Going green now could save trillions, say Oxford dons
With the latest UN climate conference meeting in Egypt this week there has been a very timely Oxford University study on the cost of green energy.
Midlands’ environment expert Ron Fox said he was very pleased to read the professors’ report that switching from fossil fuels to renewables could save the world £10.2 trillion by 2050.
“These experts showed that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources is not wrong and not expensive,” said Ron, of Noreus Ltd. “They said we should go full speed ahead because of the money it will save.”
COP27, which stands for Conference of the Parties, has been meeting this month from November 6-18 at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to look at how the world is combatting climate change.
This follows an agreement by 154 countries in June 1992 to gather almost annually to monitor what progress has been made. This year is the 27th meeting where they will be focusing on firm plans, finance, and fossil fuels.
The Oxford report said that despite mounting concerns over gas pries and energy supplies, going green now is very economical because of the falling cost of renewables.
They said that although renewables have been around for only a few decades, continual improvements in technology have meant the cost of solar and wind power have fallen rapidly at almost 10 per cent a year and they expect this price to fall further in the future.
One of the report authors, Dr Rupert Way, from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, said their research showed that costs would continue to be driven down for key green technologies.
But they accepted that questions still remained on how best to store power and what happened when changes in the weather led to a fall in renewable output.
However, they questioned previous politicians’ costings and predictions. In 2019 Philip Hammond, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer told the prime minister that the cost of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in the UK would be more than £1tn. The report says the likely costs have been over-estimated and have deterred investment. They also challenged predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the cost of keeping increases in global temperature under 2 degrees would correspond to a loss of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2050 were too pessimistic.
The experts believed that switching to renewables would likely lead to a “net economic benefit.”
The research has been published in the journal Joule and is a collaboration between the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, the Oxford Martin Programme on the Post-Carbon Transition, the Smith School of Enterprise & Environment at the University of Oxford, and SoDa Labs at Monash University.
“I only hope all the delegates to COP27 will have read this report when they come to discussing fossil fuels this week and realise how switching to renewables will save the world huge amounts of money,” said Ron, of Noreus Ltd on the University of Keele Science Innovation Park.
For more information on green energy and how to cut your carbon footprint, call Ron, on 01782 756995.
Caption: The logo for Cop27, the UN climate conference which is meeting in Egypt this week. Picture: Wikipedia
