Politico's Eu Confidential

Episode 22 of POLITICO's EU Confidential podcast features Eldar Sætre, the CEO of Norway's oil and gas company Statoil. We spoke to Sætre on November 9, after the COP23 global climate conference had kicked off in Bonn, Germany, but before Norway's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund proposed dropping investments in oil and gas stocks. We also chatted with POLITICO's Sara Stefanini, who has spent the week in Bonn reporting on the climate conference. Paging Rex Tillerson: Sætre says the future of his business is green, but that it won't give up oil and gas anytime soon. Would he call U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — a former oil and gas CEO himself — to push a green message? “You know I could call Rex, but I think the U.S. politics is more complex than that. So I don't know ... I'm very open about this when I go to Washington.” Beating the dependency on subsidies: Scaling up the use of renewable energies such as wind and solar power has tended to require big upfront public investments or tax incentives. Th