I attended an “Evening of Scenarios” with Royal Dutch Shell last night. Presenting were Dr Angela Wilkinson, Director of Futures Programmes at the Smith School for Enterprise and Environment at Oxford, Nick Molho, Head of Energy Policy at WWF, Jeremy Bentham, VP, Global Business Environment at Shell and Dr Simon Buckle, Director of Climate Policy at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College. Moderator was Roger Harrabin from the BBC.

Angela Wilkinson was very good on the theory behind scenarios and I thought that Jeremy Bentham made some excellent and at times wonderfully nuanced points.

A few things I wrote down…

“Is fresh water the next CO2?”

“ An era of volatile transitions”

“How much difference can directed technology change make?”

“ A global GHG budget for staying below 2 degrees requires us to retire about 85% of all known conventional fossil fuel recoverable reserves by 2050”
(IPCC 2001, ECOFYS, 2009, WWF, 2009)

And a question from a conversation over drinks…“What would happen to Russia politically if demand for its energy and resources collapsed over an extended period?”

One question from the floor was whether the use of scenarios had ever made a real policy difference? My answer to this question would be yes. First there is the case of Shell anticipating the 1973 oil crisis while the second example that immediately springs to mind is the Mont Fleur Scenarios in South Africa.

BTW,  I love the thought that sheep farmers in Wales are suddenly becoming rather rich (and somewhat loathed) because they are switching from farming sheep for almost no money to farming wind for rather a lot.

On a totally separate note the News International phone hacking scandal reminds me of a quote by Solzhenitsyn in Point to Point by Gore Vidal (Page 223):

“The press have become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary…hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else is this disease reflected in the press.”

Perhaps we should increasingly add social networks to media in this instance? Partly because of power, but largely for hastiness and superficiality.