How serious do you think the pressures from environmentalists, politicians, young people and so on are for the oil industry?

There are very strong pressures and a great idealistic view that catastrophe lies ahead on climate unless we do certain things. The focus of what should be done is very blurred. In reality, what we do in the U.K. in our little 1 percent of world emissions — or even what Europe does — is marginal compared to the big emitters’ activities. The big emitters are obviously China, India, Russia and the United States.

If there are going to be protests, they should be against the policies of those four countries. The protests we have had — like blocking the streets of London — are, I am afraid, completely pointless. And the protest in the financial markets of trying to disinvest in energy companies is also pretty badly targeted because most oil production is in the hands of national oil companies. They are not affected by attempts to strand assets and disinvest and so on.

Have opportunities to deal with climate change been missed?

I was energy secretary a long time ago in the 1980s. At that time, very few people talked about carbon emissions at all. If you remember, at that time the mood among scientists was that there was going to be global freezing, not global warming. The main concern was with the reliability of oil supplies, which is why we made big efforts to emulate the French and go to nuclear electricity supply. Our efforts failed, but that is another story.