Author Archives: Matthew Lockwood

The anti-renewables bandwagon is rolling ever faster. This started some time ago, but has now started to bite on policy, as seen in the EU’s 2030 proposals which contain no binding renewables target. There is an emerging view, to be found especially amongst economists (including The Economist) and on the centre-right (as opposed to the hard right anti-all climate policy view) that the focus should shift away from renewables support and back towards carbon pricing. Carbon pricing, the argument goes, will deliver emissions reduction at least cost. The implication is that, because it will be much cheaper than renewables, it will be politically a lot more popular, or at least easier.

I see two reasons for thinking that it’s not as simple as it seems, and that putting all hope in carbon pricing and backing off from renewables policy may run into trouble. Continue reading →

At the conference of the British Institute of Energy Economists yesterday, one of the speakers (the conference was held under Chatham House Rules) poured scorn on German energy policy, pointing to the €200 billion that will be paid out in subsidies over the next 10 years to renewables, the offshore wind turbines kept going by diesel and the socialisation of costs incurred where developers face delays. Economic efficiency, he said, should be at the heart of energy policy, Germans have ignored this and have paid the price. By contrast, Continue reading →

I have been looking at long-term trends in grid electricity carbon coefficients (i.e. how much CO2 is generated across the whole electricity system to produce a given amount of power). This is a good overall indicator of the sustainability of the electricity system in a country from a climate point of view, and is determined by the fuel mix.

The trends for the UK and Germany since 1990 (shown in grams of CO2 per kWh – data are from the International Energy Agency) are interesting: Continue reading →

The climate book of the moment is The Burning Question, by Mike Berners-Lee and Duncan Clark. It comes adorned with glowing recommendations from an amazing array of big figures, from Al Gore and Jim Hansen to Mike Barry of M&S and Sam Fankhauser at the LSE. Of recent books on climate change, it is the one that seems to have touched a nerve, making it high up on the bestsellers list at the Guardian.

And this is indeed the best three-quarters of a book I have read on climate change Continue reading →

This post originally appeared on the IGov blog at the University of Exeter

The idea that the best way to provide energy is simply to avoid unnecessary use in the first place has been around for some time. Back in 1989, Amory Lovins coined the term “negawatts” (energy saved by cutting out waste) to emphasise the contrast with megawatts of power or heat that needs to be generated if that waste is not eradicated. Continue reading →

I’ve blogged before on my ideas about the importance of seeing climate scepticism as a political phenomenon related to populism. With yesterday’s county council election results now showing a big UKIP vote, today seems an appropriate time to note that the rise in UKIP support correlates pretty well with an increase in scepticism expressed in polls. Continue reading →

So, the Daily Telegraph has called for the repeal of the 2008 Climate Change Act. A piece of legislation that Tony Blair called revolutionary and Friends of the Earth (who had campaigned for it) called ground-breaking. Our current PM, David Cameron, said that the Act would be remembered long after he’d gone (although acerbic critics might add that that date is fast approaching…). Many environmentalists saw the CCA as a key step, locking the UK into the certainty of a low-carbon future. Even at the time, my view was that it wasn’t that simple, that politics always trumps law.  More to the point, as the American political scientist Eric Patashnik argues in his excellent book, “the passage of a reform law is only the beginning of a political struggle”. I have drawn out the implications of this point for the CCA at length in a recent working paper for the Energy Policy Group at Exeter University. Continue reading →