Labour's Sustainable Energy Ambitions

The recent briefing document from the Labour party Thirty by 2030 is written by people who really know their subject. It is well worth reading and full of sensible ideas. In the plot below I have tried to compare three things:

• Today's energy sources,
• The proposed energy sources in 2030 as far as I am able to extract numbers from the report,
• My model in The Green Light, assuming that is achieved in 2050.

This shows that Labour's proposals, although percieved as radical, are in fact no more ambitious than those that I assumed in Green Light. And the Green Light is approximately equivalent to net zero by 2050 if one makes some very optimistic assumptions about carbon sequestration by bogs or forests or by man-made carbon capture and storage.

Adoption of technology

This plot shows that the old tech such as electricity, cars and washing machines spread rather slowly. More recent tech such as microwave, internet and smartphone spread more quickly but, I would argue, has less practical influence on people's lives.

I found it on a US economics website but the data originates from our world in data where you can explore the data and add other technologies.

Are Ideas getting harder to find?

The title speaks for iself and is copied from this paper by four economists from Stanford. Their first figure summarises the evidence.

TFP is the part of growth which is attributed to technological progress. As many other economists have found, TFP peaked in the mid 20th century and has been falling since, despite the number of researchers growing exponentially with a doubling time of around 15 years.

The puzzle to me is why most economists do not accept that the slowing of science is the underlying cause of the low productivity, low growth and low real interest rates of the past decades. While most scientists would simply claim that science and technology are still accelerating. Could it be that the professional pride of the two groups prevents either from seeing clearly. If slowing science is the underlying cause of low growth then it undermines the economics profession because it suggests that designing better economic institutions will not solve the problem (though relaxing the grip of intellectual property law could at least provide a temporary boost to growth). And if new technology is arriving at a lower rate despite the growing number of researchers, that obviously does not reflect well on the science profession.

New tech and unequal growth

Here's an interview with economist, Enrico Moretti, about the geographical concentration of growth in the newer industries such as information- and bio-tech. It reinforces my view that more growth in these areas will not easily spread to greater prosperity for the population as a whole. At least, in the present climate of unquestioning belief in "intellectual property rights" the benefits of growth in these technologies does not spread widely.
In the case of companies that use a lot of energy or other natural resources to manufacture large heavy products there are advantages to spreading production over several sites scattered around the nation or the world. If a company only uses human resources and its products are digital or pharma or knowledge then there is nothing to prevent all the value from being created in one small site.

Red, Orange, Green

As a nation we have a choice:

      Red for resource wars when the oil runs out

      Orange for global warming when the carbon is burnt

      Green for sustainable energy

It's true that action at national level can only delay the Orange, but it can avoid the Red and show a Green example that others may follow.