me quite a lot is that these positions are super constant over time for the almost 20 years. We looked at and pro petroleum parties can capitalize a little bit on the job losses, but only if it's really their topic. If they're very invested in another topic, voters don't really care. And, you know, the neutral ones lose not to the pro phase out parties. I think that's the most important takeaway here. And this is also important. Whatever this is, it doesn't swing the national election. So it's very locally concentrated and that poses many important questions on like, how do you govern the transition locally? But it's not changing national elections. Like this is not large enough to, you know, swing elections. And that's something we see for the U.S. as well. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the very insightful presentations. We talked about geopolitics and energy about like how people finance fossil fuel, lobbyism, et cetera, et cetera, and about voting behavior. Now I would like to open the floor to the audience. If you have questions, please state your affiliation, your name and to who you direct the question. First come, first serve this gentleman in your first row, please. Thank you, everyone. My name is Daniel. I'm from Concordia University in Montreal. I have a question for Florian. I was wondering, so the results you showed us, we didn't actually see the, do we see the absolute change in total votes due to economic downturns and job losses in oil sectors. And you show us that the neutral parties are hit harder. But, and the pro phase out ones weren't hit hard. But what was the, that doesn't actually show us the relative change, meaning like, what was the voter share originally in the regions with high amounts of oil jobs? Were they already not voting, you know, to be clear, were they already not voting for pro phase out parties? So it's like they didn't lose votes, but they didn't have votes to begin with. So thank you. Thank you, please, Florian. Will. Yeah, I mean, so important question, like there are other slides to show that. So, of course, if you look even nationally, then the pro phase out parties don't have a lot of, like don't have very high vote shares, right? But they're not zero. So there is something to lose. And what I showed you is percentage points. So it's not percent. So it's like, if, you know, the green parties at five, when they lose 1%, then it's just four afterwards. So there it is. It's low. And if you, I mean, if you look at it, like some of these parties that are like at 20%, another 5%, right? So, you know, there is more or less to lose, but the effects are in percentage points. So in that sense, they're comparable in terms of how many votes they represent. Other questions? Yes. The lady with the mask here. Sorry, I have to choose randomly. Black shirt. Yeah. Hi, I'm Natalie from ISD. My question is primarily for Laura, but also anyone else on the panel with an opinion. One of the things you noted was that like these, these work, these kind of campaigns are very actually anti free market, even though that was kind of the origin of these things. And I see, I think we're seeing this in a range of countries whereby we have this kind of extreme right wing, you know, like neo fascist or like kind of authoritarian sort of tendency. And I think this has a bearing on these same kind of supply side questions, kind of increasingly. Do you, what, what do you think the prospects for, or, you know, what are the strategies for fighting these, these more sort of anti free market, what you're talking about basically. Thanks. Hope that's clear enough. Laura, please. I think that one thing I didn't note in there. I mean, people like Michael Bloomberg, who I noted, Larry Fink, the head of black rock has come out and said I am absolutely not, you know, divesting from fossil fuels, which is not. So I suppose if you are so some of these voices, depending could be considered conservative or from pro capitalist that might swing some people. But I think what's really going to swing people there was actually a study that came out a couple months ago and it was by University of Pennsylvania and someone from the Federal Reserve that estimated that the adoption of that law in Texas. Texas was the first state to adopt that law and I believe it's been, I think it was voted on in something like 15 states passed in four. It might be up to six now, but Texas was the first and they estimated that it was going to result in something like $500 million. I think it was between $400 and $500 million in losses in interest. So this is like the state and I can give you the citation for this, but basically it's going to hit people at some point in their, in their pocketbook. And if you're a pensioner and if it's something that really is going to impact your, impact the performance of a pension, then those, those investors will be able to bring complaints against the state, you know, for breach of fiduciary duty. So that's going to, that's just something that's going to play out in the future. I mean, a lot of people are, are looking at, yeah, legal regulatory ways to try to prevent these political stunts essentially from really hurting people. But I think that bringing, but I think bringing it back to people, to the actual citizens like this could actually affect you financially is going to be very important. Thank you very much. Please, you have already microphone. Yeah, I'm, this is Bronwyn with Oil Change