 Welcome everyone to this very last substantive session as part of the conference which will be on Just Transitions in Fossil Fuel-Dependent Economies. My name is Claire Vergell. I'm a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and with SEI I've been quite heavily involved in the UN Production Gap Report series over the past few years. And since its inception this report has had a strong emphasis on the importance and relevance of considering Just Transition and explored how such a transition may play out in different settings. We've heard a lot about Just Transition already at this conference which really underscores this topic as one of the most complex aspects of the transition we need to make but also one of the most important ones. We know Just Transition is essential for its own sake because we need to ensure no one is left behind as we pursue a more sustainable world and we also know that Just Transition is very important for pragmatic reasons to ensure societal support as we embark on the necessary transformation to a net-zero world. The same time it's important to remember where we're starting from as we were reminded this morning the current fossil-fueled world isn't neither just nor sustainable. And it's also important to break down the concept of Just Transition as the panellists in the previous sessions in this room reminded us whose Just Transition are we talking about and how do we ensure the concept remains rich and meaningful and not just a catchphrase. So I'm very excited to welcome a great line-up of speakers whose presentations will span a range of geographies from Australia to Colombia to the US and Canada and they will be discussing a range of themes that will help us get to the heart of challenges to Just Transition. On our panel today we have Felipe Corral Montoya who is a PhD candidate at the Technica Universitat in Berlin and he will be speaking about experiences from Colombian fossil-fuel extracting regions and what they can teach us about energy transitions in the global south. We have Josh Axelrod right next to him who is a senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Josh will be discussing options for fossil-dependent economies within existing legal frameworks in the US. Next to Josh we have Emiliano and Emiliano Castillo-Yara is a PhD candidate at the University of Trier and he'll be discussing his paper on competing notions of energy justice around tar sands development in Canada. And we'll have Julia Schwab, Julia is a research fellow and doctoral candidate at the Justus Liebig Universitat in Giesen and she'll be exploring what makes the energy transition so difficult in extractivist states. And finally we'll hear from Claire Vyson and Claire is co-head of the Climate Policy Team at Climate Analytics and she'll be exploring narratives of gas as a bridging fuel in western Australia. It's great to have you all here. As you know we have about 10 minutes per presentation and I'll give a little sign as time starts to wind down. We'll first hear from all the speakers before moving to discussion in Q&A. With that I welcome Philippe as our first speaker. Thank you very much for having me here. I will be talking today about the challenges for transitions in Colombia. And first I want to do a disclaimer to who we've heard all across the past day and I have that transitions go far beyond only overcoming or dealing with fossil fuel phase out. But today I'm sadly only going to be able to focus on that. And today I want to present a little bit of our ongoing research from analysis of transition discourses in Colombia and minerals and energy policies that I've done with colleagues at the Danish University of Berlin and the University of Flensburg. So I will go directly into the context and that is that of Colombia which is a rather average fossil fuel dependent country but I want to focus here on what do we mean when we talk about fossil fuel dependency because when we talk about energy transition and this is a very popular chart of a Sanky diagram that shows energy flows in the economy. We look at the fact that here most of the energy, the primary energy that is produced in Colombia actually flows out of Colombia in the form of fossil fuel exports. So in the strict sense the transition here is not so much about the energy that is consumed domestically which is still a part of the process but about the exports. A different way of looking at this comes from this chart on the trade basket of Colombia where you can see that not only it relies mostly on crude and coal exports for its exports but that about 80% of Colombia total exports are coming from commodities and raw materials. So what is the transition really about in this context understood transition as overcoming fossil fuel extraction? Well it's not so much about energy. So transitions in fossil fuel rent dependent countries are more about the dependence on external income from fossil fuel sales than from the actual use of these fossil fuels as energy domestically. So this has to do on one hand with trade and the balance of payment situations. So Colombia has a very important trade deficit but also it has a current account deficit that means we need foreign capital to do our domestic investments and we need foreign borrowing to fund our trade deficits. So does it touches upon the fact that we have to deal or perhaps also question our insertion in the global market system. Also the transition in this context deals with the respective countries fiscal situation and of course the importance of fossil fuel income in government expenditure. And finally these transitions are seldomly considered in their complexity for example beyond installing renewables at massive scales especially in international debates and domestic policies. So why focus on Colombia if it is only an average fossil fuel rent dependent country? So yeah as I was saying in the past year 46% of total exports come from coal and oil. Fossil fuels mainly oil are also sourced of about 15% of national government income this year that figure may go up considerably. Third fossil fuel producing subnational entities rely on oil and coal extraction for over 40% of GDP so there's an economic activity generated by fossil fuel extraction and external sale. And public administrations in fossil fuel producing areas such as Cesar and La Guajira that Jose was talking about before are highly reliant on fossil fuel rents to function. So the amount of budget from the subnational entities coming from external sale of coal or oil in other regions is very high. Sometimes going to 80% of total and a local budget which is huge. Finally and as we were hearing in the panel that took place before here Colombia while it is an important exporter of coal it is rather a peripheral actor that does not set neither the price nor the consumption demand in global markets but it has to accept whatever it is and it is a country that definitely cannot control the pace of the European and North American energy transition. So whatever the pace of that transition is that's the pace we have to deal with in our own coal transition and at the same time if we look at oil we have doing links oil reserves which are in danger of being dried up in the course of the next seven to eight years. But an un-present opportunity has opened and this is a little bit why we want to talk about Colombia. We are an average fossil fuel rent dependent country but we are the first country where a national government was elected explicitly running on the promise of facing out coal as soon as possible not granting any new oil or gas contracts for exploration and extraction and thus being one of the first countries of actually implementing the recommendations by the net zero roadmap banning fracking and reorientating the economy away from what they call as extractions. Now you can take the picture if you want. And for those