Transcript: A taxi ride to a sustainable energy future
The film is a combination of animated characters and a filmed cab. The principal character
is a taxi driver. An ordinary guy except… he’s remarkably well informed about the energy
challenge and has a navigation system with extraterrestrial mapping. The second character
is a passenger, whose reactions bring some extra humour to the scene.
Cab driver:
Fare:
(chatty, friendly) Where to?
Don’t suppose you know the way to a sustainable energy future,
do you?
Cab driver taps into navigation system
Cab driver:
Sustainable… energy… okay, let’s go.
Tell me, er, do you believe in aliens?
Fare:
Aliens?
Cab driver:
Imagine there really are little green men up there. Observing us.
Been watching us since the dawn of time. At first we seemed
harmless enough as we dragged our knuckles across the savannah.
Playing with our fiddly tools. Inventing the wheel. They probably
found us quite entertaining. Intelligent, even.
But the smarter we got, well, we didn’t seem quite so harmless.
As far as the aliens are concerned, we’re a bit too haphazard.
They’d love to invite us up to the intergalactic party. But they’re
worried we’d leave the lights on, that sort of thing. We need to get
better at seeing the bigger picture. We need to face the energy
challenge.
Fare:
Ah, the energy challenge.
Cab-driver:
Will we be able to produce enough of the stuff? When we do get on
with each other, we get on, well very well indeed if you take my
meaning. In fact, so well that, by 2050, there’ll be at least 9 billion
of us.
And all over the world, more of us than ever will have cars,
holidays and those nifty little nose trimmer things. You got one of
those? Very handy as you get older.
So the challenge is how to make it all add up.
If you look at the possibilities, anything could happen of course.
But looking at the likely ones, there’s a couple of scenarios
definitely worth checking out.
Satnav offers choice of two routes. First we go down ‘Scramble’
One is that we scramble like demented badgers over resources,
each to his own, pretending everything is business as usual.
Fare:
But surely governments will take the necessary…
Cab-driver:
You’d think so wouldn’t ya? But with all that pressure to get
enough energy they might well prioritise the day-to-day, putting
off the big discussions so we end up lurching from one crisis to
another.
Supply for fuel gets short, prices go up again and again. Big shock.
So we focus on producing more energy. Forgetting all that climate
change. Then surprise, surprise, something happens to the
climate. Thunder, lightening, another big shock.
Scramble will be a constant game of catch-up, until we’re so far off
the intergalactic party circuit we’d be lucky to get invited for
leftovers.
Fare:
So why don’t we go that way – Blueprints?
Next we go down ‘Blueprints’ on Sat Nav
Cab-driver:
That’s a good point. There is another option, where we work
together as a team. People all over the world start taking action –
making proposals, sharing ideas, taking the future into their own
hands.
They get the governments to change laws, think up new Blueprints
for sustainable living. Get things really sorted – energy
conservation, carbon management – the lot. It’s all about staying
ahead of the game.
Won’t be easy mind, we’ll need to pull together like never before.
That way we can work in harmony with the planet and – here’s the
clever bit - continue to profit and grow. We smarten ourselves up
and get ourselves an invitation to that interplanetary party. Lovely.
Cab-driver:
Fare:
Cab-driver:
Cab stops. Here we are sir. That
will be £12.50.
There you go – thank you.
Right, which way next?
Fare:
Oh - Cheerio.
MVO:
This little film was made by Shell. Believe it or not, Shell is not run
by aliens.
Find out more about the future of energy at shell.com/scenarios