According to Donald Trump, climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. The US president also added, when talking to the UN General Assembly in September, that renewables “are a joke; they don’t work”. Why, I wonder, should he limit himself to lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize? A Nobel Prize in Physics should clearly be on the way.
Does Mr Trump consider why the Earth is not as cold as the Moon? Does he consider the possibility that this has something to do with the atmosphere and, if so, that changes in its composition might alter the way it behaves?
Moreover, is it not possible that even quite a modest change in temperature (relative to absolute zero) might matter a great deal to life forms adapted to today’s biosphere?
In a recent open letter, Bill Gates, no climate denier, remarked that: “Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
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That must be right. But the case for taking the threat seriously is not that climate change will make humanity extinct: a species as intelligent and resourceful as humans is likely to survive almost anything. It is that it is a threat we can deal with, because we are so resourceful, and it is one we should deal with, because doing so would create big opportunities and mitigate important risks.
The technological developments of the past two decades or so vindicate this perspective. The reductions in cost of renewable energy technologies, notably solar, wind and batteries, and the information technologies needed to knit them together in a more electricity-based energy system, have been nothing short of astounding.
Thus, according to Our World in Data, the cost of solar photovoltaic electricity fell by 88 per cent between 2009 and 2024. Where suitable, it has now become the cheapest way of generating electricity. This then is the great opportunity.
How did this happen? The answer, according to Max Roser of Our World in Data, is learning by doing. Since 1976, the price of solar modules has fallen by 99.6 per cent. With each doubling of installed capacity, the price fell by 20 per cent.
This relationship recalls the “law” advanced by Intel’s Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. In a similar process, the price of batteries has fallen by 97 per cent over the last three decades.
And who were most responsible for all this? The Chinese, above all. No wonder Mr Trump thinks climate change is a “con”. But wishing it does not make it so.
No doubt, as recent conversations with Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, make clear, technical obstacles remain, including long-term storage and long-distance transmission to regions that suffer from the seasonality of sunlight supply and energy demand. Yet the ability to shift to solar energy as the dominant source of an increasingly electricity-based energy system has clearly improved at an extraordinary rate in recent decades.
This is the good news. But against it there are three big pieces of bad news.
The first is that, even with the fastest likely roll out of the new technologies, failure to achieve agreed targets seems certain. Thus, the overarching goal of the Paris agreement of 2015 was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”. The latter level has, alas, already been surpassed for one calendar year. Given the upward trend, higher and possibly much higher temperatures than this seem almost certain.
The second piece of bad news is that a combination of inertia with legitimate fears of the cost, pervasive freeriding, political resistance and difficulties in certain areas (home-heating in northerly climates, and the hard-to-abate industries, for example) have already been significantly slowing progress relative to what is needed. With the rise of populist politics across much of the world, the political resistance seems sure to get worse.
The third and arguably worst bit of bad news is the one with which I began, the return to power of a Donald Trump animated against any policy deemed “woke”. Among these, destroying anything under the label of climate policy, one of the leading causes of the Joe Biden presidency, is foremost.
So, he has withdrawn from the Paris agreement, closed down research and data collection on climate-related issues, shuttered renewable energy projects and induced other countries into following suit. Indonesia is one.
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The US is not only the world’s most powerful country. It is also its second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. It is almost inevitable that, in the teeth of its hostility, many countries will decide that pursuing costly cuts in emissions is pointless.
They will do so if and only if they consider the new technologies far superior to their fossil fuel alternatives. A rising number are likely to do so. But that is unlikely to drive the transition fast enough.
The reactionary policies of the US are going to make the hard task of the energy transition far more difficult. On this issue, China is being far more helpful than the US, even though it also remains far and away the world’s largest emitter. As I have previously argued, in another context, the world has two rogue superpowers.
Meanwhile, like it or not, we are going to have to put a lot of our efforts into managing adaptation to a hotter world.
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