Decarbonisation is wrong

Will try to keep this short. 

Saw something recently that talked about "Carbon space" and "G20 countries must reach net zero by 20XX if we are to see any chance of global mean temperatures remaining below Y". I see this week that if nations meet their NDCs (narrator: nations did not meet their NDCs) we could restrict warming to 2.1 degrees by the end of the century. This would be fantastic. Today the UK published it's NDC pledging to cut emissions by 68% by 2030. 

I've been in the climate business a long, long time. I was in the room when the 2006 Climate Change Programme was cooked up. I led a team into action. I walked away from the bloodied battlefield of Copenhagen, scarred but undeterred. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 

Talking about decarbonisation, 10 years on from Copenhagen, is just wrong. NDCs are wrong. (If you don't know what an NDC is, you aren't missing anything. In 50 years "NDC" will stand for "Nothing Done for Climate", assuming we still have language in 50 years). Telling India to reduce emissions is wrong. 

Carbon pricing isn't wrong, per se, but the conditions have to exist for Carbon pricing to have an effect. Right now we haven't powered a major manufacturing economy without fossil fuels, we haven't produced a ton of zero carbon steel, and the UK has absolutely no idea how to heat >20 million homes without gas (they think it involves 'Heat Pumps' but they don't know how to power 20 million heat pumps, and it might involve hydrogen, but they don't know how to produce millions of cubic feet of zero carbon hydrogen).

This is not a call to pessimism. The UK has made massive steps towards decarbonising the entire electricity grid, and the next big technological breakthrough will be grid-scale energy storage, which will -- hopefully -- enable a zero carbon electricity network, 24/7, at least 340 days a year. Zero-carbon steel is do-able. And not only have we been building zero-carbon homes for decades, but the technological solution* for a zero-carbon retrofit exists, and will improve. The most exciting bit about building retrofit is that it will make your buildings more comfortable and just nicer to be in.

But how are we going to diffuse the technology we need, at the speed we need to diffuse it? This is not a call to pessimism, and this is also not a call for global socialist utopia. Making all patents free will not drive decarbonisation. Trying to impose a global carbon price will fail, because the USA will never sign up to it., and nor will India.

All countries need clean energy, for a multitude of non-climate reasons, particularly health reasons, and economic reasons. A global effort to share what works, pool resources to innovate at scale so that we are building megatonne scale projects and not pointless tiny pilot plant, and reward companies that provide zero-carbon solutions is what is needed.

"Mission Innovation" nearly gets there, but look at the membership trumpeted on the front page. 24 countries and 6 "collaborators", none of whom are companies. Energy innovation is done by Governments and it isn't driven by 'action plans' dreamed up in an intergovernmental brainstorming session. What Governments can do, however, is write some really big cheques. I worry that Mission Innovation exists precisely because Governments want to avoid writing those cheques, and MI is good displacement activity.

What I dream of seeing is the Governments getting the energy industry in a room, asking them what the real price of CCS is, and putting 50% of the money on the table. Those who can't play, or won't play, will soon be out of business.

What annoys me is that this has been evidentially needed since 2009 and still there's no sign of it happen. More than a decade of talking about CCS and "new nuclear power", while new coal plant are built weekly. And with every coal plant built, the pipe dream of a global carbon price recedes.

We will decarbonise eventually, but if Governments were really serious, we could move the dial massively within a few months. Stop talking, stop pledging, build some bloody megatonne-scale plant and work out which ones work best. It really is that simple.

And look -- I got to the end of my rant without drawing a tenuous analogy with covid-19. Well done me.

* To follow