of you that follow Colombian politics or the United Nations General Assembly it also was a government that very quickly started pushing with its discourse at the global level slamming this addiction to irrational power and profit making that countries in the global north have criticizing and comparing the poison that is embodied by cocaine with the poison that is coal and oil and this was one of the motivations that led us to look at the discourses that are ongoing on energy transition in Colombia. So what does this course analysis reveal about the broader energy transition trajectories or policies of fossil fuel rent dependent countries? So first these discussions reveal what is being prioritized by decision makers what is on top of their minds but also on top of their wallets and what is keeping their attention. Second what is being neglected who is being neglected in these documents in the implementation of the different government plans amongst others. And third which justification is given to legitimize proposed policies in one or other directions. So our analysis began to look at different documents on mining and energy policy related to transitions in the period between the last presidential election in 2019 and the current electoral cycle in 2022 including policy documents laws government plans by main presidential contenders that means those that participate in the second round of the elections as well as some as election of articles in the main newspapers. And we have three main discourses that we identified emerging from our preliminary analysis. First that fossil fuels are essential and a continued element of transition so that means Colombia in several policy documents we reviewed is framed as an already front runner as our power system is mostly clean so no big transition is needed because we already have a clean electricity matrix and here you have very interesting government documents showing their their proudness about this. Second that the fiscal income from fossil fuels is needed to fund transition so if we face out fossil fuels we're not going to have the money to build renewables. Third that gas is a crucial transition fuel this resonates with what Claudia was presenting this morning that still plays a role not only in all energy policy plans but in all climate policy plans because it's so much better than coal. Recall that we don't use the coal. Finally that fossil fuel supply explicitly is to be excluded from climate policy as it is an economic inconvenience and here again Claudia already presented this in the morning they literally said if we were to to include fossil fuel supply into our calculations it would either mean some kind of less reduced economic growth or a considerable shift in our political priorities and that's why we excluded from our long-term transition strategy. The second one talks about diversification of commodity dependence so this means diversifying for example what they call our mineral basket and say now we're not going to extract coal but we're going to also begin extracting all kinds of other metallic or including copper for the sake of the energy transition and second that we're going to begin producing hydrogen initially blue also considering the gasification of coal as a potential revenue source but in the future also green hydrogen as a potential source of exports to fill the gaps left by reduced oil and coal and this is coming from them from the roadmap for for hydrogen in Colombia. And the third one is this idea of reorientating the economy beyond commodity dependence so this includes shifting from what the discourses are an extractives to a productive economy overcoming what they call the rentier arrangement in local and national public financing so overcoming the reliance on oil and gas and colorants transitioning to a society entirely powered by wind, water and sun and finally also limiting natural resource extraction to the necessary while focusing on satisfying Colombia's local needs if you want to read it's all there so what happens now? We find that while this sounds very rosy and very positive in the past there was a neo-extractivist turn in the previous pink wave in the previous arrival of left and progressive forces in Latin America that after mentioning all these climate protection things actually turned and began reliant on the extraction appropriation of these rents for social purposes initially but maintaining this arrangement of fossil dependency. So a break in the discourse from previous government is necessarily but is not sufficient. We need also meaningful material policies that have to be introduced so that the current trajectory is changed but we are not sure which ones or how. We only know that they definitely have to touch upon these three points trade, taxes and the relations to territory which would warrant a whole other presentation but my time is already off so thank you. Thank you Philippa for the reminder that we need meaningful policies as well as slogans. Josh, on to you. Thank you all for sticking with us to the end of the conference in this last session. I wanted to start out by thanking my colleague Claudia Blanco Nunez who's not here who helped do a lot of background research in support of this presentation. Today I'm going to focus on US oil production and specifically subset of that production which is the federal onshore oil and gas program. So this is the oil and gas program controlled by the federal government when people talk about Biden approving oil this is what that is and that is basically a means to focus advocacy on the supply side and look at just transition. So let's see if this works. So just briefly US oil production. The time scale is arbitrary here. I chose it simply because federal data is only good back robust back to 2003 in the various public reporting sources we have. So you know you've seen this drastic increase in US oil production over the last almost 20 years. You can see in the pie chart there that the US is the largest oil producer in the world by a factor of almost 200% now compared to its closest rivals Saudi Arabia and Russia. That's probably widened because this is 2021 oil production in the US has grown substantially over the last year and is expected to continue growing for at least one more year. Down there in the bottom so the purple is the this is cumulative but the purple is the federal offshore so that is a slightly larger chunk of the federal of federal production than the onshore and the federal onshore is the red portion and that represents about 10% of current US daily production. So just quickly where is oil produced in the US? It's produced currently in 27 of 50 states. Texas is obviously the largest 40% of our oil is produced there. The next two largest producers are New Mexico and North Dakota and they represent an additional 20% so three states account for 60% of US oil production. I'm going to though drill down a little more so this is looking at federal onshore production now. So this is production coming from federally managed lands and that there's an agency in the US called the Bureau of Land Management. They are responsible for managing the oil and gas program. 