What role can the UK seriously can play in tackling climate change? The “delusion of grandeur” we have been led to believe is that we can do it all. This delusion is falling away – when it comes to green technology, the UK is not the envy of the world in the twenty-first century. The US is positioning itself to play a major role in this, through its Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act. The UK can’t match this scale of initiative. The EU, too, is big, and is likely to allow member governments to play a large role similar to that being carved out in the US.

In this global context, what is the UK’s role in climate change mitigation? Rather than try to do everything, the UK should focus on the three areas that it is good at: offshore wind; carbon capture and storage (CCS); and research. In this podcast, I explain why, and how concentrating on these three comparative advantages will enable us to make a serious contribution to mitigating climate change globally – the only thing that really matters.

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