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This is made of oil.
This is also made of oil.
TOY PLAYS ARABIAN MUSIC
200 million years ago, there was land here, not sea.
200 million years ago,
a layer of plants and animals were squashed under rocks.
These now become oil.
You know, humans have been on the planet for what,
200,000, 300,000 years?
Modern humans for 10,000 years.
The Industrial Revolution only started in 1850 and onwards.
And, actually, the fossil fuel-driven society
has probably really only been 100 years at most.
It's just a blip in the history of humankind.
But that blip in the history of humankind, where we've completely
locked ourselves in and completely normalised
the huge uses of both energy and particularly fossil fuels...
..that period is going to have impacts for centuries
and millennia to come.
It can feel like you're up against something that's so massive,
that's got the support of governments
and people who are so much more powerful than you...
..that it's quite difficult sometimes
to know what to do to change that.
I think that's basically what eco anxiety is...
..being constantly worried...
..about whether or not you're going to have a future.
WIND HOWLS
Somewhere between ten and 20 billion barrels of oil are still available
in the North Sea.
If all of that was found and combusted,
so that's going to be somewhere, very approximately,
between say four and ten billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
That is a huge amount of carbon dioxide
just from, remember, the North Sea, the UK's North Sea.
Britain has been defined by the North Sea.
In the beginning, companies from all around the world
came and invested huge sums in the search for oil and gas.
Nobody thought that there would be any oil in the North Sea -
that was just way beyond the bounds of possibility.
BOAT HORN SOUNDS
In fact, even to a few days before BP found oil,
the head of BP said it was an impossibility.
And then, in October 1970,
they found oil in, really, a massive field,
in the Forties field,
110 miles off to the northeast of Aberdeen.
Liquid gold.
Call it what you like, Britain now has oil,
billions and billions of barrels on it
and it has been quietly lapping at the doorstep all the time.
I was designing and constructing offshore oil platforms
with a team of other engineers.
When you're flying into a rig...
..when you look down at these oil platforms,
sometimes it just made me think,
"This is amazing that we've managed to do this."
We're drilling thousands of metres beneath the seabed
in a really hostile part of the world.
It was a bit like the Apollo project of the time.
REPORTER: North Sea platforms need saturation divers.
They are men who have to live for 30 days at a time
at seabed pressures of 400 or 500 feet.
Diver back in the bell.
It was like an adventure at first.
You got out there and just the sheer scale of it,
you know, the enormity of...
..of...
..this island in the middle of the North Sea...
..with just nothing.
I think there was this idea that we were in this new industry.
We were developing something which had never been done before.
And everything you did...
..would benefit the country, benefit the nation.
We were the pioneers, if you like.
You know, you were breaking new ground every time
and new wells coming in.
There was this idea that you had to make the most of it as well
because it wasn't going to last long.
Suddenly, crofters' and fishermen's sons and grandsons
are finding stable, well-paid jobs.
It means things like foreign holidays
and car ownership
and forms of consumption that are themselves oil-related.
There was a perception that Britain's or Scotland's oil
was being exploited for private gain.
In 1974, there were two general elections.
The SNP stood on a platform of saying, "This is your chance,
"perhaps your last chance, to claim ownership of these resources."
By some estimates, it could have made Scotland
one of the richest economies in Europe or the world.
There's a time coming...
And the argument was, if Scotland didn't achieve independence,
then the UK government was going to extract this oil
as quickly as possible under pretty favourable terms
for the multinationals.
At the time, I think we owned about 60% or 70% of BP.
We also created the British National Oil Corporation.
But the whole Thatcher ideology of let the markets run it
and give it over to the market, so all of that's sold.
Compare that to virtually any country in the world,
apart from the States, I think, who have all got nationalised
corporations of some kind,
but obviously the standout one is Norway -
I say that because it's a comparative size to Scotland
and it's probably the richest country in the world.
The government set about dividing up the sea into blocks...
..and selling off the national sea
to international companies such as BP and Shell and ExxonMobil,
which is based in the US, and selling off to them the rights
of drilling in the North Sea for oil and gas.