74% of that production is coming from two states New Mexico and Wyoming and actually if I if I included North Dakota we'd capture almost all of it. I don't include North Dakota for both both because geographically it's slightly different politically it's very different and it has it's also a very kind of flash in the pan oil producing state it's not expected it's oil reserves will be tapped out fairly quickly. New Mexico and Wyoming are different in that regard. So let's see so looking at this you know it a lot the advocacy focus of US environmental organizations has looked at onshore oil and gas the onshore oil and gas program for a long time it's long been seen as a kind of the low hanging fruit to go after supply and really bring about a phase down and you can kind of see and that that includes focus work in certain states. New Mexico has gone from being a kind of a negligible oil producer to the second largest oil producer in the country so it's created a new challenge a new jurisdiction to work in. Wyoming has is not a very big producer but has a very long extractive legacy and of course was a major is a major coal producing state but that being said though the federal estate is a prime focus for advocacy I just wanted to kind of walk through some of the barriers and these are extremely high level but there are some pretty severe legal barriers to to kind of directly going after supply from federal lands. So first under US federal law the Bureau of Land Management the BLM is is required to at least consider holding an oil and gas lease every single quarter so long as lands are available for leasing under current land use plans about 80 percent of public lands which is hundreds of millions of acres are open and available for leasing so that's not currently a limitation that the law invests them with discretion to kind of shape the size of those leases the Biden administration has attempted to do that but they of course were immediately taken to court they lost in court unclear whether that really changed changed much but it certainly made them feel like they were compelled to then move forward with with an onshore lease sale and an offshore lease sale both of which have happened in the last year. Then I has been a lot of discussion about the inflation reduction act and it's positive but it includes a hostage clause for oil and gas leasing so now for federal renewable energy projects if the federal government wishes to issue a permit for those projects it must first show that it has held an oil and gas lease sale within a certain amount of time it's 120 days so kind of if the federal government wanted to issue permits for wind onshore wind or solar let's say three times a year they would have to hold three oil and gas lease sales as well unclear and there are size limitations on that it's very complex them it's very poorly written but it's it's a huge huge new barrier to not only a transition to renewable energy but also a transition away from kind of our status quo lease a lot of public lands approve a lot of new drilling. So basically just the takeaway there is that federal law prevent provides no legal mechanism to affirmatively stop leasing it must continue. A number of other factors come into play which I'll go into a little bit more state budgets especially New Mexico and Wyoming are currently geared and shaped by money coming from federal payments to those states in these two states specifically the public education the public health system and other essential services are all tied to federal disbursements from fossil fuels so if those disbursements go away the harm is done to those public services. Similarly workforces are impacted New Mexico's economy is fairly diversified but but Wyoming's is not it's a fairly substantial percentage of the workforce works in extractive industry either coal or oil and gas and then finally just general economic preparedness the United States despite our wealth despite you know all of the resources we have is extremely unprepared for any kind of transition we saw with the with Russia's invasion of Ukraine we had no kind of central policy response that could really help people deal with the energy shock that happened and you know I think that's something to keep in mind it's of course even more so true for her poor countries but we are just not ready there is not a transit option there is not an alternative energy option etc and there's also a weak federal government that can't impose impose all of that so the question really begs the question if the laws aren't favorable is a transition possible and I would say yes but it requires okay work along three main paths first yes legal hooks must be used to the extent they're available and this requires some very creative campaigning to limit production and avoid lock-in second policies and state budgets need to be disentangled I would argue this doesn't require an act of law you don't necessarily need to reform tax policy which is politically toxic in the US but you know you could design a state budget so that the way revenues are flowing that you're kind of most sensitive and state services are not tied to fossil fuels so that those two their fates aren't intertwined and third I would say then just transition and the principles of just transition need to guide decision-making and thinking about how to address state policy so I'm going to quickly focus on the latter two and skip a few things but this up here on the top is these are federal payments to Wyoming is the green line New Mexico is the blue line you can see how so New Mexico is very dependent on oil and gas and you can see how as the price of oil and gas has fluctuated the payments have fluctuated quite a bit despite the fact that if you were to graph New Mexico's production line on there it would go continually up so despite that the payments have not been consistent Wyoming what you see there the peak that was the peak of coal for the state and and as coal has declined the state's kind of economic fortunes have just gone completely into the basement and you know had very little hope of recovery there and they are trying to kind of become more dependent on oil and gas um I was going to quickly talk about some jurisdictions that have decoupled and this also includes some some working work in New Mexico itself but we can talk about that during questions I just want to close basically by saying um just one here we go yes that as we think about just transition we have to think about what what what is happening is is the transition that's happening so far just and this is looking at the overall us workforce which is pretty evenly we saw a very similar slide in a in a presentation in the um shulman just before this the overall us workforce is fairly evenly divided among um men and women the energy workforce is not the fossil fuel workforce uh predominantly white men surprise surprise them the clean energy workforce is looking about the same um and so it begs the question of as we pour resources into job training into um building out this new economy this new workforce and of so much attention gets paid on on these transition jobs and how they're better jobs or can be made better who's who's benefiting and right now the answer is white men um and and a lot of attention goes to to um you know helping fossil fuel workers again who are fossil fuel workers white men and a lot of us policy of is of course favorable to to that demographic and so i think this is a key consideration as we think about just transition um and so this list uh is i thought this was a really great list is from it's adapted from the just solutions collective and equity fund um seven kind of questions or principles to consider uh in a just transition i think a lot of discussion at this conference has been about affirmative policy that is just transition but i would argue that policy if policy makers ask themselves these questions that their policy might come out more just in in inevitably because i think they they require um careful consideration and so um i think a lot of this has to do with a focal shift in how we think about policy is it purely are we solving a purely economic problem are we solving a justice problem and if if the answer is the latter then you know these kind of considerations applied to economic and social policy i think lay the groundwork for a more organic transition that is not um not as dependent on this kind of top-down management approach of like we have we have x number of barrels that must be slowly phased out we have no legal legal mechanism to do so if instead it's we must