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SIR DENIS ROOKE MEMORIAL LECTURE

FINDING A NEW PATH

Lord Browne of Madingley, former Chief Executive THIS YEAR’S SIR DENIS ROOKE
Officer of BP, delivered this year’s virtual Sir Denis Rooke Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘The Path to
Memorial Lecture, discussing how the fossil fuel industry Net Zero’, was delivered on 24 March by
can adapt to a net zero future. IGEM Marketing Assistant Lord Browne of Madingley, perhaps best
known as the former Chief Executive
Jodie Shepherd reports Officer of BP.
Lord Browne began his lecture by
praising Sir Denis Rooke for laying the
BP
foundations for the larger challenge
that we face. Forging a path to net
zero, he said, will require a systematic
transformation at a pace and scale that
has never been seen before.
“The world currently invests around
$1.3 trillion every year in engineered
products, businesses and infrastructure
which help to decarbonise the economy.
Combined with existing government
policies, this puts us on a path to three
degrees of warming by the end of the
century,” Lord Browne noted.
To limit this temperature change to
1.5 degrees, greenhouse gas emissions
will need to be cut in half by 2030 and
estimates suggest that investments
will need to be doubled to $3 trillion
every year for the next ten years. This
investment, according to Lord Browne,
needs to be targeted at bringing
engineered solutions up the learning
curve and down the cost curve.
In his opinion, the path to net zero
is not a challenge of discovery science.
Instead, Lord Browne believes that
“our primary goal should be to deploy
existing solutions at scale, in order
to make them cheaper and more
effective”. He also emphasised that
this investment in engineered climate
solutions cannot usefully be done in
national isolation. “Climate change is a
global problem, which requires global
resource allocation to be at the heart of
the solution,” he said.
Reflecting on his time at BP, Lord
Browne explained that it was the desire
of staff to take action on climate change
that became the driving force behind
the changes BP made – of course, there
was a need for the decisions to make
“commercial sense, but it was just
as important to understand people’s
hopes, fears and dreams for the future”.
“We will not reach net zero by asking

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15/04/2021 13:43
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IGEMNews_DenisRooke.indd 1 15/04/2021 13:43