Dieter Helm is Britain's leading energy economist. Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Economics at New College. Author, among other books, of The Carbon Crunch (2012) and Net Zero (2021).
In The Carbon Crunch Helm criticised efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through current regulation and government intervention, and the deployment of renewable energy, particularly wind power.
He recommended establishing a carbon tax and carbon border tax, increased funding for research and development, and the use of gas for electricity generation to substitute coal and to act as a bridge to new technologies.
His contribution is found in the intersection between: academic research, government and policy, and industry.
Climate change is about the stock of carbon in the atmosphere
At present, 80% of the world's energy is still coming out of fossil fuel, about the same as it did in 1990. We're not making progress on reducing the increase in carbon content, concentration in the atmosphere.
There's virtually no chance of achieving the 1.5 degree warming target.
That means coal, gas and oil. We're on over 100 million barrels a day. America is by far the world's largest producer of oil at 13 million barrels a day and rising.
While wind and solar have very important contributions to make, their cost is not competitive now, once you add the intermittency in and the system costs associated.
We're not going to power the world on wind and solar alone. Indeed, their contributions will always be part play, not total play. I think one has to be brutally realistic on this.
And that's because our economies are soaked in carbon.
De-industrialising in the UK
We are decarbonizing in the UK and in bits of Europe, and indeed a bit of the US.
Almost all the gains have been by switching from coal to gas. That's the great thing Britain achieved.
If you look at where the emissions are going to come from in the future, they're not going to come from the UK.
It's about India. It's about Indonesia. It's about China. It's about Brazil. It's about the Middle Eastern countries. It's about sub-Saharan Africa. It's about Nigeria, which will have a population bigger than Europe by 2050. And in these countries, the demand for fossil fuels is rising sharply. India is a classic example, a coal-based expansion.
We're going to close Port Talbot and we're going to close Grangemouth. And we're going to import the petrochemicals and the steel from China or elsewhere.
What happens to global emissions then? Do they go up or do they go down? Well, they go up. The Net-Zero notion that the Climate Change Committee trotted out in 2019 is not possible.
A lot of those emissions in China are ours -for us.
More money in new transformational technologies
You need a new grid, a super grid to handle the system; supported by new transformational technologies. The real hope for solar is moving beyond the materials that are currently used.
Focus develop new transformational technologies rather than trying to fix some arbitrary targets for how many gigawatts of this and how many gigawatts of that's going to be produced.
- We have a great site for offshore wind. Shallow waters, near the coast, well understood seabed, and good wind flows. So we should do offshore wind and experiment more on floating platforms, so we can help other countries do this.
- Also we are going to need some industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS), putting the gas back underground. We've got empty gas wells, empty oil wells, we've got pipelines in place. The North Sea is shallow, well understood, and we've got supplies of carbon nearby.
This makes the UK the best place to try CCS. So do those two things and export that technology.
Next up is R&D
We're really good at some aspects of research. We're not that good at turning them into production. But when it comes to things like fusion power, when it comes to developing new materials for solar panels, we are a great place to do it.
But what you can't do is take a pot of jam, which is what we do, and spread it over everything, give everybody a bit of money. Because we've got a limited amount of resources.
The amount the public is willing or able to pay is limited. So let's spend that money in a way that has the maximum effect on global warming.
And that's not what we're doing.
Carbon border adjustment
Europe pats itself on the back because it's not burning as much coal or oil as it used to. But what it's really done is we're all importing all our stuff from places like China anyway, and they're burning coal a great deal.
India's burning a lot of coal as well. And therefore, if you actually looked at your consumption footprint, all the stuff in our houses, a lot of it made elsewhere; so we need to tax that.
We are all living beyond our environmental needs. That's why we have environmental crises, because we don't pay for the pollution we cause
And is now that we're finally getting into the nitty-gritty arguing what this carbon border adjustment will be, rather than pretending that we could just ignore imports, close Port Talbot, close Grangemouth, close the fertilizer industry, close the aluminium industry, pretend our emissions have fallen and we're the poster child of the world, as the minister puts it, and just happily let us absorb and benefit from pollution in China and elsewhere and pretend it's not our responsibility.
Our carbon footprint is our carbon consumption, not just carbon production. I want to do net-zero carbon consumption.
