Ayesha: Moving from the pandemic to another huge mountain altogether which is the energy transition. Do you think countries are getting in a frame of mind where they will collaborate now? What are some of the advice that you are giving governments around the world on energy transitions?
Tony Blair: We come a long way which is the first thing. When I was first in government, I was part of the Kyoto negotiations and large number of countries didn’t sign up for it. The American Senate rejected it unanimously. Now there is an acceptance of the challenge of climate change but here’s the thing. You can’t deal with it other than through technology. That’s the only way you get countries to grow sustainably.
So, if you take the work we do say in Africa, you could say the same about Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and you get China and India. The Western world can’t say to these countries don’t develop. If I were to say this to the African leaders I work with, while I am afraid in the interest of climate, you can’t build this airport, that road or power station, you get chased out of town quickly.
So, they are going to grow and develop. So, the challenge for the world is, as the developed world’s images started to shrink. You can see this on the graph, the developed world’s emission start to shrink, the developing world start to grow. So that’s why the actual primary carbon energy production has barely shifted. You have masses of growth in the meantime so in one sense that’s good for the climate.
As I always say, the climate is different whether the emissions come from developing countries or not. The only solution is technology. There is a great example here which is around solar and renewable energy where you know in my day when I was in government, it a very open question as to whether it can be made commercially viable. But today, it is commercially viable. Now, that was only done because of incentives, because of the way there was the investment made in the technology and so on. And we got to do the same across the carbon capture storage, green hydrogen new off grid solutions. Probably new phones and nuclear even.
But the question for the world is how do you incentive development for that technology? That’s where unless you have mechanism to push the market in a particular direction, it won’t happen. In Indonesia, for example, they obviously got a lot of their energy from coal, they got an ambition of retiring 6.5 gigawatts of coal fire power and 10 to 15 years early. But they can’t do that without help. And this is where the developed world got to create the mechanism.
And here the biggest problem and I see this in the work I do around the world is creating the right financing framework for renewable projects. Because there is no shortage of liquidity in the world today. There’s lots of money. But you need to create the right financing mechanism so that it becomes in the interest of the country to build the right renewable project using gases in transition in certain circumstances rather than building a traditional coal fire, diesel power generation. So, the key to it is to get the right collaboration between the governments so that you create the market incentive for the energy developments of the future. Without that there is no solution to climate change.
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