So companies, they'll bid for certain blocks
and then the licenses are awarded by the government
and sometimes there will be certain commitments with those licenses.
So you have to do X number of wells by a certain point and then,
you know, thereafter you have to come up with development plans
of how you're going to actually...
..what you're going to do with the licenses.
So, you know, it's a fairly...fairly straightforward process.
I think people absolutely are very concerned about climate change,
as we are as a sector,
but, if we kind of knee jerk one way or the other,
I think what will happen is we will see people losing their jobs,
we will see communities being left behind, and that's not
what we think we should be working towards as a sector.
And that's certainly not our aim with our...
..with the road map that we've put in place,
and now with the North Sea Transition Deal
that we've negotiated with the government.
In 2021, the government and the oil industry set up
the North Sea Transition Deal,
which was basically driven by two fundamental pressures -
falling oil prices and rising public concern about the climate.
" 'As part of the UK's shift towards green energy,
" 'through our landmark North Sea Transition Deal,
" 'we are backing the decarbonisation of the oil and gas sector
" 'to support high value jobs and safeguard the skills necessary
" 'to develop new low carbon industries across the country,'
"said a spokesperson."
I mean, that doesn't really make sense
because, I mean, they're talking about decarbonising
the oil and gas sector.
It's like, you can't decarbonise oil and gas.
It's just... Yeah, I don't know.
They're saying a lot of fancy words that really don't mean anything.
In 2015, Parliament basically passed an amendment to the Petroleum Act
that means that the government has a duty to maximise
economic recovery of offshore oil and gas resources.
I'm not paraphrasing - that's what the statute says.
The UK's former Chancellor, Philip Hammond,
in 2017, he said in a speech,
"We are working with industry to extract every drop of oil and gas
"that it is economic to extract."
We say between ten to 20 billion barrels of oil
are still out there for us to get after.
Erm, and...
And even that, you know...
Yeah, so... Which represents a massive opportunity for us.
Effectively, we're living inside an oil machine.
One of the foundations of the cultures
that have developed around oil is the assumption that energy
will be easy to access and freely available and cheap.
BP was very involved in helping to build a significant part
of what we have in the North Sea today.
The Forties field was one of the most significant fields.
We used to operate around 22 different fields platforms
a few years ago, now we operate about six.
We are comfortably the largest producer...
..in the North Sea.
We had a number of licences for a relatively small company.
We then did a transformative deal with Shell,
bought a big chunk of their UK business,
and immediately transformed ourselves
into a very material operator.
And, at the moment, we're the most active driller in the North Sea,
producing 1.6, 1.7 million barrels a day.
We go through about 1.5 million barrels of oil a day in the UK.
If we just take one part of the North Sea,
the Forties pipeline system,
it's arguably one of the largest machines in Western Europe,
or possibly the world, and that machine constitutes
all the platforms and all the oil wells and all the pipeline system.
It drains oil from right over on the edge of the UK sea limit,
or from the Brae field or the Montrose field,
through the Forties pipeline system....
..until it lands on the shore just north of Aberdeen.
And that is one continuous system
running all the way across the seabed...
..under the fields and forests and rivers.
One piece of clockwork.
One big machine.
In effect, we're living with that constantly running
24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Until finally it gets to the west of Edinburgh...
..where it comes to Grangemouth refinery,
and it also goes to an oil terminal at a place called Hound Point.
At Grangemouth, it's refined and it's turned into
a whole plethora of different products.
So petrol, aviation, fuel, diesel and even tarmac,
it's turned into that.
And, you know, in some ways it's a massively impressive feat
of engineering that oil is extracted in the North Sea...
..and then transported by pipeline into the middle of Scotland,
and then distributed across much of Scotland and the north of England.
Erm... But that comes at a cost.
I really wanted to get involved with the issues that are happening
right around me
because it's important that we are involved in the things that happen
right around us, as well as the stuff that's going on globally,
because it's all really connected.
As a medic, I care so deeply about health
and I think that, from this lens of health, we can actually achieve
a climate just or a better world for all of us.
Because when we realise that health, well, that the fossil fuel industry
is impacting health in different ways and pollution in the air
is impacting health, and therefore, if we stop this polluting,
we also increase health.