prepare the economy or our our society for a transition so that when as that transition happens it doesn't kind of force us into these cycles of extractivism um we're able to kind of proceed forward in a more resilient way and also avoid that model being applied to the clean energy sector which it is currently there's a major risk of that happening so thank you great thank you so much josh and for really honing down on some of the elements we need to consider in a just transition um juliana emiliano you've swapped places so have you guys decided amongst you who will go first all right hello everybody i'm going to present today a work paper i'm working on at the moment with my colleague natya kombarisa who's not here today um about the blinkers so the narrow perspective the thing that horses wear sometimes right of planning for climate change and we argue in that paper that these blinkers impede a more effective climate action and also impede a just energy transition especially for extractive states in the global south and this work builds on a previous paper we have published a policy brief about the just transition from a global south perspective and that's why i first want to um give to you the most important points of that previous work to then go on to this current paper and probably you will understand then a little bit more why we do this research at the moment so to start with some developments that can be expected expected from the energy transition i think we heard it a lot so we frame these developments as a reloaded extractivism that can be expected so on the one hand a boosted green extractivism for critical minerals like lithium copper and so on and then on the other hand short term intensified fossil fuel extractivism in order to quote extract every single drop of oil we have left as the president of ecuador has said some months ago and thereby kind of confirmed our hypothesis we had there well so this context is the context of most countries in the global south either because of fossil fuel dependency um like producer countries but also when we think about Chile for example that has not fossil fuels but a lot of copper and lithium so um this context is however as we found in dominant narratives about the just transition on the international level not included or even ignored one might say dominant narratives revolve mainly about top and techno optimism the idea of win-win situations where there's no loser in the transition at all reformism and the assumption that this transition is taking place in democratic liberal market economies with a very strong public sector that is willing and able to afford and support such a transition so i think we can all agree that these assumptions are quite Eurocentric and also very elitist and so they are aiming in the end maintaining the status quo in a new green economy that's actually not that new when we think about it it seems like a version of the old economy we already know but with new energy sources so of course there are criticisms of these dominant narratives we heard some of them the last two days um just very shortly there's obviously a danger of co-optation of these discourses um focusing this um shifting the focus away from the just and just transition to more technocratic debate debates about technological solutions and also that this discourse of power then leads to a more reactive focus ignoring the existing and past injustices that we should maybe also tackle and take into account and yes so this just transition is obviously not happening in a vacuum and if we don't address now these injustices they will be extrapolated into the future however these criticisms as we have analyzed in uh we like we reviewed all papers like in different journals where these criticisms were made like from the scientific community and most of these criticisms are made at least like in institutions that publish them in the global north so um they are of course really valid and important but I think it becomes clear that the just transition in the global south is not yet discussed enough from the scientific community but also like on the international level I think and so what we concluded there in this policy brief is that what is needed when we talk about just transition from global south perspective um is a global holistic and decolonial perspective so real short I think it's maybe quite straightforward um a global perspective entails global south inequalities the issue of externalization not just when we think about emissions and climate change but also in the so-called green economy and there are also going to be externalizations a holistic perspective that takes into account the whole life cycle of energy starting with the energy extractive nexus I think that became quite clear in your presentation as well um and of course a power perspective on this whole issue so where are the roots of these problems and uh what has that maybe to do with the decolonization we might need or I think we do need for the energy system um in general so this as a quick overview now I want to take a step back that's what we did with my colleague we ended this policy brief and then we were like okay maybe we have to look a little bit deeper into why the energy transition or now the just transition is framed as the solution so to what problem is that the solution because when we look a little bit closer into problem formulations we see that they just allow us then to frame solutions in a certain way and just enable us to see maybe a certain picture that's limited that's why I want to talk about the blinkers right so um the first blinker we have identified and I want to share with you is the power of euro modernity and this epistemological project so euro modernity means it's like based on idea of a thought collective from different latin-american intellectuals and is basically very closely tied to european enlightenment and the idea from René Descartes a french philosopher who was one of the first people writing about that nature is inherently separated from society so this nature culture divide and this has um this has ever since influenced like the division of natural science from the social sciences and humanities for example so how we think like the epistemologies how we think how we analyze what problems we see which we don't see for example or how we all are also divided in different disciplines here as well and we notice quite quick like that people use different terminologies and think in different ways so um these blinkers blanket any normativity and portrayed natural science as very objective while maybe in the humanities it's more accepted to have like a kind of normative stance on some of our findings and in the IPCC I think it's very well um reflected as well that there's not any normativity kind of allowed or seen that there are maybe interests involved economic political interests and so on and I think the following quote exemplifies these dynamics quite well so Norton says there we usually in contentious situations take the climate or the energy crisis for example define a problem as the lack of our favorite solution our solution are clean energies and our problem is then the lack of clean energies um rather than providing a thoughtful analysis of the values threatened in such situations not clear view of the real problem will emerge and rational analysis however sophisticated cannot be brought to bear upon these situations so apparently we don't see the whole picture right so we don't see the real problem at stake and that's why we thought well if the energy transition is a symptom of climate change what is climate change a symptom of and that led us to the concept of of the imperial mode of living from Brandt and Wissen that is basically revolving around three main pillars the first one are crisis deepening patterns of consumption and production so basically extractivist