Abstract
Fossil fuels have powered the industrialisation of many nations and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, however another century dominated by fossil fuels would be disastrous. On the one hand, fossil fuels are responsible for the majority of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and projected increases in oil, gas and coal demand are incompatible with the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change. On the other hand, although the demise of fossil fuels has been often predicted, they have proved remarkably resilient and with low prices and superabundant resources they are likely to play a role in world energy going forward. This chapter sets out the premise of the book, to focus attention on the need to manage the decline of fossil fuels as the world shifts towards a low-carbon energy transition. Although low carbon energy, notably renewables, has evidenced significant growth in recent decades, fossil fuels continue to dominate the global energy landscape and carbon emissions are once again on the rise. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that humanity has a mere decade to limit climate change, the global energy system is therefore at a critical juncture. As this chapter argues, a nuanced understanding of the fossil fuel sector is required, given that the decline of fossil fuels, managed or otherwise, will have significant, multiple, interrelated and largely unknown repercussions as we enter a new phase of geopolitics, with resultant impacts to existing and future relations, politics and trade between countries.
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Notes
- 1.
Climate change has been called a ‘Wicked Problem’ as it is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems (Wood, 2016).
- 2.
This spectrum of change must also include the way in which we fundamentally produce, use and consume energy. For more information on the requirements for the low carbon energy transmission refer to the Energy Transitions Commission (2019).
- 3.
In addition to the report by the Global Commission, see also the Climatic Change Special Edition ‘Fossil Fuel Supply and Climate Policy’ (van Asselt and Lazarus, 2018); ‘The Sky’s Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production’ (Muttitt, 2016); and ‘A Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production’ (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2018).
- 4.
See Hölscher et al. (2017) on the differences between transition and transformation in understanding and interpreting system change.
- 5.
The following websites provide detailed and authoritative information on climate change science and the legal and governance frameworks at the international, regional, national and sub-national level: see United Nations Climate Change (https://unfccc.int/); United Nations Environment Programme (https://www.unenvironment.org/); World Meteorological Organization (https://public.wmo.int/en); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch); Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (http://climatechangereconsidered.org/); Yale program on Climate Change Communication (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/); Committee on Climate Change (https://www.theccc.org.uk/); 350 (https://350.org); C40 Cities (https://www.c40.org/); NASA Global Climate Change (https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/).
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Wood, G. (2020). Fossil Fuels in a Carbon-Constrained World. In: Wood, G., Baker, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Fossil Fuels and Energy Transitions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28076-5_1
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