I have lived experience of this plant here.
This plant stole my oxygen...
..and it made me suffocate,
suffocate so much...
The Mossmorran Natural Gas Liquids, NGL, plant is part of the northern
North Sea Brent oil and gas field system and is located
on the outskirts of Cowdenbeath, Scotland.
There's so much flaring from this gas plant that it means
that local people, like, can't sleep well because of how bright it is.
In fact, the impact of Mossmorran and what's happening there and the
impact of the North Sea oil and gas industry on our health
and on our communities only serves to allow these things to continue
and to continue to cause harm,
so I think that that's why we need to draw these connections.
There's a new oil and gas project, which is set to be licensed
in the Cambo Field, which is in the North Sea.
It's one of the biggest North Sea oil fields that's ever been found.
So we're here to point out the hypocrisy of approving
this new field just after the IEA have said that we cannot approve
and we cannot invest in new oil and gas.
CHANTING
The International Energy Agency, they are very conservative, usually,
so the fact that they're saying no new oil and gas is a very big deal.
A lot of this new climate policy that's being put in, it feels
very performative because a lot of the actions that are happening
are still protecting the oil and gas industry.
It does come into question how much we are like living in democracy.
How much our politicians are actually representing us
or how much they're representing big business.
The government came out and said, "Yes, licensing will continue
"because we do need oil and gas activity to continue in the basin
"if we are to satisfy the demand that we know is going to continue.
"So, you know, better to have it with your home-grown sector
"on your doorstep, supporting the jobs, not offshoring
"your emissions, not having to import the gap that would emerge
"if you didn't continue to produce."
What they wanted to make sure was that, as they go forward
and that for every licensing round that does come up,
that it is still in line with the Paris commitments
and their net zero targets for 2050.
We can point to Â£350 billion in taxes paid for production
and that doesn't even take into account the associated
supply chain taxes that are generated and the jobs
that are generated off that.
LOUD BANG
By the mid 1980s, the British Exchequer was receiving a huge
amount of cash from revenue from the North Sea...
..which, of course, was used to pay for everything -
roads, schools and so on.
In London, the global finance centre for oil
had begun to be developed since the '50s.
This flourished on the back of UK North Sea oil as well.
It became an engine driving forward the UK finance sector.
And that cash flowed into the pension system as well.
Increasingly, UK pensions became linked to shares in BP and Shell.
And, indeed, by the 2000s,
about 30% of any major portfolio of pension funds
was in these two companies combined.
It's not just about the jobs in the industry,
it's the spin-off of that wealth.
People need a shop, people go out, people eat, people spend money,
people buy things,
that's how the cascade works.
The market, let's say the London Stock Exchange,
markets are considered to be amoral
because they are, they're not a person.
The market is a collection of thousands of activities happening
by individual investors making decisions on behalf of other people.
It's considered amoral because it's a machine.
It's not an individual.
Amoral is different to immoral, remember.
If you're an investor, return on equity is the thing that matters -
it tells you how profitable a business is.
A return on equity for the fossil fuel sector 20 years ago,
double digits, absolutely. 100%, the norm.
Today, return on equity is struggling to get to 5% and 6%.
Some of the fossil fuel firms, they're in what's called a
secular decline, arguably, already.
North Sea oil is a commodity,
it's an asset against which an enormous amount of debt
has been leveraged.
And the question is, does the asset maintain its value?
Does oil maintain its price?
And that really matters, because if it fails
to maintain its value then the debt leveraged against that asset
is going to become unpayable.
Conversely, the return on equity for offshore wind...
..is about 11%...
..onshore wind about ten
and onshore solar about 9%.
So you're already generating more return on equity
from putting your capital into the renewable energy space.
The question is, can it take as much capital as is currently
in the fossil fuel sector?
Those who own investments in North Sea oil have to believe
that it will continue and maintain its value as an asset.
And the question is, when does the value of the asset fall?
COMPUTER BEEPS AND WHIRS
And when the price of oil falls,
then oil becomes a stranded asset.
We have to reimagine the economy.
The way we've constructed it right now means that it's incredibly
unstable and prone to crashes.