practices that rely on the exploitation of nature but also human beings and a notorious externalization of environmental harms as in climate change but also when we think about national or global sacrifice zones in remote areas and the expansion of the capitalist extractive frontier to always more remote areas and here I don't just talk about maybe the Atacama desert or the Amazon like rainforest but also deep sea mining that's heavily pushed by Shell recently very interesting to think um or also that idea that we can colonize space and mine the moon one day so um when we look at this it maybe doesn't it's not that new after all right it kind of seems familiar and then we said we are suddenly there and think yeah maybe the imperial mode of living is a symptom of neocolonialist practices and historical colonialism more generally and so we see that the cause and consequence dominoes maybe not just the linear line that would be like the Eurocentric and Euro modern way of thinking like oh it's a line right we like that it's ordered it's easy it's not that simple it rather looks like this crazy domino thing on the bottom it's very complex very messy and we have to think about a lot of things but that's difficult so I think the takeaway from this is then that climate change and the energy transition need to be situated in a historical and social context and we need to be aware that finding fixes to the climate problem cannot be separated from existing social political inequalities and if we do so this leads our decision making into a technocratic trap in the end so the blinker here is obviously the imperial mode of living as I already said that narrow narrows our perspective here so climate change turns into an isolated problem of environmental nature disembedded from its social cultural roots in the imperial mode of living and colonialism so the last blinker and then I'm going to end is again this Cartesian divide of nature culture but this time I wanted to put it into context with the solutions that are presented for climate change and these solutions are always either mitigation or adaptation and they this response then again to the separation not thinking both things together and especially when it comes to well I think there's overly like global focus like heavily on mitigation so also global south countries are used for the mitigation of global north emissions and when it comes to adaptation I think there's a really missed opportunity to maybe push for more radical in the sense of the word like rude solutions instead it's rather like of reformist character and so I think that's my conclusion that climate solution rather aim at maintaining and sustaining the status quo and a capitalist extractivist model than really aiming for transformative action thank you thank you Julia that was an excellent warning of the possibility of co-optation of different narratives as well Emiliano over to you so thank you for being here and this paper is sorry this presentation is based on a paper that I and my supervisor at the University of Trier publish on the journal futures as part of a special issue on just energy futures and this paper sought to contribute to and further theoretical discussion on conflicts over Tarzan's pipelines in Canada in the fields of energy justice and energy futures by exploring how or the mobilization or articulation and mobilization of competing notions of justice and future visions in the conflict over the government on transplant and pipeline expansion in the province of British Columbia Canada so we focus on this particular case because of the following reasons first this project has been quite controversial in recent years so while the federal government and the provincial government of Alberta and the oil industry consider this pipeline as a project of national interest because it supposedly contributes to economic growth job creation and increased tax revenues indigenous people particularly some first nations environmental organizations and citizens they argue that this pipeline well it further accelerates climate change it undermines indigenous land rights and it poses risks to the marine ecosystems in BC due to potential oil spills and increased tanker traffic second in what is now known as British Columbia first nations have never ceded their land so meaning that their governments and legal systems were never extinguished and so the the Canadian government must obtain their consent for decisions about the use of their land and this significantly affects the legitimacy of the Canadian state's assertion of territorial sovereignty and the third is that this transplant and pipeline expansion or tmx is the last remaining large-scale pipeline project proposed by the Canadian state because the other projects were canceled due to the opposition of indigenous people and environmental organizations and I saw it I think this I mean despite the fact that the federal government of Canada approved this project this case of study shows the key role of these indigenous land movements in preventing the expansion of unconventional fossil fuel infrastructure across Canada through blockades street demonstrations rallies and other strategies and the main goal of this or this leads me to the research question of this of the paper which were or the main question which was how what we call the anti-tmx movement and mobilizes plural or different conceptions of justice in the conflict over this pipeline to articulate different visions of the future right so I think that's that's the main research question and before I move on just like to give you some background information so what are tar sands and what are they found well as you can see on the light on the left side tar sands are a mixture of water, clay and vitamin, vitamin is oil that must be diluted or heated before it can be used to produce usable fuels such as gasoline now Canada has the world's largest tar sands reserves that are located in the province of Alberta as you can see on the right side and well tar sands are quite controversial because they release a more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil and therefore contribute to climate change this is illustrated in the picture on the left of our refinery in Alberta and they also lead to deforestation water pollution and conflicts between the oil industry first nations and the Canadian government over land rights which is illustrated on the right side in the picture of this tar sands mining in Alberta and here in this map we can see in red the existing pipelines or tar sands pipeline crude oil pipelines in Canada and well in Canada in the United States and the key point to bear in mind here is that most of these projects are designed to meet the US energy needs and also that these projects turn in dinos lands and also neighborhoods into sacrifice zones for the oil industry and for our countries as indigenous people or marginalized communities or regular citizens they pay the price for the oil consumption in the United States or in other countries so the important thing also is to consider the TMX struggle as part of these international efforts by different groups to stop the expansion of these fossil fuel infrastructures across North America and in the case of the TMX pipeline well we can see here here it runs well if constructed it will run from Edmonton, Alberta and the tar sands through British Columbia and then it ends at the marine terminal in Burnaby and you know in this map we also can see some of the first nations communities that have opposed this project of course they have quite different views on these projects and some of them are against or others are in favour of these projects and now just I want to mention this aspect of Canada's energy vision so the important thing is here is that consider how this energy vision is based or on the assumption that tar sands development