“We need to learn from these successes that delivering ‘net zero’ will require more sophisticated economic understanding of innovation and transition, more widely applied.” “The policies that drove major breakthroughs in low-carbon technologies like wind and solar, were challenged by traditional economic advice, which ignored the role of innovation, framing climate policy as costly,” said Michael Grubb at University College, London, who co-authored the report. Governments should adapt the same approach to accelerate new industries, including electric vehicles and green steelmaking, they said.Ĭurrent systems that weigh costs against benefits are “impractical,” the report claims, given how many uncertainties they have to weigh up. They said that the cost of green technologies such as solar and wind power, and LED lighting, had been driven down dramatically due to policies aimed to directly support them.
Academics from Oxford and Cambridge universities, UCL and others called on politicians to drive change by intervening in the market.