If you look at the London Stock Exchange
and you look at the implied temperature change of all
the companies that are listed there,
particularly the oil and gas companies,
that we have three and a half degrees of change embedded
in the London Stock Exchange.
It's one of the worst exchanges in the world because it's where many
of the world's largest oil and gas companies list...
..which means that people's pensions,
savings and investments in the UK
are actually invested in financing a future that no-one wants to see,
but no-one really realises.
People tend to be ignorant about money because finance
is quite complicated.
And because it's been functioning by and large reasonably well
for so long, there's been this paternalistic culture
that's enabled people to just say,
"It's OK, don't worry, it's all working."
Whereas, actually, it's not.
We need to now rapidly raise our collective understanding of banking,
insurance and investment, particularly investment,
and particularly where you own companies that are undermining
the future that we wish to bequeath to our children.
Angel Gurria, when he was the Secretary-General of the OECD,
talked about carbon entanglement.
What he meant was, when you had ministers
from the environmental department
coming to UN meetings and pledging to stop certain activity,
let's say drilling...
..and then they would return home to find that the chancellor
of their exchequer wasn't prepared to stop that...
..because the amount of revenue that the Exchequer received
through the tax that was charged on the fossil fuel when it was sold...
..that that level of entanglement of economic activity meant that
we couldn't simply stop the thing that needed to stop...
..because, in stopping that...
..all other things would stop, too.
I think that my predictions
beyond 2050 are difficult to make...
..and the reason I say this is because I don't believe
the global economy will be functioning the way it is today
unless we make big, big changes over the next five to ten years
to manage the disaster that's just around the corner.
A series of crises that will begin unfolding after mid-century
is going to mean the end of the global economy.
I believe that what we do over the next five years,
and the "we" in that sentence refers to humanity,
will determine the future of humanity for the next millennium.
I think people will look back on this era of oil and just think
about how ridiculous it was.
How could you know about such a massive issue
and still worry more about profit?
It feels a bit surreal in a way.
WAVES ROAR
The whole issue of climate change became quite relevant,
and there was a lot of discussions around that in the late '80s
and the early '90s, and it wasn't something I knew a lot about,
so I decided to go back to university to try and find something
out about climate change,
and so I decided in the end to leave the oil industry.
When we burn oil and gas, or indeed any fossil fuel,
it's made up of two principal elements -
one's carbon and one's hydrogen.
That carbon combusts with the oxygen in the atmosphere.
And now, of course, we're burning all of this fossil fuel so rapidly.
Remember, these are fossil fuels that were laid down by trees
and by other plants over millions of years.
We're taking them all out of the ground and almost overnight
releasing all of that carbon back out into the atmosphere,
this carbon dioxide, through the combustion in our car engines
and our power stations.
So very, very deliberately, as part of market ideology,
is the idea that we can't allow democracies or governments or states
to regulate or to manage the production and the extraction
of finite assets -
this has to be left to something called the invisible hand.
And if the invisible hand decides that in a world of climate breakdown
it's necessary to churn out more fossil fuels, then the invisible
hand will actually disadvantage the public and governments
and, indeed, that is what is happening now.
Once the crude gets to a refinery like Grangemouth...
..it's made into lots of things like petrol, aviation fuel and tarmac.
It's also made into this substance called naphtha,
which is the sort of, a basis that you would use to make plastics.
You then put it into a petrochemical plant and you make other stuff
out of it, such as ethylene.
And then that ethylene is made into other stuff such as PVC.
And that is plastic as we know it.
When you burn a gallon of petrol, it goes into the atmosphere
pretty quickly. When you turn it into a plastic toy and that's used
for a bit and then thrown away, it stays in a landfill
for many hundreds of years...
..possibly thousands of years.
And then there are tiny bits of plastic, microplastics,
which are in everything.
The water from the tap, in rivers and in seas,
and even in our human tissues and organs
and in the tissues of other animals.
And all those bits of plastic at some point
came out of an oil well.
And it wasn't so recently.
Plastics weren't really being used until the '60s in any major way.
Since signing the Paris Agreement in 2016, the UK Government has given
Â£4 billion of public money to North Sea oil and gas companies.
