I have not been bad at forecasting the future, but I have been astonishingly bad at timing it. I forecasted a green bubble in 2006, but it has not begun to arrive in significant size until 15 years later. Still, it is arriving. At the same time, I described shale gas as such a bad idea both environmentally and financially that investors wouldn’t be dumb enough to go into it, since they would go broke. Vast numbers did go into it, and vast numbers did, finally, go broke. But my timing was off; they didn’t go broke until years later because credit became really cheap (which I had not forecasted) and local banks in the US were trapped into lending money to them, or else everything else in their local, rural areas would go broke too.

At a conference in Barcelona in October 2019, I forecasted a massive pandemic which would hit third world places the hardest because quite a few had huge populations living in packed quarters in places with no sewers, often no toilets. But I thought the pandemic would happen years in the future. In fact, although I didn’t know it, the soon to be labelled pandemic had already begun in Wuhan when I gave the talk.

So what about the next ten years? The massive investment into renewable energy, which nearly everyone else is now forecasting, just might save us from global warming. Why isn’t this salvation guaranteed by the coming massive investment? The investment in renewables will, I think, be accompanied by an unpleasant exit from oil, which almost no one is now forecasting. What kind of unpleasantness? Some oil executives are genuinely charming, elegant, polite and sophisticated. But will any of them see the survival of their grandchildren as more important than the survival of their immediate careers?  These gentlemen, and their operations, will not go quietly into the night.  

A number of the oil majors, not exactly the world’s most environmentally responsible corporate citizens themselves, are, to look like solid corporate citizens in the face of the climate crisis, already divesting parts of their oil infrastructure and fields to even more opaque operators. The fields and installations they are selling are generally old. The new owners, usually private, with no public filings, or countries with dubious leadership, will squeeze every cent out of their investments—inevitably cutting back on maintenance and safety. We will see massive oil spills and catastrophic oil fires. And the massive fires may not all be accidental.

What about oil wars, which, after all, have happened in the past? I believe in the basic assumption of statistics—the future will be like the past. I have written about one possibility of this already in Le Monde, (11 May 2018). This involves a big war in the Persian Gulf, taking one quarter of the world’s oil off the market, and spectacularly increasing the price of that commodity, just as the world gets out of it. Russia, and the US frackers, would be the big winners in this end-game-for-oil war. So far, and as usual, my timing has been off.