is necessary for economic development for creating jobs and even for protecting the environment as we can see in this quote from a prime minister Trudeau in which it says that the TMX will contribute to cleaner energy development in Canada and for example here we can see like the contrast this different perspective on the TMX which consider this project not only as something that reproduces climate injustice but it is also part of this settler colonial project aimed at removing indigenous peoples from their lands for resource development purposes and it also highlights how some of these of the groups that are part of this anti-tmx movement are also trying to build alternatives to fossil fuel infrastructures by developing their own community-led renewable energy projects and because of the time constraints I just want to mention that I mean for this paper we sought to contribute to discussions in energy justice and energy futures by problematizing like the epistemological foundations of these two different frameworks because they are still based on western understandings of justice and energy futures and by that I mean that for example energy justice energy future is mostly based on the idea that of developing a different kind of technological systems that could inferior replace fossil fuel power systems and energy justice well it is useful because it draw attention to for example the unique distribution of sociological costs really associated with energy development and the decisions that are or the even making power relations in energy policymaking they are still not considering like the different values worldviews or perspective of justice that you know people on the ground have and here's some of the for example other papers that also focuses on these issues they tend to incorporate these theoretical frameworks without questioning and then to answer our research question we use critical discourse analysis also participant observations and some interviews as well as document analysis and here is a table that summarizes some of these interpretations of justice it has to do for example with indigenous self-determination land sovereignty the relationships and responsibilities to nature and the importance of also developing community led renewable energy projects has also to do with gender violence because all of these aspects are not considered in the official reports of this project and just finally thing that most important thing here to remember is that well this particularly indigenous perspective challenge the theoretical frameworks of energy justice and energy futures by drawing attention to this multiple understandings of justice and when we talk about just energy futures we're not also I mean we're also talking about dismantling the power structures underpinning energy systems and yeah I think that's it thank you thanks so much Emiliano and I think it was a great follow on from Julia's presentation discussing the different ways and conceptions of justice and what we can learn from indigenous perspectives as well all right hi everyone I am really standing on the shoulders of giants presenting work by colleagues Victor Maxwell Anna Tatman Bill Hare and many others so please don't ask me any complicated questions so yeah I'm packing fossil gas as a bridge fuel I think we probably don't need to go much into the context and the reasons we wanted to focus on fossil gases that we've seen growing awareness of the need to phase out coal but there's still a lot of proponents we've heard many reasons I think over the course of the last two days pushing for fossil gas to maintain a role in the energy system as a replacement for coal as a way to abate hard to abate sectors as a you know cleaner option in the future as a mode of sustainable development and we really the evidence is really pointing towards it not being a clean fuel so it's contributed nearly 50% of the growth in fossil co2 emissions over the past few years it's not associated with energy security or stability and critically it's not consistent with a 1.5 degree compatible future and just to demonstrate that you can see in this figure in the grays the existing gas fields and planned gas fields over the future over the next couple of decades and then in comparison the light green dotted line shows a median of IPCC 1.5 compatible pathways that we filtered based on sustainability criteria and you can see that really in that 1.5 degree world there is not space to use all of those gas fields and just I'd like to point your attention to the red line the IEA sustainable development scenario which some energy companies for example have used as justification for the need for more gas in the future but colleagues of mine Robert Bretcher and colleagues have run this through a climate model and shown that it's really not 1.5 compatible and there is a significant risk of warming going above two degrees in that scenario so it's definitely not one to aim for and part of the reason that we see this rapid decline in gas in a 1.5 degree future is in the power system and just a very quick plug for a report that we released earlier this year that looked at the role of gas in power sector in 1.5 degree scenarios. Gas electricity currently makes up about 40% of gas use so it's a very relevant sector and globally we see that gas falls to less than 2.5% of power generation by 2040 so we see that as basically an effective phase out of very marginal levels of gas left in the system and that's really not that long after coal and breaking down to the regional level we see a maximum five to ten year delay after coal at most and so it's definite evidence on the demand side that in the power sector gas is not the future. So the main thing I wanted to talk about today is a project in Western Australia the Scarborough and Pluto project by Woodside Energy which is really an example of a company betting against the world implementing the Paris Agreement. I also have a few slides at the end on some work we've done looking at fossil gas in Sub-Saharan Africa. So the Woodside Energy project, Woodside plans to develop the offshore Scarborough gas field and to expand its current Pluto LNG processing facility and my colleagues did the first comprehensive assessment of the emissions associated with that project including scope three emissions and found that they are significantly larger by about 60% than Woodside's own estimates for the project and making clear that claims by Woodside that it's a Paris Agreement compatible project are absolutely incorrect and to the contrary it's a major stranded asset risk if it goes ahead. The full project would release about 1.4 billion tons of greenhouse gases over its lifetime. For comparison that's about three years worth of Australia's current emissions and it's equivalent to about the annual emissions in 2030 are equivalent to two times the emissions cuts that have been achieved through all of the solar PV in Australia each year so it's significant and of course if this were to go ahead other parts of the economy would have to reduce their emissions faster in order to meet Australia's climate targets I think that's a really relevant thing to take into account when we talk about just transition. Woodside does, oh I forgot to change the slide so yeah here we see the emissions associated with the project, Woodside does have a supposed greenhouse gas abatement plan although it's clear that this doesn't really reduce emissions in any substantive sense there's a significant amount of hot air in the plan because it's based on a 2007 estimate of what the project was supposed to be when it was planned to be much bigger so already just by having a smaller project they've saved emissions in theory there's also a heavy reliance on offsets and including tree planting which I don't think we need to talk here about why that's not a solution and in fact about 50 