The unaddressed education gap

What is the role of post-secondary educators in being honest about the future of the oil and gas industry and about the magnitude of the climate crisis? From reading this article, it’s clear that some university departments are not doing a good job of teaching young people the systems thinking skills they need to be part of the energy system of the future. Scientists, academics, activists (especially young people), and policy experts have been ringing the alarm about climate change and the unsustainability of the current fossil fuel-dependent energy system for over two decades at the least. As educators, it is imperative that evidence-based climate science and the level of urgency required for action is communicated to students seeking careers in the energy sector to foster critical thinking and decision-making for future career choices.

At Student Energy, we work with young people interested in or already working in all parts of the energy sector, we take young people’s futures seriously – and this includes having a secure, thriving career that provides financial stability while meaningfully addressing climate change and creating a sustainable energy system for all. We also recognize that the energy sector’s harms on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities around the world, and on nature, cannot be ignored, and efforts to address, transform, and repair these harms are as much part of the clean energy transition as efforts to create secure employment opportunities.

Our approach to these big challenges includes providing free, globally accessible energy education resources, free skill development and capacity building programs, and fostering a global community of youth who are all committed to advocating for a sustainable energy transition in every sector.

Where are the young oil and gas workers who are not necessarily “seeking elite positions” in the industry?

We need to consider and prioritize support for current workers to transition out of the oil and gas industry, and young people in regions where there is a lack of opportunity for other careers. Young people are facing employment challenges in all sectors right now, so if we highlight youth in oil and gas, we need a deeper dive into why young people choose these careers beyond those seeking a disproportionately high salary: 

• It may be the only viable job option in their region
• They may face mounting costs of living or debt
• It may be one of the few industries in their region that provides adequate educational and professional training or support. 

This article could have served youth better by telling more of those stories – these more complex choices deserve to be explored so that young people can be empowered to find alternate career pathways.

The changing energy sector needs to contend with years of successful youth recruitment strategies by the fossil fuel industry. It’s important to explore how the rapidly growing clean energy sector provides more meaningful support throughout young people’s career trajectory, particularly for BIPOC youth who have been historically underrepresented in the energy sector. Student Energy has repeatedly noted the lack of free, globally accessible programs for professional development and skill-building in preparation for an energy career, and have made it one of our central priorities as an organization to provide these programs.

What does a just transition actually look like?

With oil companies laying off more than 100,000 workers in the United States alone, and the increasingly urgent timeline for global emissions reductions, a just transition away from fossil fuels is imminent. We need to start diving into the specifics of what this looks like, both what it means for oil and gas companies (those who have set some climate targets and those who have not), and what it will take to create a supportive policy landscape that can facilitate this transition for the hundreds of thousands of workers employed in the oil and gas sector. We’ll need to ensure our education systems are empowering young people to be critical thinkers, equipped with transferable skills that they can apply across the changing energy system.

Learn more about Student Energy’s skill-building programs here.

Why is Student Energy hosting this dialogue?

One of Student Energy’s main goals as an organization is to break down the communication barrier between young people and influential actors in the energy system, with the goal to have more honest conversations on areas of disagreement, create pathways for true accountability, and identify ways of working together in an equitable way. We also recognize the increasingly short timeline we have to decarbonize and transform our current energy system to address the climate crisis, and the urgent need to mobilize all actors in the energy system to support this transition. As young people are leading the movement for climate action around the world, we hope that creating an opportunity for honest dialogue between youth and energy companies can help accelerate this transition. We often do this by bringing diverse young people into spaces and dialogues where they historically have not been represented — with national and international governments, energy companies, and other powerful institutions that influence our global energy system.

Our approach to hosting an equitable dialogue

We know that simply inviting young people to share space with decision-makers isn’t enough. We need to actively address the inequities that young people often face in being able to participate in these processes, whether they are cost barriers, insufficient access to information and context, or inability to participate in the agenda-setting process so they can have the conversation on their own terms.

To address these inequities for this particular dialogue, Student Energy will be providing comprehensive coaching and support to the 2-3 youth moderators who will guide the discussion, including our training on public speaking, group facilitation, sharing and owning personal lived experience, and asking critical questions. We believe this coaching process will help ensure that young people feel more confident in asserting their knowledge and articulating their perspectives regarding Canada’s energy system and Cenovus’s ESG targets.

About Student Energy

Student Energy is a global youth-led organization empowering the next generation of leaders who are accelerating the transition to a sustainable, equitable energy future. We work with a network of 50,000 young people from over 120 countries to build the knowledge, skills, and networks they need to take action on energy. Student Energy collaborates with governments, companies, and organizations to facilitate meaningful youth engagement and mobilize resources to support youth-led energy solutions. 

About Cenovus

Cenovus Energy Inc. is a Canadian integrated oil and natural gas company. It is committed to maximizing value by sustainably developing its assets in a safe, innovative and cost-efficient manner, integrating environmental, social and governance considerations into its business plans. Operations include oil sands projects in northern Alberta, which use specialized methods to drill and pump the oil to the surface, and established natural gas and oil production in Alberta and British Columbia. The company also has 50% ownership in two U.S. refineries. Cenovus shares trade under the symbol CVE, and are listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. For more information, visit cenovus.com.

• What are the biggest obstacles to moving away from a fossil fuel-dependent energy system and achieving net zero emissions by 2050?
• Where do we stand now on the global energy transition?
• What skills should young people develop for their careers?
• What issues need more attention?

