18 - Integrating Climate into our Strategy 3 QUESTIONS FOR CHRISTIANA FIGUERES Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “The energy sector needs to move very quickly ” What was the biggest win at COP21? There were many significant wins at COP21, but perhaps the most powerful expression of determination was the Paris Agreement that set a final destination or end point of efforts to reduce emissions. Governments agreed to reestablish the ecological balance of the planet by agreeing to drive down emissions so low that by the second half of the century all greenhouse gas emissions can be safely absorbed by natural systems such as forests or soils. It’s what we have to keep in mind in our business planning. For the energy sector it means moving very quickly from high-carbon to low-carbon and eventually to zero-carbon business models. What is key to a successful transformation? The required pace of transformation means that everybody needs to be doing much more, faster. The oil and gas sector has identified some of the things that they can and should be doing. One is investing in carbon capture, use and storage. As a whole we’re not investing enough into this; it’s still very expensive and the progress is disappointingly slow, both in terms of reducing costs as well as increasing the safety of storage. The second urgency is investing in renewables. Total has adopted the vision to move into renewables and to integrate gas and renewables in a holistic way. There is much to be done in that field and it is critical that this happens fast. The third area is the elimination of methane emissions. How can industry work with governments to advance action? Nothing will be done unless there is a good collaboration between government and the private sector including governments providing the necessary incentives, and private sector boldly moving forward. Some 60 jurisdictions have put carbon pricing in place, but we don’t have a carbon price everywhere, which would be enormously helpful. We have actually undervalued every ton of CO2, and that has huge costs. We have to begin to act very differently and understand that for every ton of CO2 that we do emit, we have to get much more productivity out of it. In fact, by some estimates we should be increasing the productivity of each ton by a factor of 15. One of the problems is that the private sector has not provided a consistent signal to governments: on the one side, some companies put pressure on governments not to establish carbon policies and on the other side, there is an invitation to move to a level playing field. The oil and gas industry in particular has a huge opportunity to give one consistent voice to governments. It is in the oil and gas sector’s interest to increase the pace while also deploying its amazing technological engineering skills to push forward innovations and solutions to the challenges of this, rather than the last, century.