percent of shareholders voted against Woodside's climate report because it was too vague and had a big over reliance on offsets it also defers most emissions reductions to after 2040 and it's clear that Woodside has not really factored in the costs of these offsets and so the analysis in the bottom right hand corner here shows what could the cost of offsetting Woodside's emissions be under different carbon price scenarios and they found that costs could reach up to 21 to 71 percent of LNG export revenues in the future so seriously potentially undermining the project's bottom line it's not just emissions that's a risk for this project it's also a bet that LNG demand will continue in the future and so here you can see in the dark gray the rest of Australia's production capacity in light gray western Australia where this project is based and then the the very light gray is production capacity from this new additional capacity that's being planned in this Pluto project and for comparison the yellow line shows what the IEA's net zero scenario projects for LNG exports from Australia and that peaks around the time that this project this Scarborough Pluto project would come online and then declines extremely rapidly so clearly the IEA net zero scenario is indicating a potential collapse in the LNG market for Australia and key markets such as Japan and Korea are if we look at what they're doing domestically looking at green hydrogen for example definitely not worth betting on them being future buyers and it's also worth highlighting this project is connected to other domestic projects within Australia so a urea project and a hydrogen project that have committed to take some of the the gas instead of decarbonising those so this points to further lock in domestically in Australia to gas rather than spending investment on on decarbonisation and so I think the clear conclusion from this case study is that if this project is to go ahead Woodside is betting against the Paris Agreement from being fully implemented and I think that has clear implications for the communities as well that are associated with this project of course it will create jobs for what happens to those communities in the future when it becomes a stranded asset and what are the opportunity costs of pursuing this project rather than investing in other options and the next so just very briefly I wanted to end with a summary of some work that we've done as part of the climate action tracker consortium on fossil gas in Africa with a bit of a focus on sub-Saharan Africa although we did also look at Egypt and it's obviously a very very different context and extremely vulnerable a set of extremely vulnerable countries all very different and very complicated and I can't really cover the complexity in a couple of minutes but as it's going to be in the spotlight this year with the COP based in Egypt it thought it's definitely worth having a think about and I think these narratives over just transition and whether or not given this global context of declining gas use in 1.5 pathways what that means for sub-Saharan Africa so of course the the key priority for countries in this region is to expand energy access and achieve sustainable development goals so the question is what role does fossil gas have to play there and we've seen that although renewable energy offers increasingly low cost solutions for an energy system so far investments have been far too small so less than 2 percent of global renewable energy investments over the last decade have gone into Africa and instead we've seen substantial investments in fossil fuels there was a recent analysis that showed about by energy monitor that showed about 400 billion US dollars in the pipeline of gas projects in Africa and you can see in the figure here substantial pipeline of fossil fuel assets that's in development being being planned but thinking back to those first two slides that I showed of course declining fossil fuel demand in a 1.5 degree compatible world does that mean that these these potential benefits from exploiting gas reserves that proponents suggest are important for energy security for development in the region might those be undermined and instead the region saddled with expensive stranded assets and potentially losing out on a major economic opportunity to invest in renewable energy instead in green hydrogen for example and we did in this report a few we looked at a few different countries so one of those which I'll end on is Senegal which isn't currently a it's not yet producing fossil gas for export but it has discovered reserves of gas it's also not reliant on gas in its energy system so this is definitely not a fossil fuel dependent not a gas dependent country right now but this is Germany for example is very interested in developing gas export from Senegal and so it's highlighting really a clear risk of the development of stranded assets the opportunity cost of going into a fossil making this a fossil fuel reliant economy at a time when really we should be moving out and into renewables and we did an analysis of looking at the jobs potential for example comparing a 1.5 renewables based scenario in Senegal with a current policy gas fuel to development scenario and when you compare the annual per megawatt hour jobs that could come from both scenarios in the renewable scenario we found 6700 jobs per megawatt hour per year and in the current policies we got 1,500 so really a clear benefit from pursuing not a fossil gas future and yeah just to end I think we've got quite a lot of reports out there that I recommend you take a look spanning also some more global look at why gas is the new coal fossil gas a bridge to nowhere and then this climate action tracker work on gas in Africa and India so I would encourage you to take a look thank you Claire for spotlighting all those stranded asset risks in very different parts of the world we have a couple of minutes left for questions so I'll invite people to put up their hand if they have questions please keep them relatively brief so that we have more time for questions and we can start with two or three all right can you hear me yeah great well thank you for that great panel that great ideas and insights my question is for Emiliano you've said how energy justice is challenged by indigenous views all the time and we've seen how this happens every every point of every in every part of the world but I wonder if you have any thoughts on how energy justice as an analytical framework can do better in order to capture you know indigenous needs I mean what can be improved from theoretical framework perhaps and in on energy justice as an analytical tool what can be done in order to better capture you know indigenous reflections yeah we'll take one or two other questions and then you can respond yeah my question is to whoever wants to take it because I think there was a lot of discussion we need the rents for the transition so we need to finance the transition either with a new gas or new whatever or more fossil fuels or minerals have you found other more progressive approaches or discourses to how can countries finance this transition thank you hi thanks chris from uni flansburg my question goes to you Claire can you say a bit more about like plans of like you looked into gas and how the producers plans compared to plans in like national outlooks and stuff I mean one thing is of course what we where we need to go to and the other thing is like EU and others how what they yeah forecast kind of in their plans of natural gas use and how that might fit or not to those expansion plans thank you thank you Claire do you maybe want to start us off and then we'll move to Emiliano um yeah good question to be honest um no um we haven't looked at that um I guess yeah one good place to start would be for example looking at even at the um IEA current policies scenario is a