We’re glad Nick Stern has this all sorted then

Climate change as a problem is therefore over:

For instance, my team at the Treasury and I did not foresee that the cost of generating electricity from solar panels would fall by 77% between 2014 and 2024, or that battery costs would plummet by 84% over the same period.

We did not expect that the costs of generating electricity from offshore wind would more than halve within 15 years and allow rapid and large-scale deployment in the North Sea, or that sales of fully electric or hybrid vehicles would make up more than half of all new car registrations in the UK this September.

Every time we look at the advances in technology over the past 20 years, the prospects seem better.

In many parts of the world now, solar power can generate electricity far more cheaply than fossil fuels. The clean economy is now cheaper than the dirty economy across sectors that are responsible for around a third or more of current global emissions, without subsidy or carbon price, and that proportion is rising rapidly.

We’d note that Bjorn Lomborg did get that fall in the solar price right and he did so near a decade earlier too. Meaning that all that effort and money spent on trying to make solar cheaper was entirely micturated - the price decline was already baked into the very nature of the technology.

But note what is being said - non-emitting is now cheaper than emitting and the portion this is true of is rising. So, we’re done, we’ve solved climate change. We had to move from emissions being cheaper to non-emissions being cheaper. We have. We’re done.

Which is nice, isn’t it?

Tim Worstall