I hadn’t known before that the idea of a carbon footprint was deliberately promoted by an oil company. But now that I know – thanks to an informative article from Mark Kaufman – I’m not really surprised. Why would an oil company push us to think about our carbon footprints? For the […]
Category: economics
Super-leverage points
The biggest risk of dangerous climate change comes from the way all the tipping points in the Earth system are linked. Ice sheets, ocean currents, permafrost, and the Amazon Forest are all connected. Crossing one tipping point increases the chances of crossing others, increasing the pace and scale of change until […]
Three less visible battles to win
We all know that stopping climate change involves replacing a lot of physical infrastructure: power plants, pipelines, boilers and blast furnaces. But what if replacing some invisible infrastructure – that of ideas and institutions – is equally important? After all, as Keynes said, sooner or later it is ideas, not vested interests, […]
Moore of the Wright stuff: COP27, cooperation, and calling peak fossils
The Sinai is falling away beneath me, and the sound of overcrowded conference halls is clearing from my head. I’m flying out of COP27 and, I suspect like many others, pondering our position. A presentation by Cameron Hepburn at the China pavilion earlier this week reminded me of a strange […]
The most efficient way to decarbonise may not be what many think
The most outstanding successes of decarbonisation policy in China, India, Brazil and Europe have come from targeted investment policies, including subsidies, cheap finance, and public procurement. If we stop thinking of these policies and public intervention as ‘second best’, we can replicate their successes and make faster progress towards climate […]
What do the world’s fastest transitions to low carbon power and transport have in common?
Norway is making the world’s fastest transition to zero emissions road transport. Over half of all cars sold in the country are electric vehicles (EVs), about ten times the share that EVs have achieved in most major markets, and twenty times as high as than the global average. The UK is making […]
Expecting the exponential: seeing the pattern in the energy transition could save investors half a trillion dollars
Forecasters of the energy transition keep making the same mistake: radically underestimating the pace of change. Events of the last week show that the transition will continue to accelerate. To get ahead of the game, we need to think in curves instead of straight lines. Investors need to learn quickly, or else they […]
Telling the boiling frog what he needs to know: thresholds of risk and opportunity in the science and economics of climate change
Humanity’s situation with respect to climate change is sometimes compared to that of a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, meaning that change will happen too gradually for us to appreciate the likelihood of catastrophe and act before it is too late. With all the scientific and economic […]