The most obvious response to climate change should be to transform the way the world generates energy. Living standards have risen 40 times over the last 250 years in the west, driven neither by the small state beloved of conservatives nor the large state favoured by socialists.
Rather, the growth has resulted from a complicated interaction between capitalism and science and technology, of necessity publicly funded, creating wave after wave of transformations in the character of our economic base and the quality and quantity of what it produces.
The same now has to be done for the world’s energy production. It needs to be technologically transformed to become as near carbon-free as possible, which will only work if there is a substantive global research and development effort led by governments, matching those of conquering space or winning a war, to explore the necessary technologies. Embracing global political solutions such as a global carbon tax or global emission caps are beyond political reach, given the range of entrenched interests, not to mention the stubborn refusal by many conservatives to accept climate change science. It will be innovation that will save the planet.
This is the blisteringly obvious truth that should be written in neon in the skies above Paris at tomorrow’s launch of the 2015 UN climate change conference. Its goal is to try to agree binding agreements to limit the increase in global temperature to two degrees centigrade by 2100.
Given the investment of Barack Obama, China’s President Xi, Germany’s Angela Merkel and 144 other global leaders in attending, and the plethora of commitments to lower carbon dioxide emissions beforehand, the conference is already likely to succeed, however partially. The issue, rather, is whether, with the range of interests that have to be assuaged, the agreements can be as universal and effective as they need to be.
The good news is that, amazingly, 170 countries have produced some kind of response to the UN’s call for an “intended nationally determined contribution” (INDC). Before Paris, the world was set to produce some 65bn tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2030 compared with today’s 50bn tonnes, someone close to the negotiations told me, an increase that would have triggered a dangerous increase in global temperatures. Add up the INDCs and now the likely outcome in 2030 is 55bn tonnes. Even China and the US, hitherto both climate change recalcitrants, have made significant contributions, with China promising its emissions will peak in 2030, if not before, and the US agreeing to a 26% to 28% cut.
It is good, but not enough to turn the global trends around. The task in Paris will be to convert those INDCs into harder and tougher commitments, get the 2030 projected aggregate to 50bn tonnes or lower, and then set the world on a trajectory to zero carbon emissions by 2100.
If there are to be more than fancy conference promises then there have to be technologies available to replace burning fossil fuels. India, especially, has to be headed off from its plan to follow China’s path of economic development. Currently it burns as much coal as China did a generation ago; if in a generation’s time it burns as much as China does today, even allowing for more carbon efficiency, it will pump an extra 13bn tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. World temperatures would rise by nearer four than two degrees.
But Prime Minister Modi is clear: if the choice is between poverty and climate change, India will choose the latter. The average Indian generates a quarter of the carbon emissions of an average European or Chinese and an eighth of an average American. India is determined to grow and it has huge and easily accessible coal reserves: it intends to burn them just as others burned theirs on their road to development.
Modi’s point is dangerous if understandable, except India has another, even more abundant source of energy than coal: the sun. Solar energy used to be clunky and expensive; now plastic photovoltaic electricity and concentrated solar power are challenging that assumption. What is needed is the R&D, along with investment in capacity, to turn solar into a major energy source as competitively priced as open-cast mined coal.But one of the consequences of privatisation is a collapse in energy R&D. The CEGB and National Coal Board, for example, were great investors in scientific research. No more. Today, whether it’s energy utilities or solar equipment manufacturers, the sector spends less than 2% of its sales on R&D compared with, say, 15% for pharmaceuticals. Privatisation has weakened the capacity to combat global warming.
Thus the case for governments to fill the gap – the argument of “a global Apollo programme to combat climate change”, authored by Sir David King and lords Browne, Layard, O’Donnell, Rees, Stern and Turner. If global R&D on energy was raised from $6bn to $15bn, focused on new build energy from renewables, principally solar, that could feed into national grids and be guided by a road map committee, the authors think solar energy could be grid competitive with coal as soon as 2022. India could grow as China has done – and world carbon dioxide emissions could definitely peak by 2030.
$15bn may seem a far away target but, compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies governments give fossil fuel production, it is trivial. Intriguingly the knight and six lords behind the Apollo programme may even be making progress with their argument: Obama and Bill Gates will announce on Monday in Paris a multibillion dollar public private fund, backed by more than a dozen countries along with companies and philanthropists, to back an Apollo-style programme for energy. Decarbonisation is going to become a big global market
But India’s solar-powered grids, wind farms or even coal-powered fire stations that capture and store carbon (CCS) will not be built by the British, any more than those in the rest of Africa and Asia. Apart from nuclear, where Osborne last week announced an innovative programme to back small nuclear reactors where we do have some expertise, the story is of domestic retreat on renewables, cancellation of the £1bn CCS challenge fund and hiding behind the EU’s 2030 commitments on carbon emissions.
Paris is emerging as a potentially important moment, but from which Britain is semi-detached. It is a moral obligation, global challenge and economic opportunity all going begging.