Explanation of the Oil Crisis

 

In 1856, a scientist, named Eunice Foote, conducted an experiment. She filled one tube with regular air, and another with carbon dioxide, put thermometers in them, and placed them in the sun. And she noticed, the tube of carbon dioxide got a lot hotter, and stayed hot longer. She published her results noting that "an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature". Three years later, Edwin Drake struck oil in Western Pennsylvania. A hundred years after that first well, the American oil industry celebrated its centennial. And they invited the physicist Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, to make a speech about the future of energy. 

We probably have to look for additional fuel supplies, he told the crowd. Because the extra carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels causes a greenhouse effect. Which, he believed, would be sufficient to melt the ice cap and submerge New York. By 1965, scientists were confident enough to formally warn U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson A decade later, Exxon's own scientists were making grim predictions. By 1988, it was front page news. And since then, we 've kept pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate. We have a world economy today that depends on fossil fuels for most of its energy. 

A third of it from oil. It's a tremendous irony that the very substances that helped us achieve this level of development today are, now, the very substances that endanger the future of civilization as we know it. Governments are starting to agree that we shouldn't let the world warm more than one-point-five degrees centigrade, and we're on track to blow past that by twenty-thirty. So, why is it so hard to turn off the tap? And can we do it in time? Industrial nations have developed a great dependency on oil. It has added a new freedom to our lives. The invaluable stocks of oil in these exotic islands. Their wealth is cracking the old life of Arabia wide open. Nigerian government love the oil more than our lives. Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide surround us. 

If man continues to abuse his environment, Earth too may become barren. The story of oil is a story of geopolitical clash, technological advancement and intense competition. The story of oil is a story of inequality. It's a story of dominance. The Nigeria in which I was born in was just a couple of years before the ending of the British colonial rule. At the time, it was an agricultural economy. Cotton from the north, cacao from the west, and rubber from the mid-west. And in the area where Nnimmo grew up, fishing. The Niger Delta is an area that is crisscrossed by water bodies, creek streams, rivers, estuaries which is the breeding ground for most fish in the Gulf of Guinea. It was so fertile, fishermen could just leave their traps at high tide and pick them up at low tide. And in the evenings... Children would sit around in the moonlight, and the elders would share stories.

 They didn't know they were sitting on one of the most oil-rich regions on Earth. Until the British granted Shell and BP an exclusive permit to explore for oil. They struck black gold in 1956. Nigerians were extremely hopeful that the discovery of oil in their would bring about positive changes in their economic wellbeing, in the health conditions of the people in terms of employment and everything. And just a few years later, Nigeria won independence. The future looked bright. After all, fossil fuels had transformed other countries. The world's wealthiest nations had once been much poorer. The amount of work a person could do was the amount they could do with their hands possibly helped by a horse or mule. Coal was the first discovery that changed all that. Ancient organisms in oceans and swamps had soaked up the power of the sun. Their fossils compressed over millions of years into coal, and a mile or more down into natural gas and crude oil. Burning coal, this time-capsule of the sun's energy, helped Britain become the first industrialized nation and the most powerful empire the word had ever seen. And then, oil came along. And that stared off this kind of boom. It was discovered that gasoline, which had been kind of this waste product when they refined oil, was actually a very good fuel for cars.

 Oil was the most energy-packed liquid source of power that you could get your hands on. Right from the very beginning, it was very important to the British navy who wanted to have access to British-controlled oil. It started as a syndicate of private investors that went on a journey and an adventure to find oil the in the foothills of the Zagros mountains in Persia. That was the start of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Later renamed, British Petroleum. And they were just in time. The first world war began with cavalry charges and people on horses, and it ended with airplanes, with tanks, with trucks. When the allied navy switched to using oil instead of coal, those ships could go further before refueling. Oil put the world in motion. People were finding newfound freedom driving all over the place, flying all over the place. It's pulled millions of people out of poverty. What oil did was really create the modern world. Power plants were built. Roads were built. 

Gas stations were built. Refineries were built. Everybody wanted investment in oil and gas. But the profits were lopsided. The ocean of crude oil underneath Persia’s desert led the way to the Middle East oil boom. Iran was making just a fraction of the profits from their own oil while the British raked in the rest. And they decided they were sick of that deal. Long-smoldering Iranian nationalists made clear their intention to seize the oil industry and expropriate the British company. So, in 1953, Britain and the U.S. engineered a coup, overthrowing Iran's democratically elected leader to install the Shah. Because they felt that he was more amenable to having a great relationship with the West. Which is how a young Lord Brown ended up there. 

Yeah, I spent many years as a child in Iran when my father was working in the oil industry. And when he turned eighteen, he started working for BP himself. I joined the oil industry believing it was a place where you could solve problems that no one had solved before. How could you use oil to go further and farther? At the time, BP was one of seven companies from just three countries that controlled 85% of the world's oil reserves. And, over in Nigeria, they quickly learned that oil didn't mean prosperity for everyone. Under colonial rule, the British had forced diverse states into a single nation. And, after independence, Nimmo's home region announced it was seceding. As a young child, I did not fully understand what was at stake. To me, the most exciting thing was that there was going to be a new nation called Biafra. But this region encompassed most of the Niger Delta and its oil reserves.

