This article was published by The Energy Mix on May 14, 2024.
Decarbonization is running “faster and cheaper” than some of its earliest proponents ever imagined it would, and Canada should be able to manage the resulting business risks it faces by diversifying its economy, one of the world’s leading energy transition specialists told the Globe and Mail in an interview published Monday.
With the cost of electric vehicle batteries and solar panels falling 90 per cent in recent years, “we can now plan to decarbonize economies faster and cheaper than we dared think was possible in 2008,” Lord Adair Turner, who’s observed the process since becoming the founding chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee in 2008, told the Globe’s Adam Radwanski.
Turner was in Toronto to appear at a conference May 14 hosted by the Transition Accelerator think tank. He said Canada “stands to suffer some net economic loss” as a major fossil fuel producer facing cheaper suppliers in an era of declining demand, but “should be better able to minimize that damage through diversification than less developed economies in similar situations,” Radwanski writes.
“Broadly speaking, countries which are high-cost producers of oil and gas have to be relatively disadvantaged in this transition,” Turner said. “I think one’s got to be honest.”
Turner, a former head of the UK’s financial regulator now sitting as an independent member of the House of Lords, said it would be “very bad for the world” if an influence like Donald Trump gained political power and scaled back the hundreds of billions in investments that are spurring the energy transition. “It would be absurd to imagine otherwise,” he told Radwanski.
But even if the U.S. stepped out of the clean energy race, he said the “unstoppable economics” of affordable clean energy would keep many other countries at the table.
“There’s a set of technologies coming forward which I think are going to produce transformational change in Indonesia, in India, in Africa,” he said. “It’s getting to the stage where the combination of a solar panel plus a battery just becomes the cheapest way to produce electricity around the clock. In which case, even if America is slowing down, in a lot of other countries in the world, things are still progressing—they don’t switch off.”
Read the rest of Adam Radwanski’s interview with Lord Adair Turner here.
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