How Scotland Is Juggling Oil And Gas And Jobs In Their Transition To Renewables

How Scotland Is Juggling Oil And Gas And Jobs In Their Transition To Renewables

The Robin Rigg offshore wind farm in the solway firth between Cumbria and Scotland. A global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies is underway, driven by one statistic: fossil fuels provide 83% of the world's energy and about 73% of the world's greenhouse gases (GHG). These gases cause global warming, in the opinion of most climate scientists, and the global temperature has increased by over 1 Celsius degree since 1850. Like an S-shaped curve, the transition began slowly at first but has increased more rapidly in the years after the Paris agreement in 2015. And the tension between fossil and renewable energies has increased too. How much should we invest in renewables year-by-year? How quickly does the world have to cut back its fossil energies? What about jobs that could be lost from the fossil fuel industry? Can they be upskilled into the renewables industry? Scotland is a small country that has made significant advances in their transition to renewables, and they are summarized here: · The country has benefited from an oil and gas industry that created half a million jobs and enormous national wealth. 75% of energy consumption was from oil and gas in 2019. But oil