 So, when the Nigerian government declared war, the British gave their support. My village was, more or less, a warfront. The government blockaded the region. It’s estimated that more than a million civilians died of starvation. I still hear voices in my head, sometimes, of people asking for help, crying for food. It’s not something that you forget in a hurry. Biafra surrendered in 1970. The next year, Nigeria joined OPEC, an alliance of oil-producing nations that wanted to take back control of their resources. And, in the 70s, they wielded their power, raising oil prices, with some countries, boycotting the U.S. for their military support of Israel. It suddenly turned into a crisis and a shock to the political order. Gasoline stations ran dry. Airlines cut back flight schedules. Factories were forced to close. And, in 1979, when the Iranians overthrew the Shah and took back control of their oil prices went through the roof again. 

And while that was bad for oil-consumers... Oh, it's ridiculous, you know. You know, it's... You just don't know where it's gonna stop. It was great for oil producers. Nigeria became one ofthe wealthiest countries in Africa. But after that 70s boom, oil prices crashed, and so did Nigeria's economy. The idea of the resource curse is that countries don't necessarily do better just because they have an abundance of natural resources. It can throw off the currency valuation. Make other industries less competitive. And cause economic turmoil and corruption. The problem is not the resource. The problem is how the resource is exploited. It's one thing for a country to get oil revenues. It's another thing is who gets the money and where does it go? A large chunk of that has been taken out by transnational corporations. And the money that stays goes to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, which is owned by the government, and is also in charge of regulating the country's oil industry. So, we have an operator who is also a regulator. And since independence, billions have disappeared. 

That level of corruption, it corrupts, not just people economically it corrupts the political system. And there were other costs. In the Niger Delta, over 50 years of spillage has created 27,000 miles of toxic oil swamps. Kids are swimming in water covered in crude oil. Life expectancy is at 41 years, maybe one of the lowest in the entire world. Fishermen can no longer just leave their traps at high tide. You have fisher folks who go into the rivers and toil all day, all night, and catch nothing. And no more moonlit nights. The gas flares set up by the oil corporations run 24 hours every day. And on top of all that, Nigeria is a hot, dry country which means it's more sensitive to rising temperatures. And, as of 2020, the global temperature has increased by more than one degree centigrade. Heat waves are getting stronger, more frequent and more deadly. It is powering hurricanes that intensify more quickly. Wildfires are burning much greater area. Climate change is not responding to our annual emissions, what we’re putting out this year. It's responding to our cumulative emissions. And so, the rich countries caused the problems. 

We are the ones who put out all these carbon emissions over all these years. But developing countries are facing the brunt of the cost. It's already pushed millions of people to flee their homes. The clock is ticking, and we can really wonder whether there's any hope that we can pull this off or whether we've come to the precipice as, as a human race. What's at risk? Not the planet, it will survive. What's at risk is us. The world emits around fifty-billion tons of greenhouse gases a year more than it ever has. And governments agree we need to get to net zero by 2050. And achieve carbon neutrality. We are gonna move to net zero in a transition in all countries. Strong aspiration to reach net zero... Significantly reducing emissions.

 Legislation, uh, for net zero. Nigeria has rolled out institutional frameworks to cut emissions by 20%. This issue is not like the Coronavirus where you need one vaccine to deal with one virus and its variants. This is a very broad issue that needs lots of solutions. And it's going to require a lot of technology that really hasn't been developed yet. But there have been dramatic changes. Wind and solar power are now cheaper than coal in a lot of countries. Battery technology is improving rapidly. Governments are investing in more hydropower and nuclear plants. Electric cars are getting cheaper every year. And for long-haul ships and planes, engineers are working on biofuels and liquid hydrogen. And people are working on solutions for every piece of this pie.

 And the current goal isn't  to get to zero carbon emissions. People are targeting net-zero. Net-zero. They are saying, we will produce carbon, but we will off-set it. By restoring forests, wetlands. Techniques in the ocean. Which can help soak up more carbon. Or carbon-capture technology, which is still expensive. And that is an issue with a lot of these solutions. So many governments are trying to tip the balance. More than 40 counties have a price on carbon to make burning fossil fuels more costly. In over the past decade, the U.S. has been moving from coal to natural gas the result of fracking. The U.S. went from being the world's largest importer of oil to the world's largest producer of oil. And the natural gas plants the U.S. has been building, are major investments in a fossil fuel future.

 But it's  helped the country significantly reduce emissions. And the emissions are dropping in Europe too. But global emissions are not. When you look at where emissions are growing right now, all of that is happening in the developing world. Even if the United States and Europe all work together to fix the problem, we are still not there unless we bring the developing world along because that is where the emissions of the future are. Without keeping emissions down in the developing world, we will all fry. As a Nigerian and as an African, it's very, very tough to see people living in extreme poverty and tell them that, you know, let’s wait a few years till we get the best possible solution to get you out of that. The average young person in Africa, wants to have the same amount of energy as the average young person in America.

