“We are still being staggeringly shit. Lots of amazing things are happening, but there is no doubt we are doing badly overall.” Simon Sharpe, former civil servant and member of the UK COP26 team, is scathing in his assessment of how the world is doing in managing climate change. Speaking to me about his new book Five Times Faster, Sharpe insists the focus by NGOs and others on encouraging businesses and politicians to “try harder” and “raise ambition” is at best unhelpful, and at worst “profoundly depressing”.
Sharpe’s book, published in April by Cambridge University press, is based around the premise that the world needs to act five times faster to avoid dangerous levels of climate change. To speed up the transition, the science, economics and diplomacy of climate need to be rethought, he argues. “In all aspects of climate change, we can see things moving forward,” he tells me over Zoom from his home office. “The war in Ukraine has pushed people to go faster.” But there are “structural issues” that mean we are “not moving quick enough”.
“Economics often get in the way,” says Sharpe. He highlights the absurdity of deciding policy based on cost-benefit analyses when the costs of climate change of 3°C or 4°C above pre-industrial levels are based “entirely on made-up equations”. Sharpe, whose background is in physics and finance, quotes the physicist Doyne Farmer: “Economists pull these equations out of their arses.” He blasts the “wrong economic theory” for creating and continuing the idea that regulation will add costs: “regulation just sets the rules”.
Sharpe attributes the UK’s success in decarbonising its power sector and replacing coal with large amounts of offshore wind not to strong political will, but the “right combination of policies”—“targeted investment and technology choices”. Economists may suggest reining in spending today, but Sharpe is insistent that meeting climate goals means investing in innovation and currently expensive zero-emission technologies to push them “down the cost reduction curve”. Market measures, like emissions trading systems, can make industries more efficient, but won’t create the energy transition we need.
“The UK is afflicted by neo-classical economics worse than other countries,” says Sharpe. “We are stuck in a rut of treating the economy as an equilibrium system, but equilibrium is only one state of a dynamic system.”
Economics aside, I wonder how he thinks the UK government is doing on climate action since the issue appears to have slipped down the agenda after COP26 in late 2021. “The UK government is not outstanding compared to its peers on climate change, but it is probably not that much behind either,” he says. Sharpe is clear that no country is doing enough to bring down emissions. “Remarkably ineffective” is how he describes international climate diplomacy based around COPs. “After 30 years of formal climate negotiations, we still don’t have institutions that are supporting the right kind of cooperation,” he says. “All substance has been taken out of the negotiations; we are now negotiating over processes.”
This criticism doesn’t mean he thinks the now annual climate meetings should be scrapped. “COPs need to happen,” says Sharpe. “I want there to be the opportunity for lots of people to come together.” But they should be focused much more on practical cooperation rather negotiations over emission targets. He points to the Breakthrough Agenda that was launched at COP26, where countries agreed actions to help decarbonise the power, road transport, steel, hydrogen and agriculture sectors in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Sharpe’s book opens with him explaining how his interest in climate change coincided with the birth of his daughter (he was previously working in counter-terrorism). I ask whether his daughter, now 11, is proud of having a dad so passionately involved in saving the planet. The answer is a wry no. “She’s not a climate activist, and probably just thinks I spend too much time working and not enough time playing.”
He is clear, though, that we all need to up our game if we are to create “plausible grounds for hope” for today’s children and future generations. “Wherever you stand, whether you are a concerned citizen or a politician, an activist or an investor, there are things you can do to help shake up complacent institutions and promote the spread of new ideas.”
