COP26: World Leaders Are Repeating The Same Old Climate Policy Mistakes
“According to the UN, the last 10 years of climate promises have made no difference, and COP26 is unlikely to be different. Solving climate change is mostly about green innovation, not expensive, unsustainable promises.” - Dr. Bjorn Lomborg
With the UN climate summit in Glasgow (COP26) winding down today, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, says we should manage our expectations:
"We've been doing this exercise 26 times now. From Kyoto to Copenhagen to Paris and now Glasgow, rich nations have reliably talked green, but global emissions have increased, because nobody wants to leave their constituents with huge costs. In a very frank analysis of recent climate policy, the UN calls the 2010s a “lost decade.” Despite all these climate summits and all these climate promises, when looking at the actual emissions we can’t tell the difference from the world we’re in and a world where we didn’t care to do anything about climate since 2005."
Lomborg points out that promises of net-zero emissions by 2050 will similarly be broken:
“As long as cutting emissions is expensive, leaders will talk a lot but do little. A new study in Nature shows that a 95 percent reduction by 2050 — almost net-zero — would cost 11.9 percent of GDP or more than $11,000 present-day dollars for each American every year. Yellow vest-style protests will be bound to occur, and just like French President Macron, leaders are likely to back paddle on expensive, unpopular green policies."
He continues: “Crucially, as long as cutting emissions is expensive, we won't convince the poorer world to follow suit. And their emissions matter most for the rest of this century. But understandably, developing nations have more important priorities, like driving economic growth and getting their populations out of poverty.
That's why the best way forward is an innovation-led response to climate change: “We should innovate tomorrow’s green technologies rather than subsidize currently inefficient wind turbines and solar panels. We should explore fusion, fission, water splitting, and more. If we innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, everyone will switch, including China, India and the rest of the developing world. Copenhagen Consensus calculated returns from green energy R&D as eleven dollar for every dollar invested — hundreds of times more effective than current climate policies."
Unfortunately, innovation is not at the heart of the COP26 results, and leaders have not followed through on previous promises:
"During the 2015 Paris climate summit, world leaders promised to double R&D spending on green energy innovations by 2020. Unfortunately, the world community is failing this promise, too. Leaders should commit five times more funding for green R&D to develop clean and affordable solutions that will power our societies in the future," Lomborg says.
Instead of a focus on innovation, we have seen much of the same old broken promises in Glasgow, like the announcement that we will end deforestation in 2030. "This promise has already been made in 2014, but the agreement failed to slow deforestation at all."
Another announcement that was made during the summit – cutting down methane emissions – is welcomed by Lomborg:
"Many of the methane promises are smart — it is an easy and very cheap way to reduce emissions. Costs have been found to be between $2.5 per ton to actually saving $3, which is much better than most other climate proposals."
Lomborg also points out that adaptation to a changing climate is crucial: "Adaptation doesn’t make the cost of global warming go away entirely, but it does reduce it dramatically. Unfortunately, cheap adaptation is often ignored in scare stories about catastrophic climate change."
He concludes: "We've been barking up the wrong tree 26 times, trying to sell the world on expensive policies that not even the richest countries follow through with. Eventually, we need a better approach. We need green energy innovation. This will allow everyone to make the switch away from fossil fuels, and it won't deny poor nations the path to prosperity that is so critical for developing resilience against the effects of climate change."
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Over the past three months, Dr. Lomborg wrote a weekly climate column for The Wall Street Journal.
He also wrote various op-eds on COP26 for newspapers around the world, including Canada's newspaper of record The Globe and Mail, Le Monde (France), New York Post and Daily Mail (UK).
david@copenhagenconsensus.com
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