These are some of the questions we dove into on our webinar with Rachel Kyte, Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and formerly the CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All. We’ve summarized some of our key learnings:

We’re not on track to meeting the goals of SDG7 by 2030. Here’s why:

840 million people still lack access to energy. This itself is likely an underestimate of the actual number, as it is self-reported by governments that have an incentive to show that more progress has been made than has actually taken place. In addition to those without energy, there are a billion more without access to reliable, affordable energy. Most of these communities are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, so there is a real geopolitical risk of large parts of the world being left behind, as access to energy is critical for alleviating poverty, improving education and healthcare outcomes, and providing a foundation for economic development.

Energy demand is predicted to rise enormously, both due to rising income, and increased demands for heating and cooling in many parts of the world. As the climate crisis gives rise to record summer temperatures, thermal comfort will become a significant public health issue, and demand for air conditioning will rise. With over 80% of the world’s energy still supplied by fossil fuels, rising energy demand will also lead to rising emissions.

There are a lot of reasons to be excited about the clean energy transition.

Despite the sobering statistics on energy access and rising emissions, there is still meaningful progress being made, and more and more opportunities for young people to guide the transition to a just and sustainable energy future.

 The price of renewable energy continues to drop steeply, contributing to positive developments for electric vehicles, green hydrogen, and other emissions-intensive sectors.

While many governments continue to show weak political leadership, there are some promising signs: there is an increasing amount of ‘South-South’ finance mobilized towards decentralized energy infrastructure (for example, Indian investment in mini-grids across the Sahel), demonstrating an alternative to the risk-averse approach of development assistance from the Global North.

For young people who are driven to transform the energy system, there is an entirely new generation of energy jobs on the horizon. We’ll need public policy that embraces the need to build green infrastructure at the speed and scale needed to tackle climate change, and we’ll need a completely different systems analysis, encompassing centralized and decentralized energy, modern renewables, buildings and vehicles that store and give back power, and energy produced and consumed across political boundaries.

 We need an urgent shift to integrated energy planning.

It used to be that bringing energy to communities meant extending the central grid, but it is clear now that this is not the most effective solution in many cases. Many of those without energy access are living on the peripheries of fast-urbanizing cities with grids ill-equipped to handle an increasing electric load, and others are in rural and remote areas where extending the grid would be an expensive, resource-intensive undertaking. Still others might have access to a grid, but may not be able to afford to connect to it. For these reasons, integrated energy planning – figuring out where the grid should be the provider of power, and where it should be supplemented with off-grid and decentralized energy sources – should be prioritized by decision-makers, and young people seeking careers in the energy sector.

Integrated energy planning extends beyond cities and peri-urban areas, and might include trans-national and trans-continental energy planning. Problems with renewable energy and green infrastructure availability can in some cases be solved by working collaboratively across multiple jurisdictions, yet the energy security debate often limits this type of collaboration.

Decentralized energy empowers communities (particularly women within those communities), but it is a potential challenge to the political status quo.

Decentralized energy comes with many other benefits aside from providing energy access. It empowers communities to develop, own and govern energy infrastructure that is appropriate for their needs. Women tend to disproportionately bear the effects of energy poverty, from missing out on income-generating opportunities due to time spent collecting cooking fuels to experiencing severe health impacts from indoor air pollution. Access to decentralized energy could free up time, improve health outcomes, and allow greater involvement in energy governance for women.

However, the road to a more decentralized energy system won’t be easy. Incumbency, and locked-in utilities and infrastructure creates a natural bias against decentralized energy. Going up against entrenched energy ministries and institutional structures that are reluctant to lose central control of the energy system presents another major political and bureaucratic hurdle. In addition to the institutional barriers, development finance remains slow-moving and risk-averse, with only 1% of development assistance going into off-grid, decentralized energy.

Progress on energy efficiency is slowing down, even though conserving energy is the cheapest way to reduce emissions.

To meet the SDG7 goals on energy efficiency, the rate of improvement in energy efficiency needs to be over 3% annually – currently, it is only 1%, and slowing down. Considering that improving energy efficiency is the cheapest way to curb emissions, and an area that presents numerous new job opportunities, this is a major issue that needs more attention. Energy efficiency is often a hard sell for governments, industry, the financial sector and even the public, as there are deep social preferences for building new things and developing new technologies to tackle emerging problems, rather than valuing the cost and emissions savings from not doing things.

Another emerging dilemma over the next ten years will be attempts by the energy industry to offset their growing emissions with forestry and other natural climate solutions. While nature-based solutions are an integral part of addressing the climate crisis, offsets should be used as a last resort. Instead, emissions should be curbed directly at the source or not produced at all.

 Every month of the Student Energy Leaders Fellowship features a webinar with a leading energy expert. The Leaders Fellowship cohort can submit questions in advance and during the presentation, to guide the discussion.

 About Rachel Kyte

Recently named one of Time magazine’s 15 Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change, Rachel Kyte is a trailblazing leader and expert in sustainable energy and energy access, and a long-time champion of young people. Formerly the CEO and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), Rachel is stepping into her new role as Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Rachel has also served as the World Bank Group’s VP and Special Envoy for Climate Change, leading the Bank Group’s efforts in campaigning for the Paris Agreement and mobilizing billions of dollars to support developing countries to address climate change. She was recently honoured by Queen Elizabeth’s 2020 New Year Honours list for her critical efforts combating climate change and serving in the field of sustainable energy.