Bjorn Lomborg: The West’s best climate bet is fuel research and development

As the COP30 climate summit wraps up in Brazil’s Amazonian hub of Belém, activists are dispersing after two weeks of rain forest photo ops, protest disruptions and impassioned speeches on slashing carbon emissions. But participants sidestepped the stark reality: The actions of western nations — including Canada — have less and less sway over the trajectory of global warming.

For decades now, western governments, especially in Europe, have prioritized carbon cuts over higher economic growth, spending trillions of dollars to convince consumers to adopt electric cars and accept more costly, less reliable wind and solar power. Yet all these expensive efforts are barely making a dent.

The global decarbonization rate (measured as CO₂ emissions over GDP) has remained roughly constant since the 1960s, with no change following the 2015 Paris Agreement. Global emissions have skyrocketed, reaching a new record last year. Despite this, climate campaigners demand that the world quadruple its decarbonization rate.

Why are emissions still increasing when the EU and the United States spent more than $700 billion last year on green investments like solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, hydrogen, electric cars and power grids? Because rich-world emissions matter very little for climate change in the 21st century.

The West did dominate emissions in previous centuries, but future emissions will come overwhelmingly from China, India, Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and many other countries clambering out of poverty. One recent scenario shows that under current policies, just 13 per cent of CO₂ emissions over the rest of this century will come from the mostly rich and western countries of the OECD.

The West’s pledge to achieve net-zero by 2050 will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars yet do little. Most likely, the policy will simply shift energy-intensive production to the rest of the world with little overall impact on emissions — just as EV battery manufacturing has shifted to China’s coal-powered economy.

If rich countries try to fix this problem with carbon border taxes, costs will escalate for both rich and poor countries, while robbing the poor of the opportunity for export-driven growth.

If, super-optimistically, we assume the West ends up actually eliminating all its own emissions without further leakage by 2050, global CO₂ emissions over the century will fall just eight per cent. When run through the United Nations’ own climate model the resulting reduction in global temperature rise is a minuscule 0.02°C by 2050. Even by the end of the century, temperature rise will be reduced by less than 0.1°C.

Despite the West’s irrelevance, climate summits and pious activists endlessly fixate on what the rich world should do. Protesters glue themselves to highways in Europe and the U.S. while mostly ignoring China and completely disregarding India, Africa and the rest of the world.

No wonder, because their message of self-sacrifice will not go far in countries that desperately want energy-driven development. Poorer nations don’t want to emulate Germany’s huge climate-driven debt, Spain’s green blackouts, or the U.K.’s record-setting electricity prices.

There is a cheaper and much more efficient approach: innovation. Throughout history, humanity has tackled major challenges, not with restrictions, but by innovating. When air pollution enveloped Los Angeles in the 1950s, we didn’t ban cars. We developed catalytic converters that made cars run cleaner. When much of the world was starving in the 1960s, we didn’t force everyone to eat less. We developed higher-yielding crops.

Now, though we need similar breakthroughs for green energy, the world is all but ignoring innovation. In 1980, after the oil price shocks, the rich world spent more than eight cents per $100 of GDP on green R&D to find energy alternatives. As fossil fuels became cheap again, however, investment fell. When climate concerns grew, we ignored innovation and rushed to subsidize inefficient solar and wind. By 2023, the rich world was spending less than four cents of every $100 of GDP on green R&D. Total rich-world spending adds up to just US$27 billion — less than two per cent of overall green spending.

To enable breakthroughs in many potential technologies, we should raise that spending to around US$100 billion a year. We could invest to innovate fourth-generation nuclear with small, modular, type-approved reactors, or boost green hydrogen production along with water purification, or research next-generation battery technology, CO₂-free oil harvested from algae, as well as CO₂ extraction, fusion, second-generation biofuels, and thousands of other possibilities.

None of these technologies is currently efficient, but innovation only needs to make a handful better than fossil fuels and everyone will switch. And because innovation will cost a tiny fraction of current and future net-zero spending, green R&D will let us do much more while spending much less.

Unfortunately, the leaders who jetted into Brazil’s rain forest for the climate summit remain fixated on mandates and subsidies, completely missing the power of smart R&D. It’s time for the West to recognize its limited leverage and pivot from wasteful spending to game-changing tech investments that actually deliver results.

Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First.”