E3G

Is Nuclear Inevitable? Policy and Politics in a Carbon Constrained World

By Tom Burke

The truth about climate change is that the only real choice we face is whether to build Spitfires or Hurricanes or both and how many of them to build, by when.

This is an issue on which we cannot afford policy failure. There is no rewind button on the climate. There is very little scope for trial and error. Nor is a stable climate readily traded-off against other desirable goals which themselves will become unattainable in a rapidly changing climate.

As Stern himself recognised, the analytical toolkit that economists bring to a problem of this nature and scale have their limitations. The core value of his work is that it confirms conceptually what the scientific community has long been saying empirically, that the cost of resolving our climate dilemma will be far outweighed by the cost of not doing so.

Stern was very clear about what me must do if we are to avoid the greatest risks of climate change to our security and prosperity. Let me illustrate this with a graph I call Stern on a page.

“Stern on a page” graph

He points out that our energy system currently adds about 7 Gigatonnes (GtC) of carbon to the atmosphere a year. By 2050 on a business as usual basis this will have risen to 14 GtC.

To avoid the worst risks of climate change we need to keep the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere below 550ppm – well below if possible. This would give us a reasonable chance of keeping the eventual temperature rise to below 3°C.

This means that to avoid the greatest risks of climate change we need to make our energy system carbon neutral by the middle of the century. Since there is no politically available route to a stable climate that does not involve increased use of fossil fuels, coal in particular, this means we must move very rapidly to the deployment of carbon sequestration and storage for electricity generation and hybrid vehicles for road transport.

These are by no means the only things we must do. We also need to hugely improve energy efficiency and greatly increase the deployment of wind, solar and other renewable energy technologies. The relative role of each carbon neutral option will vary from place to place but what we are looking for from all of them are very rapid step changes as we make a transition to a low carbon energy economy that must be completed in about four decades.

Which brings us neatly to energy policy and more particularly to energy security. There can be no doubting the importance of this issue. Modern economies simply do not function without secure supplies of affordable energy.

Reading the headlines you could be forgiven for thinking that the world was on the very edge of a energy resource crisis. The reality is rather more complicated. We do not have an energy resource problem. Not yet anyway. We do have an investment problem. Actually, we have four different investment problems and a geopolitical problem.

Much attention is currently given to the IEA’s projection that to meet the world’s rapidly growing need for energy - and thus to ensure energy security - we need to invest some $21 trillion between now and 2030. For those concerned with climate security shifting the trajectory of that investment on to a carbon neutral pathway is an urgent priority.

But large aggregates can conceal more than they reveal. Journalists and politicians alike talk lazily about energy security as if our energy resources were all the same. They rarely bring out the differences between oil, gas, coal and electricity and they hardly ever mention efficiency at all.