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Carbon Tracker

Expect the Unexpected: The Disruptive Power of Low-carbon Technology

By Luke Sussams, et. al. - Carbon Tracker, February 2017

The time for energy transformations is now.

Achieving climate stability will require deep and widespread changes in the global energy sector. Fossil fuel industry projections, however, continue to show a future energy system with few changes to that of today. This is in spite of examples of disruption in the energy sector at the hands of the low-carbon transition. This scenario analysis was produced in partnership between Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and explores the extent to which ongoing cost reductions could see solar photovoltaics (PV) and electric vehicles (EVs) impact future demand for coal, oil and gas. The findings of this study should motivate energy companies and their investors to retire the use of business as usual (BAU) scenarios and further integrate the consideration of downside demand scenarios.

Read the report (PDF).

Ending the Oil Age

By Jess Worth; lead image by Jenna Pope - New Internationalist, November 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

In September 2014, the $860 million Rockefeller Foundation made an historic announcement. Timed to coincide with massive marches for climate action all over the world, the fund revealed it was going to divest from fossil fuels. Following in the footsteps of the World Council of Churches, the British Medical Association and Stanford University, the latest major institution to make such an announcement is also the most symbolic. Because the Rockefeller fortune owes its very existence to oil.

The Rockefeller story is also the story of the rise and fall of the first ‘oil major’. Standard Oil, founded by John D Rockefeller in 1870, soon came to control the burgeoning US oil industry, from extraction to refining to transportation to retail.

It built an unprecedented monopoly that ultimately became so publicly despised that the US government stepped in and broke it up – birthing Exxon, Mobil and Chevron, among others. But by then, Standard had already set the Western world on a path to oil dependence that we are still shackled to, chain-gang-style, today.

The forced break-up created the Rockefeller millions. A century later, those millions are being used to make a dramatic point: we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the oil age.

The Fine Print I:

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The Fine Print II:

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