Deciding how to decide to achieve a low carbon transition

Event details

Simon Sharpe is Deputy Director of COP26 Policy Themes at the Cabinet Office. He recently moved from the Department for Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), where he was Head of BEIS’ International Climate Change Strategic Projects.

Simon will discuss the main lines of a contemporary policy debate on how to make effective decisions to achieve a low-carbon transition.

Decision-making in the UK government has traditionally followed a framing of fixing market failures. In this framework, we estimate the marginal benefit of marginal action, in order to determine the optimal level of action justified by damages caused, in this case by climate change.

This has been made most famous by the Stern report in 2007, which supported the adoption of the Climate Change Act by comparing costs and benefits.

However, as is clear from the scientific evidence, the transition to net-zero emissions needs to be much deeper, rapid and pervasive than a marginal analysis can even imagine.

We are contemplating a radically different industrial and economic system, a highly non-marginal change, in which both economic risks and opportunities will arise.

In this presentation, Simon Sharpe will discuss a transition in the making in our understanding of climate policy, in which we begin to see the low-carbon transition from an industrial strategy perspective.

He proposes to adopt an approach to informing policy-making using complexity science and insights from the economics of innovation and systems transition, based on assessing risks and opportunities.

Simon will also discuss the role of the UK in engaging internationally on climate change and low-carbon innovation policy, notably at the upcoming UK-based climate Conference of the Parties (COP26).

Registration

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