Cheapest Energy in History. Still Heading for 3 Degrees?

Solar power now costs a thousandth of what it did in 1976. Batteries are down more than ninety percent in a decade. By the logic of economics, the climate problem should be close to solved. It isn't. We are on track for close to three degrees of warming, and politics is sliding in the wrong direction.

Few people have thought as long, or as clearly, about the economics of climate change as Lord Adair Turner, chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and first chair of the UK's Climate Change Committee. This week, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac sit down with him to work out what’s going wrong. 

Turner doesn’t soften it. The "electrotech stack" of solar, batteries and motors keeps collapsing in price in a way fossil fuels never can. Sub-Saharan Africa could leapfrog the fossil era outright. China's bet on electrification makes America's wager on cheap gas look like a costly mistake. But the movement he has spent two decades inside has also sold a story it never should have: that the transition would cost no one anything.

So what closes the gap between what the technology makes possible and what our politics will allow? Who pays for the parts that aren't cheap? And if money alone can’t avoid a 3°C hotter future, what can?

Learn More

🎧 Watch Adair Turner’s three LSE lectures, the full “Limiting Climate Change While Growing Prosperity” series this conversation distils.

⚡ Explore the Energy Transitions Commission and its “Protecting Paris” work on staying well below two degrees.

🌡️ Read the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 to see where the near three-degree current-policies trajectory comes from.

🚢 Understand the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework, the global shipping carbon price that stalled in London last October.

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Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks

Edited by: Miles Martignoni

Show Runner: Caitlin Hanrahan 

Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford

This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.

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