A nutshell called Paris

You know how many of us have been calling for an actual experiment with net zero? Take a town, make it net-zero and see how it works, that sort of thing? Well, we just got what we wanted in Paris.

Since I don’t really follow the Olympics, it was belatedly that I learned this year’s edition was supposed to be the greenest in the history of the games but when I did learn it eventually, it was more than I could have ever asked for.

Predominantly vegetarian food, no air conditioning in athletes’ rooms and on the buses that transport the athletes to the venues, eco-friendly mattresses, swimming in the Seine instead of pools (I’m not sure how exactly this falls under the net-zero label but whatever) — the French had really taken their net-zero mission seriously. And they promptly turned into a laughing stock.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the reports. Teams bringing their own ACs. Teams moving out of the Olympic village to get some air-conditioned comfort and decent food. Athletes getting sick after swimming in the Seine. And, of course, the massive outcry against the vegetarian menus — and the very pertinent suggestion by Tammy Nemeth that if richer teams could afford to move to hotels but poorer ones couldn’t, wasn’t that an unfair advantage?

The Paris Olympics have turned into a summary of the energy transition in a nutshell: a complete disregard of physical realities in favour of a fantastical goal that has about the same chance of succeeding as a vegan hockey team beating a meat-eating team.

Of course, there has been a backlash from veganists on the food topic. After those responsible for catering to the athletes discovered — with much surprise, I’m sure — that professional athletes cannot perform optimally on a 60% vegan diet, the menu was “adjusted”, meaning changed. Athletes breathed a sigh of relief but veganists and vegetarians jumped at the chance to cry foul.

“Athletes requiring high animal protein diets is a myth that has been busted a long time ago. Those perpetuating it in these Games aren’t basing their arguments on science,” the policy manager of the European Vegetarian Union, because there is such a thing, told Euronews.

Of course it’s a myth, just like the myth that oil and gas produce more reliable energy supply than wind and solar. That’s probably why the history of sports is so full of vegan champions across disciplines. And that’s why people in countries with a lot of wind and solar pay so much less for energy than people in countries that focus on hydrocarbons.

I haven’t seen an explanation of the gastrointestinal problems athletes developed after swimming in the Seine but they could be probably put down to that increase in meat, eggs, and carbohydrates that the organisers were forced to provide. Meat and eggs are, after all, bad for us. Or it’s climate change.

In a charming attempt at what passes for journalism these days, Global News wrote that “It’s not yet clear if the illnesses were due to Seine’s water quality – which has been a constant concern in the lead-up to and throughout the Games.” They’re perfectly correct, of course. All the athletes that fell ill did so after dipping in the Seine but hey, correlation does not mean causation, right? Right? It could totally be the meat and the eggs. Or it’s climate change.

By the same token, a recent Wall Street Journal report attributed the fact that Californians pay the highest electricity prices in the country besides Hawaii to climate change. It’s not the mad dash to build as much solar as there’s space available. It’s not the equally mad dash to turn all Californians into EV drivers. No. It’s climate change:

“Across the country, fires, hurricanes and other extreme weather associated with rapidly warming temperatures are prompting utilities to take expensive steps to protect electric lines and generators. Utilities are also pouring money into increasing capacity to handle surging demand.” There you have it. It’s climate change and nothing else.

Now how about that decision to leave athletes with no air-conditioning smack in the middle of summer? Well, first of all, the only reason it was this hot in Paris in the middle of July was, yes, you guessed it, climate change. We know this courtesy of the World Economic Forum, which recently enlightened us that “temperatures experienced by athletes during the Paris Olympics "would not have occurred without human-induced climate change".”

Source? That thing called the World Weather Attribution, which is not at all like a pharma company that makes up an illness so it can develop a drug to cure it. In other news, wind turbines are perfectly safe for animals both onshore and offshore, solar does not mess up the soil for future use, and green hydrogen is totally cheap and not just hype at all.

Based on all this, it is utterly incomprehensible why so many athletes moved out of the Olympic village and why many others brought their own AC units. It is equally — and utterly — incomprehensible why Glencore decided to not spin its coal business off after all, and why Maersk, which had promised to go all-methanol and zero-LNG with its ships suddenly says it will actually be buying a lot of LNG ships — that can incidentally work with regular bunkering, too.

In a world fraught with incomprehensible things, a glimmer of perfect comprehensibility was delivered to all willing to see this week by the FT. In a story titled, rather comically, The IEA’s divisive mission to decide the future of oil, the publication wrote that “The IEA’s forecasts matter. Governments, oil companies and investors rely on the agency as a trusted source on global energy to inform their policies and strategies.”

I’m not done yet. The FT then went on to write “But its forecasts have faced criticism in the past from climate activists for not predicting the rapid rollout of renewables and are now being attacked by fossil fuel advocates as too supportive of the energy transition.”

Feeling exposed, fellow fossil fuel advocates? I sure do. Those guys don’t shy away from calling a fossil fuel advocate a fossil fuel advocate, just like the IEA doesn’t shy away from forecasting an oil surplus of 8 million bpd by 2030. “We want to call things by their names and we don’t shy away from that,” per Fatih Birol, whom the FT interviewed for the piece, which basically details the IEA’s descent into madness, meaning its transformation from an energy data provider to a transition cheerleader.

The most interesting part of the story comes towards the end, after a round of verbal applause on the IEA’s surge in popularity — among climate activists — when it embarked on the cheerleading path.

“The agency’s pivot has also brought financial benefits,” the FT authors wrote. “While its core budget, which stood at €61mn in 2022, has remained broadly stable, members pay “voluntary contributions” in exchange for advice on the transition and the IEA’s Clean Energy Transitions Programme generates an extra €20mn a year. With the extra money, the IEA has more than doubled in size. “When I took over, we were slightly more than 200 people. Now, with the same core budget, we are more than 420 people,” says Birol.”

What was it that silly conspiracy theorists like to say? Oh, right. Follow the money.