That is a huge amount of money that should be being used for
public good and is instead propping up these big, polluting,
harmful companies.
I heard about a case that was happening that was taking the
UK Government to court around these subsidies and around the new policy
that had been created by the Oil and Gas Authority,
which basically allows for the promotion of oil and gas production.
I feel like I got to a point where I was so desperate
about - what should I do? What can I do?
I'm taking the UK Government to court to pull the plug
on public payments for big polluters.
The world is moving away from an oil and gas economy
to a lower carbon economy,
so we, BP, intend to be part of that transition.
So I think, if we, if we didn't make the move, we wouldn't exist.
We will be taking carbon emissions from heavy industry
that is based in the Teesside area
and sequestering that in reservoirs offshore.
We'll be using the same very similar expertise
to what we've used with our oil and gas production
to capture that material and inject it.
The oil industry has traditionally been full of people
who love solving problems.
That's why people become engineers,
because they want to build big things and do stuff,
and that doesn't matter whether you're a woman or a man.
It's that challenge in your mind that you love -
and this is another challenge.
In 20 years' time, I would love in the UK that we're still producing
the same level, the same level of hydrocarbons that we're producing
now, but with a net, with a net zero footprint.
So we often hear this language now, particularly of net zero.
So what really is it? We need to sort of understand what it is.
And, actually, from a purely scientific point of view,
it makes some sort of sense.
The idea is that we have to get to a point where the emissions
we put into the atmosphere are balanced by those
that are removed from the atmosphere.
So what we put out is balanced by what is taken back in.
And we then give it like a year,
so at some point in the future, always a long way away,
so something like 2050.
In 2050, we will have this net zero, where we'll have found a way
to balance our emissions, which are still quite significant then,
with sinks that absorb the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
We are setting up a carbon capture business of which may ultimately
take some of the CO2 that we produce from a hydrogen process
and then we will store that carbon in underground reservoirs,
depleted gas fields, where we produce the hydrocarbons from there.
We know the history, we know the structure.
Actually, the UK could be in a really robust position
for carbon capture with the spin-offs for potentially
supply chain benefits, exporting some of those skills
to other countries.
We have very few working examples of carbon capture and storage
on power stations.
I've got colleagues that have been working on this for 20 years.
There is currently no operational carbon capture and storage, CCS,
capacity in the UK or Europe.
All estimates are that there won't be in the next decade,
and the next decade really matters.
So it's absolutely no excuse to continue expanding oil and gas
infrastructure on the assumption that we can bring down
those emissions using that technology in the next few years.
It's just, it's not going to happen.
We will maintain some level of oil and gas production over time,
but we're hugely ramping up our investments in non oil and gas
forms of energy as well.
We're about to get into a ScotWind leasing process.
That, the process itself to actually acquire the leases, takes time.
From the point at which wind leases are acquired
to when wind farms are installed
is normally a period of about ten years.
We will do everything we can to compress that period
and make it faster.
But it's almost, just the realities of what happens is these...
What we are talking about is changing the infrastructure
of the world - that takes time.
For decades, the world has been built on
a hydrocarbon-based infrastructure.
Maybe a good analogy would be
it's almost like replacing all the veins in the human body.
I guess we have an addiction to oil and gas in our society
and that's why we need to work thoughtfully
as to how we move forward.
Just to stop it for the sake of stopping it
isn't going to stop the demand that's associated with it.
Everything we use has an oil base virtually in it.
You know, from your shoes, the tyres on the electric car,
or the iPhone. I think the iPhone's got about six litres of oil
used in its manufacture.
Your waterproof jacket, which we all need here in Scotland,
there's hydrocarbon in it.
You know, you're going to need it.
So having a go at North Sea oil and gas production...
..in itself, I think, is unfair.
People in the oil industry and just people in general have a go
at environmentalists for, you know, using phones and buying shoes.
If people think you're a hypocrite,
they're not going to listen to what you have to say
and, I mean, that is exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants.
It takes the pressure off of them and onto everyday people
whose individual actions in the grand scheme of things
is tiny compared to the actions of massive fossil fuel corporations.
