Dave Waters, Director & Geoscience Consultant, Paetoro Consulting UK Ltd

Some pro-renewables lobbyists shouting how it can deliver all we need. Personally thinking if it can it will, just give it a good shot and we'll see where it lands us. But let's have a Plan B in case not.

I see the hydrocarbons advocates insisting how they will still be needed. Thinking sort of doesn't really need to be argued. World couldn't get off it tomorrow if it wanted to, even if just for petrochemicals & fertilisers. Still there is near ubiquitous agreed need to reduce dependency on combustive uses as fast as we can. So, let's turn every stone to do what we can on that front. If HC combustion indeed has to be done locally for lack of alternative, seeing what tweaks can lessen the impact.

Seeing a lot of railing against nuclear from many sides, but countries in an energy corner, increasingly turning their glance in that direction, even with the price tags. It's not going away and packs lower carbon energy muscle, so let's figure out how to do it well, including waste.

Amidst it all a great insistence that energy demand can't or won't come down, "consumers" won't "like" it. But the number of places that have really tried to pervasively persistently design for that on long time scales are few, so it's an untested variable really. It should shunt to top of the list. It takes more than us turning lights off or thermostats down. It takes long term design for less energy demand at all scales: buildings, infrastructure and policy, and better management of the demand there is. Making it easy and desirable to choose options with less energy requirement.

For me the issue is less about whether each of these things "wins" or has a presence at the energy table. It's more about the order we apply them in and the priority assigned to each. That may be simplistic or naïve, but it does remove a lot of the angst. Internally at least.

It allows the admission that all of them might locally have a place and/or time. That's not the same as saying they should all have equal precedence or weighting. Deciding that is the tricky bit and is intimately quantitative, not gut feel. It's OK not to instantly have all the answers on that front. We don't. We won't. But successes will float to the top over time, and be copied, multiplied, magnified.

For me the working-hypothesis sequence, for energy, is demand reduction-renewables-nuclear-hydrocarbons.

Overprinting it all, a perspective on time. That while there is a sense of urgency, decades are involved in any change.

This view manages to upset just about everyone I suspect. That's not my aim, honest.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Paetoro Consulting