We need green research, not more failed climate targets

In the midst of an energy crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce plans for all of Britain’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2035. He wants to show leadership ahead of next month’s UN climate summit COP26, but the reality is that such targets are largely pointless. Either all electricity will go green by 2035 because it is cheaper than the alternative (in which case the target was unnecessary) or, more likely, such a policy will simply drive up electricity prices to levels voters reject.

The last three decades of climate negotiations are littered with such failures. In a report released in 2019, the UN offered the surprisingly frank analysis that the 2010s were a “lost decade” for the climate and it was impossible to tell the difference between what actually happened and what would have happened in a world that adopted no new climate policies after 2005.

This puts the PM’S challenge with COP26 into perspective. The UK can choose to do what every other host has done and essentially hold one more failed climate meeting. Or it could take its role seriously and choose a different path.

The real challenge with the current approach is that as long as cutting emissions is expensive, leaders will talk a lot but do little. In the rich world, this is to avoid following in the embarrassing footsteps of Emmanuel Macron who was forced to backtrack on a modest hike in fuel prices by the emergence of the gilets jaunes.

In the poorer world, nations focused on driving economic growth and getting their populations out of poverty do not have the luxury of investing in costlier forms of energy.

To meet this challenge, we need a much stronger focus on green energy research. If the world can develop green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels, then we will have solved global warming. Everybody would switch, even poorer, high-polluting countries such as China and India.

Working with 27 of the world’s top climate economists and three Nobel Laureates, the Copenhagen Consensus, of which I am president, recently found that the most effective, long-term policy to help the climate would be a six-fold increase in green research and development.

Not only is this actually feasible, the total cost for each nation would be much lower than current climate policies. Our research suggested that the world should increase its spending by another £54 billion per year by 2030, a relatively small sum compared with the £135 billion we are spending on subsidising ineffective green energy today.

On the sidelines of the 2015 Paris climate summit, global leaders including David Cameron and Barack Obama actually promised to double R&D spending on green energy innovations to $30 billion by 2020.

Unfortunately, most nations are failing to meet their promises. Boris Johnson must seize the unique opportunity to change this. He should insist that the outcome of Glasgow must be all nations agreeing to spend much more on R&D and to implement a process of verification to monitor compliance.

The Prime Minister could make Glasgow a huge success by turning a corner on two decades of failure and introducing a cheaper, smarter way forward, one that will actually help fix climate change without infuriating ordinary people or exacerbating the risk of energy shortages.