 They want to have the same type of opportunities, and energy is that golden thread that hinders people to reach their full potential. While Nigeria's land is energy rich... It's the country that has the largest energy access deficit in the world. In a country of, around, two hundred million people almost half don't have access to electricity. And for those who do... Every day at nine o' clock in the morning, all the power supply goes off where I live. It comes back at two PM and then it goes off again at eight PM. So, most businesses rely on diesel-powered generators to keep the lights on. There is eight hundred million people around the world that do not have access to energy. 

 And to have enough energy to live a full and dignified life. It is not an inconvenience. It is a difference between life and death for a lot of people. They need to be able to develop, to have electricity and infrastructure like we do. But today, we know that there is better ways to do that than the ways we did it two or three hundred years ago. So, you hear about leapfrogging. That developing countries can just jump over the technologies that the wealthy world used to get wealthy. Instead, they will develop based on renewables. There is a bit of a hypocrisy with developed countries asking countries that currently do not have that much money to leapfrog and transition out of something that they are still doing.

 Lets say I have an Auntie in Lagos Island, and she takes a public bus from home to her business every single day. She's been saving up money to buy a little two-door car which probably runs on diesel or petrol. And she says, well, I don't have any money to buy an electric car and you say no, you have to continue on the bus till you get the electric car. That is what energy transition looks like now in Africa. Before you can tell the developing world, you know, don't use fossil don't use coal, you have to have financing behind that. For Africa to actually transition, experts say it would take an investment of $70 billion every year. The global North should pay a climate-debt for the exploitation that has gone on for so many years. Those who created the problem, have a duty to invest in making this happen. And when global leaders met in Paris in 2015, they agreed. The landmark Paris Climate Accord included something called the Green Climate Fund a way for wealthy countries to help developing nations transition.

 They pledged to give a hundred billion a year by 2020. And we are nowhere near getting that. They have fallen short by ninety billion. Some wealthier countries are investing billions in clean energy projects across Africa. But they are investing even more in fossil fuels. In 2020, Britain's Prime Minister addressed a UK-Africa summit. There is no point in the UK reducing the amount of coal we burn if we then trundle over to Africa and line our pockets by encouraging African states to use more of it. Is there? But days later, it came out that 90% of the energy deals that Britain had made that week were in fossil fuel projects. And the pattern continues. China has made wind and solar technologies much cheaper. But they're also still investing in coal plants. And recently, the U.S. has invested $9 billion in fossil fuels around the world most in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

While the streets of wealthy countries are getting cleaner, with cars that are more fuel-efficient or electric, a lot of these old, fuel-guzzling models aren't vanishing from the face of the Earth. They are exported to countries like Nigeria, because they are the only kinds of cars most people there can afford. Africa is basically seen as a dumping ground for technologies. And though Nigeria is the largest oil producer on the continent, the few refineries they have are closed or dysfunctional. So, they export their crude oil around the world and import most of their fuel from the Netherlands and Belgium. But it's not the same stuff that they burn. Investigators found that diesel samples contained sulfur levels 204 times what is allowed under European fuel standards.

 There is a lot being invested in destruction in the world today. The challenge the world faces now is to move from a system of inequality to a system that is more just and more fair. I certainly feel ownership for both the benefits of oil and gas and the issues including climate change. Back in 1997, Lord Browne made a speech that shocked the oil industry. There is a discernable human influence on the climate. The oil world reacted badly, and declared that I had, quote, left the church. But now, the world's oil giants are also acknowledging we need to get to net zero. They see which way the political winds are blowing and they are going with them. They must contribute to the solution, not just hope the word sorry can get you out of the penalty box. Most companies have a choice to make. But overall, these oil companies have chosen oil. Renewables make up less than one percent of their investments.

One report estimates that in 2030, most of the world's oil giants will actually be producing more oil than they do today. And while private companies once ruled the world, government owned ones now produce half the world's oil and gas. And many of their economies are largely dependent on them. Countries that are very economically dependent on oil, face a real challenge. Their production tends to be cheaper than anybody else's. So, they'll probably be the last people, as it were, to turn out the lights on this industry. The $88 trillion world economy has been based on an energy system in which oil has the preeminent role. 

Other energy transitions took centuries. This is meant to happen in 30 years. I expect oil will be around for quite a long time. But it will be used by people who have no option but to use oil. Rich countries who are historically responsible for the greatest proportion of carbon emissions, they have the greatest responsibility to act first and most. So, there's this issue of fairness, and, in a sense, everyone is right here. But it doesn't really matter. We all need to work on this together whether or not its fair in any sense. Developing countries are saying yes, we want to be part of this, we want to transition, but we really need the help. We cannot achieve our climate goals if we don't achieve universal access for everybody. 

The story of energy, climate change, and development have to be one of the same. 30 years from now, the world will look different, but how much it will change and how different it will look that's still very hard to see. 

It is sometimes difficult to dream about 

the future and the way to get there

But a new system is possible.

And that is where my hope is.