Well, that’s according to a study as reported by none other than the BBC.
Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could save the world as much as $12tn (£10.2tn) by 2050, an Oxford University study says.
The report said it was wrong and pessimistic to claim that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources was expensive.
[…] But the researchers say that going green now makes economic sense because of the falling cost of renewables.
“Even if you’re a climate denier, you should be on board with what we’re advocating,” Prof Doyne Farmer from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School told BBC News.
“Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it’s going to save us money,” he said.
The report’s findings are based on looking at historic price data for renewables and fossil fuels and then modelling how they’re likely to change in the future.
[…] The report’s expectation that the price of renewables will continue to fall is based on “probabilistic” modelling, using data on how massive investment and economies of scale have made other similar technologies cheaper.
And here we come to the crunch. “Probabilistic” modelling is fancy way of saying ‘Green energy may be expensive now but just you wait!’ It also suffers from the same problem as predictive analytics. Predictive analytics, in a nutshell, is about making predictions by building models based on existing data, then testing by retroactively applying the model to past events and seeing if the predicted result matches the actual result. Which, admittedly, is one step better than climate modelling.
The problem is: just because things happened one way, doesn’t mean they’ll happen the same way again. No model can be 100 per cent accurate 100 per cent of the time. While this may be acceptable when predicting if someone will vote Labour or National, it’s not acceptable when making the argument that going green will save trillions of dollars.
I could also turn the whole thing around and say investing more in conventional energy technology could achieve the same results, maybe even better results, and at less cost and risk. All I need to do is get some funding and whip up a model in support.
“Our latest research shows scaling-up key green technologies will continue to drive their costs down, and the faster we go, the more we will save,” says Dr Rupert Way, the report’s lead author from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
[…] 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 and Environment at the University of Oxford and SoDa Labs at Monash University.
When looking at research reports, it’s important to know who wrote it and who paid for it. You can be forgiven for thinking that Farmer has at least some expert knowledge relating to climate. In fact he’s a mathematician with expertise in modelling and, as far as I can tell, little if any climate-related expertise.
Likewise, Way is also a mathematician. His current research includes energy system modelling and “understanding strategies for accelerating the sustainable energy transition”. He also has a broad interest in ‘sustainability’. But again, no actual climate-related expertise.
The Institute for New Economic Thinking purports to be a neutral think tank that challenges conventional wisdom, although a list of its principles includes:
An outdated economic structure is endangering our planet – but new approaches could save it. To uncover solutions, economists must first incorporate analyses of climate change, population growth and stressed resources into their research.
Its article page also features quite a few articles that appear, at least on the surface, to support the climate emergency narrative.
There are other problems too. For example, did the research factor in the environmental cost of going green (think: electric cars)? Without looking at the full report we don’t know. And even then we still may not know. There’s also the assumption that the cost of green energy will keep going down. Fact is we don’t really know. After all, there’s a limit on how small a solar battery can get and how much energy it can store.
The purpose of the research is of course to provide ammunition to climate alarmists. But it’s also designed to appeal to those who advocate a more conservative approach to climate change: those of us who aren’t convinced that there is climate “emergency”. In essence, the argument is even if there isn’t climate emergency, going green makes sense.
I’m not buying it.