Addressing climate change won’t happen without fossil fuels or messy

Forgive senior Saudi officials for their head-scratching in response to the simultaneous and contradictory demands from the Biden administration that Riyadh’s royals pump more oil into the world economy while reducing carbon emissions.

In my travels over the last two weeks — first to Riyadh to hear Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman commit Saudi Arabia to net-zero by 2060, and then to Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change conference – you could feel the reverberations from the first energy price shock of the green era.

The domestic and international politics of rising energy prices, with the cost of a basket of fossil fuels having doubled since last May and with blackouts in China and India, are colliding with the longer-term certainty that global leaders must more effectively address the dangers of a warming world.

I returned home this weekend to Washington with three convictions:

• First, what the world is experiencing is more energy transition than energy revolution. The shift from fossil fuels to renewables will take years, and the only way to accelerate it is more technology breakthroughs, such as battery storage; more global policy changes, such as a carbon tax; and even greater investments in renewables.

• Second, we’re all going to hear the term “climate change adaptation” more because “climate change mitigation” is going to take a lot longer than the purists would wish. The difference is that mitigation tackles the root causes of climate change while adaptation manages its negative effects. Where mitigation strategies fail or move too slowly, adaptation strategies can society more “climate-resilient” and, in some communities, be a matter of survival from the impacts of heatwaves to rising seas.

• Third, international and domestic politics will shape the energy future as certainly as will new technologies and changing climate realities. Countries like China, Russia and India are either unwilling or unable to transition faster to renewables. The U.S. will need to weigh its human rights demands on China against its desire to win climate concessions. In democracies around the world, voters will demand affordable and reliable energy – even as their leaders struggle to meet net zero commitments.

The painful lesson of the past few weeks is that you can’t take fossil fuel supply off the market when energy demand is rising, and the renewable replacements aren’t yet sufficient.

“The world has sleepwalked into the supply crunch,” said Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, special envoy for climate change of the United Arab Emirates, in Riyadh. His country was ahead of all other oil-producing states in setting a net-zero target for 2050. Despite that, he said, “A transition means a transition. It takes time.”

Minister al Jaber says the lesson he draws from the current energy scare is that even as the world rushes toward renewables and decarbonization, the reality is that fossil fuels remain 80 percent of the energy mix…