Author Archives: Matthew Lockwood

I’ve just been to a presentation of BP’s Energy Outlook 2030. This was launched in January, but has only just reached us here in the South Downs. BP’s head of energy economics, Paul Appleby, got something of a rough ride from the assmbled, mainly student, audience, about BP shirking its responsibilities by not pressing politicians to do more on climate policy. The predictable defence is that BP takes the climate issue seriously, but is meeting its customers needs for fossil fuels, is accountable to its shareholders, can’t do things that means it will operate at a loss, and that ultimately governments have to make public policy.

I have some sympathy with this position – BP is a company and it’s doing what you’d expect a company to do. But it’s a position that implicitly raises an interesting deeper question. Continue reading →

Several commentators on recent events in Libya have noted the hypocrisy with which British politicians happy to do arms deals with Gaddafi (and other dictators) in the past have suddenly turned their backs on their old friends and are calling for democracy.

Of course the deals (and ultimately the hypocrisy) are driven by oil. A key issue for a democratically elected Libyan government, if that comes about, is how it would handle oil revenues. Continue reading →

Our good friends over at The Breakthrough Institute have a new report out on the rebound effect – the idea that as energy efficiency increases, we use part of the savings we make to consume more energy, and overall the impacts of energy efficiency are much less than we think. This comes on the heels of Steve Sorrell’s excellent review of the subject in 2009.

There is plenty of evidence that the rebound effect is real. But it would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that this means it is impossible to reduce energy intensity Continue reading →

Mckinsey have just produced a report for the European Gas Advocacy Forum saying that Europe could hit its 2050 emissions target (an 80% cut on 1990 levels) for almost €1 trillion less if it built more gas rather than wind. Leaving aside the fact that Mckinsey also recently worked on the ECF’s Roadmap 2050 project on how the EU could meet its targets without gas at reasonable cost, they are not alone in making the cost argument for gas. Continue reading →

We were recently challenged on the question of how inequality can be reduced at the same time as the transition to a low carbon economy can be managed. We agree that both need to be addressed at simultaneously, since sharp inequality makes the politics of climate policy much more difficult.

My starting point is to argue that we first need to understand what is driving inequality. At the top end, it is clearly about the rise of finance, but in a recent pamphlet co-authoured with Adam Lent, I lay out the case that in much of the economy it is innovation that is the main mechanism. Continue reading →

The transition to a low carbon economy is a transition, so indicators of change like investor confidence are a litmus test of the direction of travel. Sadly, news just in from an Ernst and Young survey of 529 UK- based firms and financiers shows such confidence sharply down since the Comprehensive Spending Review Continue reading →

Just a quick  one to say how delighted we were to learn of the excellent (and excellently named) Climate Sock, which tracks and offers comment on polling about climate change and climate policies. Check it out! (Hat tip to Will Straw)

We set up Political Climate almost exactly a year ago, with our first post on the Copenhagen Accord. It’s been a bit tough at times balancing the blog with family life, and there have been a few times when we went a bit quiet, but we managed the keep the show on the road! We’ve really enjoyed writing the blog and we hope you have enjoyed (or at least been stimulated by) reading it, and hope you’ll stay with us over the next year.

Matthew and Andrew

PS Thanks to Laurence Chiles for handling the CSS

One of the big puzzles about climate policy is that, according to most studies, reducing emissions, even by a large proportion, appears to cost very little, but despite this, the politics are hard. Why is this? One reason may have to do with the difference between how costs are typically  expressed in such studies on the one hand and how people actually experience them on the other. Continue reading →