Boris shouldn’t write off fossil fuels just yet

At last week’s G7 summit, Boris Johnson pushed his fellow leaders to back his climate finance plan to support large-scale renewable energy projects across Africa and parts of Asia. The PM received a decidedly lukewarm response to his new Marshall plan, only netting pledges from Canada and Germany – and for good reason. As Rishi Sunak highlighted this week, when he declined to put a ‘specific figure’ on the cost of Net Zero in an interview on GB News, the cost of these climate plans are anything but clear.

Fundamentally, Boris’s plan to boost renewables around the world misses the fact that renewables are actually struggling to catch up with traditional energy sources. This isn’t likely to change any time soon: thanks to renewable energy’s reliability issues, the need for solid energy infrastructure in developing countries, and soaring demand for petrochemicals, the fundamentals of the fossil fuel industry remain strong.

It’s not surprising that most G7 states have shied away from making significant new pledges towards climate finance. Before the summit, the PM was already facing opposition within his own government, with the Treasury reluctant to free up new funds for the plan before the autumn spending review. Instead, the Treasury had only ‘reaffirmed’ an existing vague commitment to ‘increase and improve’ climate finance contributions.

During the pandemic, the UK managed to fund fossil fuel projects, as did other G7 governments. Over the past year, they channelled some £137 billion into oil, coal and gas, propping up their airline and car industries that were being hit by the pandemic.

Major energy powers have been betting even more extensively on traditional fuels. Norway recently released a white paper on its long-term energy strategy which made clear that the country intends to continue exploiting its substantial fossil fuel reserves in the decades to come.