International and a question for Gary primarily, but I guess first if you'd considered changing the like nose in your outcomes for mobilizations to like not yet potentially because I guess my like very basic understanding of kind of some social movement of like often right after mobilization is when organizers are like most likely to say that they've failed and that the like change can just be more nonlinear and, and slower. And then also if you looked at kind of the really like local geography of where the anti fossil fuel mobilizations were coming from because I guess from thinking about Canada as a place where it's been politicized for a very long time. And I think we haven't actually seen a ton of outcomes yet. I think, yeah, I'm thinking about Alberta. I think working in Alberta and talking about anti fossil fuel work. There's, there's actually often a lot of openness to it, but it's that the kind of social movement institutions or funding have been all outside of Alberta for the most part. And so I think some of that kind of it's really always perceived as outside actors has been a part of the kind of delay or like lack of success so far. Although I should say, yeah, there's not that there's been nothing. There's some change I think. Okay, thanks for, for that question. I think you're right. It's, it's too early to say no. It's, it's just that the situation has been so much changed since the Ukraine war. So that was sort of what I was alluding to. But of course it's, it might be that this is a temporary setback for these kinds of mobilizations. But at least what we see in Norway right now is that this whole focus that was so potent last year, especially it's only just one year ago, this election took place. And it was, you know, one of the top three issues for people in Norway under the election was exactly this topic of, you know, whether Norway should stop issuing new oil and gas exploration licenses. And now that discussion has just died away with the Ukraine crisis with much more focus on Norway as this reliable partner for Europe. So it's, it's more like a delay, I would say. And the potential is definitely there because if and when the energy crisis gets better, this issue will come back on the agenda in Norway, I think. And your other question was about localized mobilization. And I would say that in Norway it's, it's a dimension of cities versus the countryside. So people in the cities, especially young people in cities like Oslo and other larger cities in Norway are much more have a tendency towards voting green. They're more, you know, they are more concerned about climate change issues in general. And they have, you know, supported the Green Party, especially in Oslo, which where the Green Party is part of the governing coalition of Oslo. And in other bigger cities too. So it's like more like a city or urban rural dimension in Norway rather than, but also related to what Florian said about the Southwest where people actually work in the oil industry. So that's also part of this debate in Norway. Thank you very much. We have time for one really quick question, please. So the gentleman has his hand up. Quick question, please. Sorry, it may not be quick. I'll try this. Again, we're goody. Just to build on Norman's question there. It was about a sort of implication for Shell pulling out of the Campbell oil field was another companies come in a smaller independent firm who are maybe more unaccountable and harder to. And so there's a kind of irony of the protests, right? And that fits in a broader trend of the North Sea is that the major oil companies are pulling out and it's being filled in by these smaller independent firms. So that's something to consider. I thought as well, as well, because your framework had us, the variables was political parties. But I think more important for the UK context is the political economy of it is that it's an independent regulator, the oil and gas authority who make the decision on licensing. So I wondered if you've done interviews with those institutions as well. Yeah, it feels like to me, the Scottish Parliament's more symbolic in this sort of space than making decisions on it. Yeah, so we haven't finished doing the interviews yet. We're hoping to get interviews with government officials. Haven't done that yet, but it would definitely be interesting to talk with them about those issues that you raise. And I know the UK case studies done by Fergus, he's sitting right behind you with the master. You can talk to him in the break, but I feel like I couldn't give you a full answer for what you asked about the UK case. Sorry about that. That was a quick comment. Yeah, it's just a quick comment. I think that's a super interesting point. I think we need much more like investigative research on that. It doesn't only happen in North Sea, like as the oil and gas wages pull out, there are these private equity companies moving in and is actually like strategically advised to a lot of clients of large private banks to invest in these private equity companies because they're hugely profitable. And it's completely under the radar. And it really speaks to this, like what is the effect in the end of mobilization against actions from these large corporates that are more accountable than opaque private equity firms? I like this call to action oriented research. That's really good. Good closing remarks. Thank you very much for the panel. Give a hand of applause to our distinguished panel.