Cheapest Energy in History. Still Heading for 3 Degrees?
About this episode
The episode discusses the paradox of declining renewable energy costs amidst political challenges in addressing climate change.
Solar power now costs a thousandth of what it did in 1976. Batteries are down more than ninety percent in a decade. By the logic of economics, the climate problem should be close to solved. It isn't. We are on track for close to three degrees of warming, and politics is sliding in the wrong direction. Few people have thought as long, or as clearly, about the economics of climate change as Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and first chair of the UK's Climate Change Committee. This week, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac sit down with him to work out what’s going wrong. Turner doesn’t soften it. The "electrotech stack" of solar, batteries and motors keeps collapsing in price in a way fossil fuels never can. Sub-Saharan Africa could leapfrog the fossil era outright. China's bet on electrification makes America's wager on cheap gas look like a costly mistake. But the movement he has spent two decades inside has also sold a story it never should have: that the transition would cost no one anything. So what closes the gap between what the technology makes possible and what our politics will allow? Who pays for the parts that aren't cheap? And…
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- What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth
- India: Life Inside Delhi's 'Airpocalypse'
- The Clock is Ticking: Forty Seconds to Explain the Climate Crisis
- Beyond Politics: Should we take the heat out of the climate crisis?
- Europe’s Summer of Fire: The New Normal?
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