Spending on renewable energy ‘shortsighted’

Spending billions on renewable energy and nuclear power is counterproductive to limiting global warming.

The rush to invest billions of ­dollars in renewable energy and nuclear power technologies was shortsighted and counterproductive to the goal of limiting global warming to the levels agreed to at last year’s climate summit in Paris, an Oxford University study has found.

In a paper published in Nature Climate Change, climate physicist Myles Allen said efforts should be focused on “carbon efficiency” and “backstop” carbon capture and storage. He said offshore wind farms and nuclear plants came at a high cost and could limit the ability to respond properly to climate change later.

Professor Allen is a past contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The ­results of his study run against the orthodox view of many environment groups that fossil fuel use must be phased out completely. However, they recognise a key point made repeatedly in IPCC ­reports, that carbon capture and storage is vital to meet the challenge of climate change.

Professor Allen said there were only two things politicians could do to address the climate challenge: reduce the cost of large-scale capture and disposal of carbon ­dioxide, and help achieve carbon ­efficiency — the maximising of the average rate of economic growth achieved for a given rate of emission.

Unless carbon capture and disposal cost less than $200 a tonne of carbon dioxide, stabilising temperatures below 2C would require “truly heroic levels of self-sacrifice by future generations”, he said.

Of the billions being spent on combating climate change, only a tiny fraction was relevant to the “backstop” technologies that would have the impact needed, he said. And sacrificing economic growth to reduce emissions could impair the ability of future generations to reduce emissions to zero.