- Bishop Hill blog

More from Cameron Rose, who is attending a business and climate conference in Brussels.

The Big Fat Carbon Price (see the end of yesterday's post) was the subject for the first discussion, surprise, surprise. Tony Hayward was the man to watch. He is chairman of Glencore, a mining company, and CEO of an Anglo-Turkish company called Genel Energy. He was once BP CEO. Here are the key points I noted:

'Fossil fuels provide 82% of world energy but in 30 years the IEA expects it to be a percentage in the early 70s.' (Not much reduction there, then)
'The emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been a mess and we are now left with a dysfunctional energy market.' (Not afraid to speak plainly.)
'If the objective is to change behaviour it must be at the point of use. We need to eliminate subsidies.'
'The abatement of a tonne of CO2 from a coal power stations should be treated the same way as for other, new technologies.'
'China and India must complete their industrialisation.'

And things livened up when Kerry Adler, CEO of Skypower (solar) entered the debate. Kerry is in favour of decarbonisation. Fast. But he said this:

'I am not sure what carbon tax means and most people don't know what carbon prices mean. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we don't make it clear what we are trying to do. We have to keep it simple and governments have to have the people behind them.' (I liked that. I'll come to that later.)

'We understand, for example, 'pollution tax'. We need to focus on something simple. Let's take the tax money, put it in the World Bank and give it to people to make a difference.' (That roused a bit of a applause)

'Any tax which is not enforceable is useless' (This was becoming the closest thing to a dispute on the panel.)

Everyone here is hugely in favour of a price on carbon, mainly Fat. And Fast. I asked a question about the need for public consent for a carbon tax, which led to considerable debate about democracy.

I must spare your the next session on building energy capacity. Suffice it to say I was astonished at the repeated linking of any and every climate phenomenon to human-caused climate change by almost all on the panel. It seems no one had heard what AR5 and the 2011 SREX report says about attribution and extreme weather.

DAY 2 PM

But on to Nick Stern. He was pitched against the Saudi Minister of Petroleum Ali al Naimi. Lord Stern was smooth, persuasive and strategic. But he did dominate and everything he said is contingent of some assumptions that are dubious to say the least. Every word from the 80-year-old Saudi Minister was parsed carefully - perhaps in respect and trepidation as to what he might announce. He accepted the basic case for human caused climate influence the need to decarbonise, but he was not going to be bulldozed into unrealistic commitments and suggested it needed to be something which would realistically happen around 2040-50 (by which time many of us, including the man himself, will be long gone). And he was at pains to point out the benefits the world had received from fossil fuels. But he talked of his country's massive investment in solar.

A hallowed concept in the green investment industry is the 'stranded assets' concept - referring to the post COP21 period when holders of investments in, or owners of, fossil fuel resources, find regulation squeezes their value leaving their assets stranded. I posed the question that if COP21 was unsuccessful the stranded assets might be those who bet the bank on renewables. It was given polite consideration but in reality no one could countenance it as a likely concept.

One person I spoke to runs a wave energy company in the US He readily admitted that wave energy would never be competitive and that there was a recent history of such companies failing - he knew a fair amount about the failure of Pelamis in Edinburgh. But he was hoping it will come good in the future - apparently relying on a new paper (he's going to send it to me) by a UK academic predicting an increase in temperature between 6 and 10 degrees. I confirmed he meant by 2100. Yes he sure did!

And then there was the Director of Advocacy of a global charity who wanted to know whether I was going to disinvest from fossil fuels. 'Because it is now inevitable we will reach 4 degrees by 2100.'

At least the representatives from a Chinese news agency were a little more sceptical.

There is no space or time here to report on Laurent Fabius, French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development. . . and half a dozen other ministers from assorted states (apparently I missed President Francois Hollande yesterday). US Secretary of State John Kerry appeared by video link.

And as a reminder to self here is a list of the most repeated phrases:

'Time is running out'
'2 degrees'
'First time we have brought all these people (from business and government) together.'
'We must succeed at COP21'
'Even if we don't get a full agreement in Paris we have momentum'
'Two degrees'.
'For the first time senior business leaders 'get it''
'Two degrees' . . .

Nonetheless this was an impressive gathering of business leaders and politicians. Almost every one of them took as their starting point that time is running out and the situation was urgent, caveated in some cases (eg Saudi Petroleum Minister and Tony Hayward) by a recognition that the transition to no carbon would take a good few decades.

As I dined beside the Seine with a dozen or so ESG experts, I wonder how they will feel in ten years' time should their panic prove to be based on shonky assumptions about the science.

That's it over and we now wait for a tsunami of press releases leading to COP21 in December. Here is the one from this conference. No one asked me if I approved it.