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| Wed, 9th Dec 2020 13:30:00 |
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Writing the book on the net zero transition |
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has just published the book on the net zero transition. At around 1,000 pages perhaps it is the War and Peace of the green industrial revolution, an exploration of every corner of society at a time of historic flux. Or maybe it's the Middlemarch, a realist depiction of a community responding to legislative reform and technological disruption. Let's hope it is not the Don Quixote or Infinite Jest. There must be no tilting at windmills and the last thing we need right now is another post-modern meditation on a future dystopia - we can get that from watching the news.
What the CCC's Sixth Carbon Budget has in common with those various masterpieces - apart from the fact it too will be referenced by far more people than ever read to the end - is that it is about to become, in its own way, a canonical text.
The 1,000 pages on the Sixth Carbon Budget stretched across three documents - The UK's Path to Net Zero, the Methodology Report, and Policies for the Sixth Carbon Budget and Net Zero - are a remarkably in-depth and meticulously referenced blueprint for how to transform a modern industrialised nation into a net zero emission sustainable economy within just three decades. Spare a thought for the climate sceptic bloggers who are even now trying to scan all 1,000 pages in a desperate attempt to find the one out of context footnote or cherry-picked graph they can hang their entirely predictable critique upon.
For everyone else, here is the most comprehensive analysis to date of how a net zero emission economy can be built while still improving living standards, bolstering competitiveness and resilience, and maintaining public and political consent. As such you can make a case for it being one of the most important documents ever published. This is not necessarily hyperbole.
Like any classic work, the reports draw heavily on the tradition of which they are a part. In its broadest sense, the CCC's analysis today simply reiterates what advocates of climate action have been saying at least since the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and arguably for decades previous. The costs of inaction on climate change far outweigh the costs of action. When you correct the market failure that results in greenhouse gas emissions it is entirely possible to tackle the climate crisis and build a healthier, fairer, and more prosperous economy for all. The deployment of clean technologies creates a virtuous circle of economies of scale, green jobs, reduced climate impacts, and myriad co-benefits that mean net zero emissions can be achieved at likely net benefit to the economy. The alternative is around 3C of warming this century that would pose a cataclysmic threat to civilisation as we know it.
This analysis now has a remarkably solid evidence base and is widely, if imperfectly, accepted by almost every government on the planet, investors with trillions of dollars of assets under management, and the thousands of powerful companies that have publicly pledged to deliver net zero emissions.
However, the report also contains the shock of the new. The unifying thread that runs through the 1,000 pages is the analysis of how the costs of decarbonisation have fallen far faster than even advocates of clean technologies expected. Renewables and energy storage costs have plummeted, there are very good reasons to think hydrogen, heat pumps, and electric vehicles can follow suit. Just a year ago the CCC estimated the UK would need to invest around one per cent of GDP a year to deliver net zero by 2050, but it now believes it may require investment equivalent to around 0.6 per cent of GDP in the 2030s before falling to just 0.5 per cent by 2050. These surprisingly rapid cost reductions have opened up remarkable possibilities.
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