Opinion: Green energy research should be prioritised

I find it difficult to share many politicians’ enthusiasm for last month’s multinational agreement on climate change.

Yes, it was an historic achievement for nearly 200 nations to come together in Paris and agree anything. But the final communiqué was as full of holes as a colander – giving targets for limiting average temperature rises to less than 2C, with some delegates saying nations should aspire to keep them down to 1.5C and others dismissing the likelihood of achieving either.

Signatory nations agreed that emissions of greenhouse gases should peak as soon as possible and that they would report progress every five years. It seemed to be accepted, however, that Chinese and Indian emissions would continue to rise until 2030.

Meanwhile, $80bn would be paid each year to poorer developing nations to help their economies to grow without increasing emissions. It was not clear where this would come from.

As Conservative MP and UK Environmental Audit Committee member Peter Lilley remarked, it was a “toothless agreement”. It’s a sentiment that was virtually confirmed by the UK environment secretary, Amber Rudd, who, while welcoming the deal, admitted there would be no tough compliance measures on countries that failed to carry out their pledges.

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Implicit among the ambitions signed up to by the (reportedly) 50,000 delegates in Paris was the phasing out of fossil fuels within a few decades, in favour of renewables and nuclear. In other words, we might get no energy from coal, oil or fracking. We will have to rely on nuclear, wind, wave, solar and farmers’ AD plants. Is it cynical to suggest this is a pipe dream?

Furthermore, if all 196 signatories were to try to deliver their promises, the cost to the world’s economy would be prohibitive. Prominent Danish scientist Bjørn Lomborg has estimated the cost to Europe’s GDP would be a minimum of £200bn per year if the EU enacts regulations efficiently – and double that if it does not.

David Richardson farms about 400ha of arable land near Norwich in Norfolk in partnership with his wife Lorna and his son Rob.

The UK’s bill would be £50bn per year. And for the world as a whole, the cost would be between £600bn and £1.2trn a year. This could make the shindig in Paris the most expensive treaty in world history.

It would be far better, Lomborg suggests, if a small proportion of that money were to go on developing more efficient green energy sources.

I wouldn’t like readers to think I am anti-energy saving, or that I dismiss attempts to harness green energy. Why else would I have fitted solar panels on my roof? We have also rented some of our land to a neighbour with an AD plant, on which he is growing rye and maize to feed his microbes.

If I’m honest, I don’t really agree with using land for energy crops. Before long we will need every acre to produce food. But the Feed-in-Tariffs-aided rent the neighbour can afford to pay us is more attractive than any margin we can sensibly expect from wheat, rape or sugar beet – and we need to make a living. Furthermore, the agreement also provides for us to receive digestate from the AD plant to spread back on our land.

But these are short-term measures. Long term, I don’t believe Paris will achieve the results suggested from vague, negative conclusions. And the huge cost of the meeting would have been better spent researching more positive means to collect and conserve green energy.