Good morning, Peter Vanham here in Geneva.
Far away from the political gridlock in Washington, D.C., a new energy consensus is brewing in the U.S., including in its reddest and most fossil fuel-reliant states. It is one where all agree that “energy is energy, whether it is generated by wind, steam or whatever it might be,” as Dewey F. Bartlett Jr., a former oil and gas executive and former mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, told the New York Times recently.
The emerging middle ground looks something like this: advocates of renewable energy acknowledge that fossil fuels will remain in the mix for decades to come to allow for an orderly and affordable transition to cleaner sources of energy. Companies that are very carbon-intensive, meanwhile, do their part to get on a pathway to “net zero” by 2050, but in the meantime can bank on techniques such as carbon capture and storage, which allow for the continued use of fossil fuels.
