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Dieter Helm

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68
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2024-04-14
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2024-04-14
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  1. “So if I think about what we're doing now, there's a lot of energy used in the communications technology we're currently using. A lot of it. In fact, ICT will be the huge growth in electricity demand over the next two, three decades. It's going to be really big, AI, et cetera. All of that stuff which lies behind our modern communications. But, you know, look at the clothes you're wearing. Look at all the carbon in those. What did you have for breakfast? Or, you know, are you going on an airplane later today? I mean, I don't fly.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That you actually increase emissions by buying the steel from somewhere else and importing it and not counting it, etc. But that said, the reason we want to get to this proper measure outcome is because we do not want the climate to go above two degrees, because that has real consequences, really serious consequences. And not just nicely pedestrian, it just gets a bit worse year by year. These things have tipping points too. So this is a really serious challenge. I don't think it's quite exponential.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, I want to do net zero carbon consumption. So I don't want to do net zero territorial carbon production because what happens to be emitted in the UK is not a measure of what you and I in the UK are contributing to climate change. That's one of my earlier books I said people should construct their own carbon diaries. Work out how much of what they're doing is laced with carbon and then work out what it would be like by 250 not to include that. And we know that the numbers, for example, for the UK for carbon consumption are much higher than carbon production. Another blip in this that we don't even include Drax power station in our emissions because we believe that they're going to grow some trees in the United States to offset this stuff. So these numbers are not the right net zero numbers and indeed they can be perverse. They can produce the result.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Other technologies fusion, nuclear, etc., these may be completely transformational. So I want to give a lot of money to developing those new technologies. That's really important to me, and that's where I put more focus rather than trying to fix some arbitrary targets for how many gigawatts of this and how many gigawatts of that is going to be produced. And I'm very optimistic about those technologies.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, if you're ESG, you should take into account the human rights of the people there and what's happening to them in the same way as you should take into account when you drive your electric car the child slave labor in the Congo mines, right? So you should take account. But what I would say is the real hope for solar is moving beyond the materials that are currently used. That's really exciting. When it comes to offshore wind, okay, you can make them float, but you can't make the blaze much bigger. And it's not unreasonable to say that the considerable cost savings have been made have possibly largely been made.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Where 80% of the world's solar panels are made. If you look at the labor conditions there, if you look at the organization of that labor, if you look at the role of the Uyghurs in this, including those who are in these camps to be controlled, etc., if you look at the intensive coal that's used to produce those solar panels, because they're very, very coal intensive to produce, the story is slightly different.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “A fantastic achievement, and it's also a fantastic achievement how essentially doing the logistics properly. And increasing the size of the blades reduced the costs of producing offshore wind. Nobody wants to detract from that. That's great. But you also have to ask why those costs have fallen before you jump to the conclusion that they're going to keep on falling forever. It's all exponential. So one thing say great step forward. Second step to say is what happens next? Now the reduction in costs of solar are almost entirely due to the manufacturing cost savings in China. In northwest China”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That the scale of what needs to be done is huge. It's to get from 80 or 70% of total energy globally to something much lower. This is like taking a peacetime economy and making it a wartime economy and doing it on stints because after all last time we did this we were taking essentially fossil fuel internal combustion engines and using for military purposes as opposed to peace ones. This is a complete transition of our electricity system. You need a new grid, a super grid to handle this system. You need to put that in place. That's a big investment. And as to the notion that the costs of renewables will always fall, I hope they will, but let me just point out the costs of offshore wind have just doubled in the North Sea because the cost of capital has gone up quite substantially.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Look, no doubt as a psychology involved in this And I'm absolutely certain that if you tell people it's unsolvable, then they will stop trying to solve it. That's not my view. My view is that you'll need quite a range of technologies. The technical progress is a very important part of this. Nuclear may well be a significant part of this frame.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “There are plenty of technologies out there coming down the track. Where I depart from conventional wisdom is while I think that wind and solar have very important contributions to make, and I'm very pro both, and I think that both should be subsidised because I don't think they're cost competitive now. I don't think we're going to power the world on wind and solar alone. And indeed, I think that their contributions will always be part play, not total play. So I think one has to be brutally realistic again. I keep coming back to this point, but I'm pushing back against your notion that we must be, you know, happy, clappy, and optimistic about this stuff.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I come back to your points about optimism and pessimism. There's nothing in what I'm saying that says this problem can't be cracked. Nothing at all. And there's plenty of energy. The sun comes up every day. The sun produces in about an hour more energy, I'm told.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Okay, so let's unpack it. First of all, this idea that the UK is showing leadership. I mean, it's about brutal realism. We've been in deindustrializing. You know, what do you think is going on now? We're going to close Port Talbot. We're going to close Grangemouth. And we're going to import the petrochemicals and the steel from China or elsewhere. What happens to global emissions? Do they go up or do they go down? Well, they go up, right? And so this notion that, you know, when we get to net zero, we'll no longer be causing climate change, if only that were true. You know, a lot of those emissions in China are ours for us. So if you measure properly our carbon footprint, which is carbon consumption, not just carbon production, you would get a very different story from the one that's trotted out. Now, I understand why politically it's important to say that for the politicians, but the reality is not as presented.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's about India. It's about Indonesia. It's about China. It's about Brazil. It's about the Middle Eastern countries. It's about sub-Saharan Africa. It's about Nigeria, which will have a population bigger than Europe's by 2050. And in these countries, the demand for fossil fuels is rising sharply. India is a classic example, a coal-based expansion. That's the context because global warming is global. It's what it says on the tip. And we seem to think that global warming is made in Oxford or in, you know, in England.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And this is what makes the challenge of what we have to do so demanding and so important. But it is a huge challenge. Think of plastics. Think of the world's transport. Think of almost anything you do. Write your daily carbon diary down and then have a look at almost everything in your day and work out how much of it's made up of carbon. Now it's true we are decarbonizing in the UK and in bits of Europe. And indeed a bit of the US, electricity. Almost all the gains have been by switching from coal to gas. That's the great thing Britain achieved. That's why we're in the 70s for the share of fossil fuels in the British economy not above the 80s. But if you look at where the emissions are going to come from in the future, they're not going to come from the UK. We're 1%”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, oil's going up, right? America's gone. America's the big transformation under particularly Obama, but also Biden, which is the transformation from a country declining in oil output down towards the kind of 7 to 9 million barrels a day to now being by far the world's largest producer of oil at 13 million barrels a day and rising. And that's because our economies are soaked in carbon.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, if you now look at what the other 20% of that 100% is for the world's energy, the other 20% is mostly nuclear and large scale hydro. So if you look at the graph, where we've got to in renewables so far, it's a bit bigger than the pencil line along the top, but it's really quite small.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, but if it's all going in that direction and the costs are tumbling everywhere, then you have to ask yourself, you know, leading politicians tell us in Britain that renewables are 10 times cheaper than fossil fuels, et cetera. You have to say, well, you know, the market will do this stuff. Now, I don't believe that. If we just take a position, you know, the world's in, 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, about the same as it did in 1990. 80%. That's where we're starting from. And that's coal, gas, and oil. Demand for oil is still going up. The demand for gas is rising sharply. And the demand for coal has not yet even stabilized.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, if you think that's going to happen and you think it's going to happen in the way that Kingsmill described it, then we can all go home, basically. It'll be like the internet. We won't need government to do any of this stuff. We won't need any subsidies. It's just going to happen.”

    2024-04-14 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 69. The brutal truth about net zero and how to vanquish climate populists, with Dieter Helm · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source