Some years ago Burke Hedge wrote a book about two friends in a village who were called Pablo and Bruno. Both supplied the cistern which gave the villagers their water.

They earned their living by going to a well far away, filling their buckets and carrying them back to the village.  The friends earned a reasonable income from doing this in the way it had been done for decades. Bruno was happy with this and spent his modest profits on wine, women and song in his limited spare time. Pablo on the other hand invested his spare time to painstakingly construct a pipeline from the well to the village. This was a huge sacrifice and nobody understood what he was doing and mocked his folly for working double-hard.

In time though, when the pipeline was finished it provided limitless water with no labour cost beyond routine maintenance. Bruno was out of business but Pablo could sit back and watch the profits roll in abundantly and grew very wealthy.

The “Bruno method” requires constant and unremitting hard work. If the work stops the income stops. The only way to increase income is to work harder and capacity is limited. It gets more difficult with old age and ill health.

Whereas the “Pablo method” gives a huge amount of security & leisure. And profit in perpetuity.

The story warns of the threat of ‘linear’ labour, lack of vision and redundancy in the face of superior and scalable technology. In my opinion, it is also the perfect analogy for where we are today with renewable energy and the resistance it faces from the incumbent fossil-fuel brigade.

It seems entirely clear to me that renewable energy is like Pablo’s pipeline. Once it’s running there is abundant and more-or-less free energy. Once done: a system utilising wind, solar and tidal can provide enough energy for the country. We do benefit from a lot of wind and tide in the UK. And why stop at 100% of our need? We could produce two or three times what we need and use the excess for storage options such as hydro-electric or production of green hydrogen. With abundant, free excess energy there is no end even to use of inefficient options.

Powerful voices mock and traduce the “net zero” story and blame if for high electricity prices. The narrative is that the up-front costs of renewables are costing everyone dear. The truth is the precise opposite. The cost of electricity is driven by the “marginal pricing” mechanism. Even if 99% of our electricity came from super-cheap renewables, it’s still the 1% coming from expensive gas keeping the price high for everyone, all the time. So, the quicker we can get to 100% renewable and beyond then the quicker the consumer stops over-paying. The whole system is, to put it technically, ‘bonkers’ and must be reformed. Meantime, why is the idea of abundant and free apparently so unpopular? The answer, as usual when the goal is to continue burning fossil fuels, lies in the fake news produced by the fossil-fuel-funded lobbying groups on Tufton Street and perpetuated by politicians who are unduly influenced by them. The person on the Clapham omnibus with half a brain realises the truth about getting a return on an investment, much like Pablo’s that some hard work and sacrifice in the short-term pays back massively in long-term.

And talking about investment returns it seems obvious to us that investing in dinosaur companies – even with the best PR gloss, can’t paint over the cracks of a doomed industry. Fossil fuel is like Bruno’s buckets: you need to find it. Then dig it up. Then transport it. Then burn it. Then repeat. It’s linear. And outmoded.

Renewables on the other hand are like Pablo’s pipeline. Once established they are the gift that just keeps giving. And with a very, very low carbon footprint.

Naturally, the fossil fuel lobby is determined to keep their polluting and corrupt business going. I calculated that existing identified oil reserves would be worth around $1tn out of the ground. That is $1,000,000,000,000 of ‘asset’ if only they can persuade us that we need it NOW and that we have to dig it up. Of course they are wrong. They are like Canute against the tide. But it won’t stop them trying. Horse dealers tried to scaremonger with the advent of the automobile. Oil is doing the same with the mass-adoption of renewables. And with the EV (another threat).

We think that oil in the ground will be a ‘stranded asset’ or at least that demand will subside when Pablo’s pipeline of renewables comes on full stream and feeds into new efficiencies like the ‘smart grid’. That’s what makes oil businesses a poor long-term investment as well as an unethical one. We’re betting on Pablo-style progress prevailing rather than fossil fuel funded fake-news.