We need to start talking about this as a systemic problem
and not as an individual problem.
There's no real consumer choice around the fact that we live in
an energy infrastructure that means we have to use oil and gas
currently because other alternatives are not being promoted.
This is not made of oil.
I think we've been hearing that the oil and gas company
is the answer to our future energy needs for decades
and the fact is that their investment in renewable energy
is a vanishingly small proportion of their overall investment.
The Oil and Gas Authority, if you open up their website
or indeed go to their Twitter account, that's what they say,
"We're there to maximise oil and gas production," and they help
the government meet its net zero.
That demonstrates to me absolutely clearly how net zero
is basically a front for an incrementally greenwashed
business as usual.
It delays any real action.
It relies on technologies that are either highly speculative
or in only very small pilot schemes at the moment to remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, hundreds of billions of tonnes
of carbon dioxide, not small quantities, out in the future.
And when I say "we're" going to remove it,
not us, our children and our children's children.
BIRD CRIES
There are several parts of Fort William that are threatened
with flooding, and this will include the main roads
and the main rail lines between Fort William and Glasgow...
..and that means that there's going to be a transport problem
in the future, and food supplies might cut out at some point.
In 50 years' time, if nothing changes,
the water levels could rise to 40 centimetres.
Already this winter, it flooded right up to where I'm sitting
and the road had to be closed.
If the road up to the high school could be closed,
how could the children get to school?
Well, in 50 years' time, I'm worried that there won't be the same type
of wildlife as there is right now because of climate change.
Ullapool's like a fishing village,
so then, if the smaller fish die out,
then the bigger fish won't have anything to eat,
and that's kind of like the same as puffins
that live around the coastal areas of Scotland.
They could be affected by climate change, if the temperature rises
and the sea levels rise,
because then that would make the smaller fish swim away
to places that are cooler or further north.
Puffins will die of starvation if they don't sort something out soon.
This bridge could be completely underwater.
The SEC behind us, where they're holding COP26,
that's going to be completely destroyed.
There are so many things happening in the world right now that...
..I'm honestly not sure I could face
bringing even like a child into the world.
If we don't make the change now, we never will.
It's actually so much closer than a lot of us are actually
willing to believe...
..and that's quite terrifying.
Adults have made their life choices. They've got their career
and they've, you know, sometimes they have a family,
they have a house, and it's not going to impact their lives
in the same way it will impact us because, you know,
what career am I going to have based off of this
and where am I going to live?
And what food am I going to be able to eat?
DUCK QUACKS
We're going to have several metres of sea level rise already locked in
and, since Edinburgh is on the coast,
that poses a pretty severe threat to lots of areas around here.
Everything would be under water,
the Ocean Terminal mall, the pub at the end of the road over there,
everything.
It's not even that far in the future,
like, I'll maybe just be starting retirement.
Even if we feel like it's in the distant future,
areas I go all the time will not be, they won't even exist any more.
THEY CHANT: BP, Shell, take your oil and go to hell.
ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, take your oil and go to hell.
ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, take your oil...
The things I am most worried about is the future
for children aged 15,
children aged three, four, five.
They will presumably expect to be alive by the end of the century.
And, at the moment, that is really not looking like the sort of place
you'd like to live in.
So what we are seeing is a major disturbance
in the global weather system,
but much more serious is what is happening to that ice on Greenland.
As the ice melts, it enters the ocean
and there's enough ice there that, when it's all melted,
sea levels globally will rise by an average of 7.5 metres,
24 feet...
..and we will not recognise the world when that has happened.
And, quite frankly, I believe this is already happening
towards that final level of 24 feet sea level rise.
WATER ROARS
The Paris Agreement says that 1.5 degrees should be our aim
and the fact that we're heading much more rapidly towards 3.5 degrees
should be a grave concern for everybody.
SHOUTING
My family is still mostly in Bangladesh
and I see it as, I guess in my case,
a very personal example of the deep injustice
at the heart of the climate crisis.
As a country, it's done so little historically to contribute
to the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere
and it's done so little to cause the climate crisis,
and yet people there will be bearing the impact, already are
overwhelmingly living with the impacts
that we're currently experiencing of climate change.