comparison um but yeah I think that would be an interesting uh question to look at three things Emiliano uh how can the justice do better yeah thank you for your question I think it needs to engage with uh let's call it non-western perspectives in the first place and by that I mean of course we can read some of the different um authors that have written on energy justice but before incorporating their ideas or trying to apply their ideas automatically into our studies I think we need to take a look first at the social and geographical or historical context in which different injustices are being reproduced and then um also to consider like these different perspectives but not like incorporating within the existing frameworks but rather to take a look at maybe the similarities or differences and see how can we think uh you know beyond uh or this western understanding of justice that is also for example reflected on on the idea that it has to be a uh uh for example a win-win situation in this conflict over pipelines or that justice can only be achieved through uh the I don't know like existing uh legal institutions like the courts so for example uh many uh indigenous communities across north america are calling for land back meaning that it's about decision making power over what happens on their lands so and I think that the this idea disrupts completely like uh the concepts conceptions of justice that are being uh um put forward by the government so I think yeah I mean this is one way in which uh the concept of energy justice can be advanced for the thank you and then there's a tricky question about how can countries finance this transition and perhaps um some of the other speakers would want to weigh in here Felipe yeah thank you very much for the question um I think it has two parts that are very important to highlight so first the idea of having to find alternative ways to finance the transition instead of rents from positive fuels or other commodities and I think that has to do with something that that Julia showed also and that is also overcoming the idea of depending on rents and of restoring past wrongs and this this brings the a notion of justice to the forefront and here I think there are some very interesting proposals uh already in in circulation so first the idea of climate reparations that has been amongst others voiced in in in the last cop and by academics such as Keston Perry um that it calls out the fact that this mess we find ourselves in is part of a colonial legacy that has not been corrected and that the reparation is very important component different than overseas development aid or low ends or other forms of funding and the second one which goes brings us to to what is also being proposed by the new Colombian government is this idea of a climate protection depth relief or depth swaps um to fund the transition so basically unburdening countries in the global south from their external depth so with the resulting additional fiscal space they can fund the transition themselves that is less progressive so to say from this this climate justice or or the colonial perspective but it's also very discussed finally then we can always go back to the extractives and continue as we are no uh but I think uh I don't need to convince you that that may not be what we want thanks Philippe um and Josh and Julia I'm just wondering if you guys have anything to add from your perspectives the US is also struggling to finance the transition and I guess it also raises the question of what we are actually financing and what we should be financing so any short reflections from your sides um yeah I mean I don't think the US is as reliant on the uh what what you all term rents um to finance the transition but we are very reliant on the resource um and so in some ways I wonder maybe if that begs the question of whether the of consuming countries I mean obviously we consume all of most all most of the oil we produce and we import a little bit as well so we are contributing I guess to to the the finance issues that other countries are having in terms of that decoupling um so it begs the question of if we kind of finance our transition away from that over consumption of the resource it does that free up resources it does that change the resource flow so that this kind of um assumed dependence um on those rents uh is diminished um I mean I think Canada's another really good example of this because that yeah the trans mountain pipeline is justified you know a multi-billion dollar investment from the government into a pipe privately on pipeline justified as oh well the oil for that will will pay for the transition even though the cost of the pipeline is higher than the investment that they can hope to get out of that pipeline so it's a it's a really unfortunate um piece of rhetoric uh in the US I don't think that's part of the rhetoric I don't I don't hear that um and the inflation reduction act you know the all oil did maybe was slightly offset the cost of that that uh investment but that investment was made and it's you know hundreds of billions of dollars so I don't think that's a limitation for us so it I think behooves wealthy countries to just make the investment uh to kind of focus new investment in our budgets on this instead of traditional things uh with like defense and things like that I think that's one of the really valuable aspects of this panel that we have so many different perspectives and settings where this discussion needs to take place Julia do you have any closing words reflecting on this or um of your own yes I think my take on this question is not that a macro perspective because I'm an anthropologist I think I'm not the person to ask such a big question even for one country I can't give that answer but from my um research what I think um can be one pillar and one way out is really to decentralize the energy systems because for example in Ecuador two-thirds of the revenues um from oil I actually used for subsidies in the transport sector etc so I think um when then these revenues break away like one big thing will be like how to secure access to energy so I think then we have to think about really local solutions to this so I mainly work in the Amazon so I think um there they have like a special like leverage because they are the Amazon they are the lungs of the earth so I think we like they can pretty good advertise this outside and search for other like more direct let's say bilateral corporations with like international development agency whatever that is or NGOs and so on and maybe try to be less dependent on the central government I think that would be a big move for decolonization as well thinking about like their self-determination etc so I think that's like but that just speaking for that region I know within Ecuador not thinking about the urban centers etc so there I'm also without a good answer I think thank you Julia all right so we're really at time and I don't want to stand between you and the final closing session but just really wanted to thank our speakers for bringing their very diverse perspectives from so many parts of the world I think it's really necessary if we're building a research community building a movement to keep sharing ideas and insights and realizing you know what patterns exist what differences what we can learn from each other and also just really found Julia's words inspiring for us to bear in mind that just transition isn't happening in a vacuum that we need to keep the power aspects in mind as we deal with this topic and and question you know to what's problem is just transition as a solution and to what extent is climate change a symptom of another problem and that can really help inform our work going forward I think an anthropologist's view is useful in these discussions as well so thank you all very much for being here and a big thank you to the speakers again