Oil, Guyana and Climate...

effective carbon sink, intact. It is useful to reflect on the fact that Norway’s financing of this comes from its oil derived wealth. Recently they announced in a policy document that “The petroleum sector will remain a significant factor in the Norwegian economy in the years to come, although not on the same scale as today. The Minister of Petroleum and Energy said the future Norwegian oil and gas sector will be “capable of delivering production with low emissions within the framework of our climate policy”.

All this needs to be considered in light of the fact that fossil fuels will be part of the energy equation for some time to come as we transition to renewables and energy efficiency. This raises another possibility which was suggested to me recently in a discussion with a trusted colleague, whose idea was that the producers of fossil fuel should get around a negotiating table and decide on a production cap for each. Informing such a cap would be information on the allowable emissions from fossil fuel by 2050, knowledge of the emissions generated by the recovery, distribution and eventual use of fossil fuel by each producer and on this basis, come to an agreement as to how much each will be allowed to produce and over what time period. This is an oversimplified statement of the case, but it may be one way to deal with the equity issue when it comes to production until such time that fossil fuels no longer figure in our energy sector. There have been some whisperings in the corridors of the international community of negotiation of a “non-proliferation treaty for fossil fuels”.