With or without oil, the necessary transition

With the climate urgency and the challenge of making the transition, human societies are at a turning point. “Peak oil” is most likely to happen in this decade, and with unconventional oil not meeting its objectives of replacing conventional in the long run, humanity faces a new challenge: knowing we already have too much oil if we are to respect Paris Accord and limit global warming to +2°C (“Unburnable resources”), what do we do with what we do have ?

The future of oil is set to live between two boundaries:

-The first one being a restriction on the demand as we decide that fighting climate change becomes the priority.

-The second where we consume as much oil as we can, so matter the climate consequences, leading to constraints on the offer.

These two scenarios lead to the same idea: no matter what we choose, we will have to wean ourselves from petroleum. But oil companies and governments plan to prepare seems to lack the impact needed to tackle this major change: where and how can we act?

With the help of an Impact/Effort representation of oil using sectors, we try to give leads of response on which ones are to focus. Any major change needing the involvement of all stakeholders (governments, citizens, companies), our story ends with our “Action Triangle”, a tool aiming at asking the right questions for everyone to get into motion, based on the understanding of any party’s core needs.