Baldrickworld

Baldrick: Don’t worry Mr B., I have a cunning plan to solve the problem.

Edmond Blackadder: Yes Baldrick, let us not forget that you tried to solve the problem of your mother’s low ceiling by cutting off her head.

The above comes from one of the greatest shows ever made and one that has become extremely relevant in the transition age. The reason it has become so extremely relevant is that the transition is essentially a series of cunning plans of the same variety as Baldrick’s plan to solve his mother’s low ceiling problem. Here’s the latest evidence, which, in the right hands, could be used to produce a whole new season of Blackadder, if not two.

#1 The price tag cunning plan

Many of us here follow and mock the constant revisions of the total cost of the energy transition. It is highly entertaining because those doing the revising carelessly throw around figures ending in “trillion” as if the word means “small change”. BloombergNEF is the latest.

In a report spanning an impressive 250 pages, which “crunches 18 million datapoints”, Bloomberg’s so-called research unit concludes that the transition to net zero by 2050 will cost the world an extra $34 trillion — because transition technologies are not economical.

It might sound surprising but BloombergNEF says it quite openly. If we only use economically competitive technologies, the authors of the report say, the non-existent global average temperature of the planet will rise by 2.6 degrees Celsius by 2050.

Clearly, this is an unacceptable path forward, so we need to pour $34 trillion more into the transition in order to provide the support that economically non-competitive, meaning commercially unviable, but extremely green technologies need to become dominant.

But get this, even with this additional investment in, it bears repeating, economically non-competitive technologies, we “still might miss the more ambitious Paris goal of keeping warming below 1.5C — edging closer to 1.75C instead.” But at least “That could still avoid some irreversible climate damages.” Chop that head off, save it from the low ceiling. And they needed 250 pages and 18 million datapoints to say it.

The good news for those concerned about average global temperatures the way some people are concerned about the effects of fairy intervention on their genetic survival, is that there are entities eager to chop their own heads off to solve that ceiling problem. Instead of, you know, bending a little.