A half a metre sea level rise by 2050,
we will see the... Everyone knows Bangladesh,
two thirds of the country under water.
It's expected that tens of millions...
I think one estimate is that 30 million people
will have to emigrate
as a result of the impacts of climate change.
Vietnam, 90% of the country under water, sea water
at least once a year by 2050, in 30 years' time.
The Mekong Delta region is the biggest series
of rice paddy fields in the world.
By the time we get to mid-century, rice production will collapse.
At 3.5 degrees, roughly 74% of the world's population
cannot live where they do today
because the midday summer air temperature will be too hot
for the body to be able to function.
The body's inner organs will start to collapse.
We are looking, by mid-century,
possibly at 100 million climate refugees
from that part of the world, possibly 200, 300 million...
..and that'll be happening around the world.
We have to defossilise the global economy as quickly as we can.
PLANE ROARS PAST
CHANTING
In my view, there are many reasons to be deeply critical
of the whole COP process.
The most dangerous voice there was that from the fossil fuel industry
and, remember, that industry is not always a private sector voice -
it's often the voice of the governments.
A lot of the oil companies are owned by the governments,
so the governments themselves are in effect the oil companies
in many parts of the world.
So whilst tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of protesters
and civil society activists and wider society
is kept at arm's reach...
..the fossil fuel lobbyists are right in there with the negotiators
before COP and during COP.
They're in the governments. They're part of the governments.
They're part of the DNA of the COP.
And then we stand back saying, "Oh, look, there's hardly anything
"about the fossil fuel industry and how we have to rapidly faze it out
"within the agreements that come out of these COPS."
And Glasgow, again, was just the same.
They're in and out of the ministries far more than,
I think there's some evidence that suggests nine or ten times
more often than you get people from the renewables coming in there,
and they've been doing this again for decade after decade.
The fact is that, if we were about to be hit by a meteorite,
if the country was about to be hit by a meteorite,
the government would do everything possible to prevent
that happening immediately.
It wouldn't say, "Oh, let's wait for the private sector to come up
"with a plan and a managed transition
"before the moment of impact."
Right? We can't afford to do that.
The urgency of the climate crisis is not entirely unlike
the threat we would face if we were to be hit by a meteorite.
And, therefore, we cannot rely on self-serving capital gains-making
shareholders in oil companies for that transition.
METALLIC CLANKING
We need to decommission properly.
There are certain obligations that we're under
and as a sector we want to make sure that we do tidy up after ourselves.
So we decommission, we do it safely, we do it efficiently,
we do it cost-effectively, and we do it with an environmental...head on.
The industry is liable for all the costs
associated with decommissioning.
The way that the tax regime works in this country for oil and gas
companies is that they can claim costs that they incur
from decommissioning oil and gas assets, which is another way
of saying cleaning up the mess that they've created.
You know, it's disassembling rigs, making sure that there isn't a whole
lot of toxic sludge left behind, the sort of clean-up
that all polluting industries have to do
when they exit from that industry.
But if you're an oil and gas company, the UK taxpayer
pays about 50% of the costs of decommissioning.
All companies in the sector benefit from that tax regime
and it means that, whether they're a British company
or a foreign company, they are not making a contribution
to the British economy in terms of the money that they contribute
to the public purse, and they are benefiting from taxpayer dollars.
The UK's Office of National Accounts has estimated
that over the next few decades we are on the hook
for Â£18 billion in decommissioning costs.
It's the kind of arrangement that no other industry benefits from.
We need to transition. We need to get the manufacturing site onshore.
For decommissioning oil and gas,
we could recycle the steel and we could build jackets for turbines.
We could build the turbines.
Right now, the future of North Sea oil
is in the hands of the investment houses.
As the oil and gas depletes in the UK now,
the majors aren't making enough quick enough,
and as their assets get older they've got to spend more money
on them and they don't want to be doing that either.
So what we've got now are...
..investment houses looking to make a quick buck.
As we move forward with the whole climate debate,
you're going to see these investment houses
being exposed and attacked for continuing to invest in oil and gas.
These investment houses are going to think twice and a lot of them
are just going to pull the plug.
And if they pull the plug...
