Prince William is right about climate change
Rather than tired, statist greenery, his Earthshot prize will use incentives to fix environmental issues
Amillion for coming up with ways to reduce carbon emissions. Another six-figure sum for smarter ways to recycle waste. And yet more for devising ways of capturing the force of the wind and the waves to replace fossil fuels. There will be plenty of big prizes on offer from Prince William’s Earthshot project, designed to reward breakthroughs in the battle against climate change.
But the biggest prize of all might be something entirely different. In truth, the Prince is harnessing the power of competition and incentives to fix the challenge posed by global warming. That is far better, and far more likely to be effective, than the stale, joyless, anti-capitalist rhetoric of most of the environmental movement. If the project can convert the greens to markets, that really will be an achievement.
After the Nobel, Earthshot promises to be one of the most valuable prizes on offer globally. In total, it will make £50 million available over the course of a decade. Every year, five prizes, each worth £1 million will be awarded for examples of genuine innovation, with the competition open to individuals and teams from anywhere in the world. If you have a smart idea, and it shows some prospect of working, then the money will be yours both to reward the moment of inspiration and to take it into development.
It would be easy to be cynical, but that would be unfair. Prizes have a long history of solving tricky problems. The most famous of all was the Longitude Prize awarded by the British in 1714, and eventually won by an obscure clockmaker called John Harrison with an idea considered so outlandish at the time that no one used it for years. But they have been deployed far more widely than that. Most recently, the Netflix Prize awarded $1 million for coming up with an algorithm that could work out which shows we wanted to binge-watch next (and, boy, did that work). The Mercatus Centre at George Mason University has launched a series of prizes for combating Covid-19, with up to $500,000 on offer for novel treatments and smaller rewards for achievements such as innovation in social distancing (and, heck, really it should be a billion at least, given the scale of the problem).
The point about prizes is this. They are a great way to encourage solutions to novel and difficult problems. In many ways, they mimic a free market. They provide incentives: invent something new and you get rich. And they are open to outsiders, allowing all kinds of new ideas to crash into the system. Top-down, state-led bureaucracies are very, very bad at innovation. When they see a new idea, the first instinct is to crush it, and the second is to regulate it. But prizes are the scientific equivalent of a start-up hub in Shoreditch or Silicon Valley. Lots of new ideas jostle against each other, sparking a round of creativity, and the best ones survive.
If you want to combat climate change, that is what will actually work. Over the past decade, we have started to find lots of different ways to reduce pollution while maintaining our lifestyles. Only this week, British Airways retired the last of its gasguzzling 747s, replacing them with planes that are 25 per cent more fuelefficient. In Germany, sales of hybrid and electric cars overtook diesels this month. The price of solar panels has dropped by almost 90 per cent over the past decade – power from the Sun is now close to undercutting any of its traditional rivals. Some of the ideas are big (like electric cars) and some are small (like biodegradable bags). But each one makes a difference at the margin. Taken together, they can add up to a transformation.
Most of the environmental movement, from Greta Thunberg to the Prince’s collaborator on Earthshot, Sir David Attenborough, remain stuck in a tired anti-capitalist, anti-production groove. Sure, we could cut pollution by living in cold, dark caves, eating berries all day. But like a kind of green lockdown, that wouldn’t be sustainable for very long, nor would it work for anyone other than a handful of fanatics.
With innovators and entrepreneurs using their imagination, we can clean up the environment and maintain growth, while also preserving the planet. The Prince’s initiative might even convince a few of his fellow campaigners of that simple truth – and that really would be a prize worth having.