Copenhagen climate summit: technological revolution needed to combat climate change

There is a dangerous misperception that willpower and political agreement are the only missing ingredients needed to combat global warming. In fact, there is also a colossal technological hurdle. Ending our reliance on fossil fuels requires a complete transformation of the world’s energy systems.

No alternative form of energy is efficient enough to compete with fossil fuels at scale. Other than nuclear power, which is much more expensive than fossil fuels, all of the known possibilities require significant research and development.

On our current complacent path, with a meagre $20billion of public funds spent annually worldwide on researching and developing green energy sources, the necessary breakthroughs will not happen in time.

In that case, governments will try to cut carbon emissions through taxes and trading schemes without effective replacements. This will make virtually no impact on climate change in the future, while in the shorter term there will be significant damage to economic growth, leaving the planet in a much darker place than it could be.

Keep in mind that global energy demand will double by 2050. Use of fossil fuels, though maligned by some, remains vital for economic development, prosperity, and our very survival. Alternative sources of energy have been hyped by corporate lobbyists and a credulous media to appear far more ready for widespread use than they really are.

An oft-repeated claim is that Denmark receives one-fifth of its power from wind. But the reality, revealed by a recent study by the Danish Centre for Political Studies, is that less than 10 per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand is met by wind, because much of the power is produced when there is no demand and is sold at low cost to other countries.

Danes pay the highest electricity rates of any industrialised nation, on average about $0.38 per kilowatt hour, compared to $0.08 in the United States. The Danish wind industry is nearly completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies to support a modest workforce. Each new wind-power job costs the Danish taxpayer $119,000 (£73,000) per year.

Together, wind and solar energy supply just 0.6 per cent of the world’s energy needs. This is not just because they are much more expensive, but also because there are massive technological hurdles to overcome to make them efficient. First, direct-current lines need to be constructed to carry solar and wind energy from the areas of highest sunshine and wind to the areas where most people live. Second, storage needs to be invented so that when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow, the world still gets power.

For this to occur, public funds on research and development must be increased dramatically. Investments to the order of $100 billion a year will be needed if wind and other alternative technologies are to become viable. That is 10 times more than is spent by governments now, but just a fraction of the cost of the ineffective carbon cuts that have been proposed.

Bjørn Lomborg is author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist, and an adjunct-professor at Copenhagen Business School

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