..that ends operations here.
That shuts it down.
Oil and gas workers now are very worried
about what the future holds for them.
The technology, the ability, the core skills, the infrastructure,
the supply chain companies, they're all here.
They can all deliver
on what we need to do in the renewable sector,
whether it's carbon capture, whether it's hydrogen production.
We can do it all...
..given the chance.
You see, the big oil companies,
they're now beginning to sell up and move away...
..and in their place come a whole range of much smaller companies.
So those are private equity companies who are owned by
private individuals based in, say, for example, Switzerland
or the USA or Russia.
And then also state-owned companies,
such as Malaysia, Abu Dhabi,
but also China and Iran.
The Chinese National Offshore Oil Company
has three major oil fields in the North Sea -
Telford and Golden Eagle and Buzzard.
Buzzard is the highest producing oilfield in the UK North Sea,
so China has an increasingly important role to play
in the future of this area
and that's an important thing when we think about how much control
do we as British citizens have over the future of the North Sea.
If, say, for example, people in Scotland say, "We don't want
"that oil exploited because of climate change or whatever,"
then the UK would have to compensate
the Chinese National Oil Company, and effectively the Chinese state,
for tearing up the contract that it's made with it...
..which means that it is more and more removed from government control
and democratic control and public scrutiny.
DISTANT HORN BLARES
About two thirds of the oil that we produce is being exported
to countries such as China and the US,
and not used to be refined here, on the UK mainland...
..which undermines the argument that this is important
for UK energy security.
WAVES ROAR
I think we'll look back on this era as the good old days
before everything goes insane, and we can't even stop it any more.
And I think there is going to be a lot of resentment from future
generations because we really are at the last point
where we can change things.
And if we don't, I don't think the future generations
are ever really going to be able to forgive us.
Yeah, they're going to blame us
and we're not even the ones in control here.
We have been consistently wrong about the scale at which renewables
have become competitive.
The price of solar has dropped by 80% in the last decade.
Nobody, including the world's leading energy forecasters,
saw that coming.
So to continue to lock in our dependency on oil and gas,
because we think that in 30 years' time we might still need it
is a huge mistake.
Compared with digging deep beneath the North Sea to produce this,
you know, quite challenging material...
..to then pipe it day after day, year after year,
decade after decade, the huge refineries that then convert this
black goo into all sorts of amazing products, one way or another,
that we've managed to do that is incredible.
And then you look at the renewable industry now that's developing -
it looks so much simpler than this oil industry
that we've completely normalised.
And I look at the skills that we have offshore,
that degree of sort of, you know, engineering
understanding and so forth,
you think, if we applied that to the renewables,
we could deliver a renewable
renaissance, or a new renewable conversion from fossil fuels,
far more quickly than we ever built with the fossil fuel industry.
We need every institution of finance, be they insurers
or fund managers or banks, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF,
we all need to work collectively to make sure that we rebase global
economic growth so that it's no longer powered by fossil fuels.
If we don't deliver that, then civilisation itself is at risk.
I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it is a fact.
PLANE ENGINES ROAR
Oil was discovered in 1859 -
at that time, there were about 800 whaling vessels in the world...
..and that was how we powered lights in cities - whale oil.
About ten years later, half of that whaling fleet was worthless
because nobody needed the whales any more.
It's going to take a lot longer,
but the rigs of today can be equated to the whaling vessels
of 150 years ago.
This period of burning the fossil fuels,
of really taking what has been millions and millions of years
of laying down the carbon through natural processes
and suddenly releasing it, virtually overnight,
but that's a very short timeframe.
So to assume that we can't live as humans without fossil fuels
completely misunderstands that we have done so in the past...
..and that we will have to in the future.
We're embedded in the physical realm of the oil machine,
but we're also embedded in the emotional world of that.
It makes the way we think and it makes the way we feel.
The difficulties of getting out of oil
is that it feels like life is going to be more deprived...
..and we're frightened of that.
Our desires are often made possible by a level of energy consumption.
WATER GURGLES
We've been in the phase of oil.
We have to go beyond it.
We have to find a way out the other side of it.
That will lead us to learning new ways of being.