Juno News - May 26, 2022


The WEF is out-of-touch with those affected by its policies

Topics
oil and gas futures
Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Francois-Philippe Champagne Peter Baker
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

207.13

Word count

1,023

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Andrew Lawton talks to Peter Baker of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCDSD), a global organization of business leaders that tries to move forward towards sustainable goals. They discuss the challenges facing the oil and gas sector and the challenges faced by governments, and how they can work together to address them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Andrew Lawton coming to you from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum's
00:00:03.980 2022 annual meeting is taking place. One of the biggest criticisms leveled towards the World
00:00:09.160 Economic Forum and to a lot of the policies that are discussed here is how out of touch they are
00:00:13.960 with not just the struggles of the people around the world, the ones who are governed and affected
00:00:18.120 by these policies, but also how different regionally places in the world are from the
00:00:24.000 interests that are being represented here. One notable example of this is energy. It's all easy
00:00:29.600 to talk about the big picture pie-in-the-sky ideas of moving towards clean and green energy,
00:00:34.340 which by the way never seems to include nuclear for some reason, but that's a topic for another
00:00:38.960 video. But again, when they talk about the infrastructure required for solar, for wind,
00:00:43.640 a lot of the times they're talking about wanting to do away entirely with fossil fuels, with
00:00:48.760 traditional energy like oil and gas, the backbone of the Canadian economy. I spoke about this a little
00:00:54.000 bit with Peter Baker, who works with a global organization of business leaders that tries to
00:00:58.880 move forward towards sustainable goals. So what is it that you're doing here at the World Economic
00:01:03.740 Forum? So we're the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. We're talking to all the
00:01:08.760 business leaders about how we can get action to scale up because we need real system transformation
00:01:13.920 and this is the place to talk about that. I'm from Canada where the oil and gas sector is critical
00:01:19.100 to the economy and when a lot of people in that industry hear about sustainable development,
00:01:23.260 they hear about basically programs that are going to outlaw their industry. So what is the place for
00:01:29.520 oil and gas in your ideal future for business? Well, it's clear that over the long run we need to
00:01:35.120 move away from fossil fuels, but we need transition pathways out of it. The world has a lot of need for
00:01:41.120 energy and we'll have that for the coming periods, but we need to begin to invest in alternatives.
00:01:47.000 We need to really then work with the oil and gas companies to say what are those alternatives
00:01:50.860 and can we create investable solutions together with them? So that's really the conversations
00:01:56.400 we're having here. Do you think the market is capable of dealing with these things or do you
00:02:00.260 think it ultimately comes from governments that have to push the market into these things?
00:02:04.520 I think capital markets are actually in the lead at the moment. So more and more investors are
00:02:08.460 beginning to map what are climate risks, how do certain assets compare to those climate risks,
00:02:14.360 begin to price it in. And so over time what you'll see is companies that really
00:02:18.240 are investing in the transitions will attract the lower cost of capital and that's going to
00:02:22.820 accelerate the transition. And then yes, sure, the laggards, they will need to be regulated 1.00
00:02:27.360 towards those type of solutions. But I think the combination of corporate innovation
00:02:32.780 with capital market pricing will be the accelerator of all this.
00:02:36.780 As he says, they're very keenly aware that business can take a leading role in this,
00:02:41.300 but just what are the implications of that going to be? We here in Canada, our own government,
00:02:45.840 talk about the so-called just transition away from oil and gas without anything concrete about
00:02:50.700 how they're going to ensure that the people affected by that transition have jobs in the
00:02:54.960 future. Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said it's all just a simple matter
00:02:59.020 of re-skilling and up-skilling. What are you doing to help the workers who are being left behind?
00:03:04.740 Re-skilling, up-skilling. I mean, you're quite right. The interaction between machine and human
00:03:08.760 is prevalent in every industry. Actually, it's interesting. If you go even in a small and medium-sized
00:03:13.560 businesses, which would be tools, for example, or in aluminum, or even in steel, you start saying
00:03:20.760 the, if you've seen some of these machines, you need a lot of skills today to operate that. I mean,
00:03:25.580 this is not the job of your father. This is easier said than done. And there was an interesting
00:03:29.980 dilemma that came up when one discussion, one of the many here at the World Economic Forum focused
00:03:34.820 on climate, did a survey which didn't just go to the people in the room, but went to anyone who was
00:03:39.920 watching it online, who wanted to vote, and it was what their top priority should be. And if you look
00:03:44.920 at the results, everyone, I think, thought that it was going to be transitioning away that was going
00:03:49.200 to be the top priority. But people actually talked about energy independence, sustainability, and also
00:03:54.820 things like reducing energy costs. They were all neck and neck as far as which ones were, in fact,
00:03:59.600 the top priority, which was a bit surprising to the people in the room. I caught up later with India's
00:04:04.640 Minister of Natural Gas and Petroleum, and he admitted that the discussions are very different
00:04:09.120 elsewhere in the world than the ones that are taking place here in Davos. You were on a panel
00:04:13.640 about oil and gas and energy this morning. Do you think phasing out of fossil fuels is actually a
00:04:18.420 realistic goal? Look, I said what I had to, but you know, if you were to do that survey in different
00:04:25.960 parts of the world, if you were to do it, for instance, in South Asia or Africa or in Latin America,
00:04:32.280 you'd get results that might be a little different from the kind of results you're getting here.
00:04:36.200 The minister didn't go into too much detail before he was hurried away to his next meeting,
00:04:39.940 but I appreciated his candor that, yes, the conversations they're having about energy in
00:04:44.320 the developing world where they need fossil fuels, they need oil and gas, they need traditional energy, 1.00
00:04:49.540 those discussions are very different than the ones taking place here at Davos.
00:04:53.200 For True North from the World Economic Forum, I'm Andrew Lawton.