S-Curve Economics CIC

The biggest barrier to climate progress right now isn't the US, says Simon Sharpe at Chatham House, but distraction and disorganisation at national and international level.

Why? Because there are plenty of steps that countries can take in purely national interest that leads to cutting emissions.

We need a global assessment of avoidable climate-change risks To understand the urgency of emissions reductions, policymakers and citizens need a full analysis of what is at stake.

The only way to avoid travelling up the dangerous S-curves of climate change risk is to move faster up the S-curves of the energy transition.

Read the article here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some of the UK’s top climate scientists (and one of our S-Curve team) have just published an article in Nature arguing that climate change risks need to be assessed and presented to heads of government in this way.

As Mark Carney said in his ‘tragedy of the horizons’ speech (yes, he’s made more than one good speech), ‘The catastrophic norms of the future can be seen in the tail risks of today’.

At first the probability is vanishingly small; it then increases rapidly; and then the rate of increase slows as it approaches a certainty.

If you take a worst-case outcome – such as heat and humidity combinations exceeding the limits of human tolerance – and plot its probability as a function of time, you get an S-shaped curve.

Climate change is unusual in one respect: unlike the risks of earthquakes, terrorism, industrial accidents, and many other things, the risks of climate change increase systematically over time.

So the second question must become ‘how likely is that, as a function of time?’

We need a global assessment of avoidable climate-change risks To understand the urgency of emissions reductions, policymakers and citizens need a full analysis of what is at stake.

In any field of risk assessment, the first question to ask is: ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ The second question is: ‘how likely is that?’

Clean energy targets emphasise the importance of building the new zero-carbon system as rapidly as possible, which is necessary before attempting to phase out fossil fuels.

Check out the analysis in our First Build, Then Break report here: www.scurveeconomics.org/publications...

The logic of these new metrics echoes the S-Curve view on the need for clean energy-focussed targets as a climate governance framework, rather than solely relying on carbon budgets.

We lay out this argument in our policy brief on Transition Milestones: www.scurveeconomics.org/wp-content/u...

As we breach 1.5 °C, we must replace temperature limits with clean-energy targets Actionable goals are needed to guide the world towards what needs to happen most quickly: shifting economies to clean energy sources.

As well as being more relevant to necessary actions, this provides a more positive focus for political debate.

See the comment piece by Kwesi Quagraine, Mark Lynas and Erle Ellis here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

As we breach 1.5 °C, we must replace temperature limits with clean-energy targets Actionable goals are needed to guide the world towards what needs to happen most quickly: shifting economies to clean energy sources.

As well as being more relevant to necessary actions, this provides a more positive focus for political debate.

See the comment piece by Kwesi Quagraine, Mark Lynas and Erle Ellis here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Indicators that directly measure the pace of the clean energy transition offer a better way forward. A new metric proposed in a Nature article would measure the rate at which clean energy grows relative to total demand, providing a clear indicator of progress towards 100% clean energy systems.

Neither points usefully towards the actions needed to actually achieve net zero emissions and avoid dangerous climate change.

Climate action has a measurement problem.

Warming metrics — such as the 1.5°C target — are difficult to measure year-to-year, and near-term emissions targets can lead to overemphasis on short-term easy fixes.

Link to the paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This work builds on previous work on ‘Systems archetypes of the energy transition’, which can be found on our website here: www.scurveeconomics.org/publications...

System thinking doesn’t have to involve complex models or messy diagrams. It can start with recognising and looking out for these patterns of change that occur across different technologies, sectors, and geographies.

Presented as simple causal loop diagrams, they offer practitioners useful heuristics for understanding and managing dynamic change.

In a new comment piece for Nature Reviews Clean Technology, S-Curve Economics analysts Max Collett and Simon Sharpe present six feedback dynamics that shape the pace and direction of the energy transition.

The path to net-zero energy systems is shaped by feedback effects, path dependence, and non-linearities. It is important that our mental models of change reflect this.

(Short 🧵 below)

Virtuous and vicious cycles in the energy transition - Nature Reviews Clean Technology Feedback loops shape the pace and direction of the clean energy transition by accelerating or resisting change. Researchers and practitioners can draw on these feedback loops as practical heuristics t...

Shiny new paper: Virtuous and vicious cycles in the energy transition

We explore how feedback loop dynamics are shaping the energy transition and what it means for decision makers.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This can be done by breaking down the transition into three stages: emergence, diffusion, and reconfiguration, and selecting policies to address the different challenges faced at each stage.

netorgft16281865.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/s-curv...

The framework provides a high-level map of policy options to accelerate transitions, showing which kinds of policies are effective at each stage. The overarching principle is to first build the new clean technology systems, before destabilising and dismantling the old ones.

Last week Anna Murphy was a keynote speaker at the 2nd High-Level Convening for Ministries of Finance of Latin America and the Caribbean. She shared a policy framework for accelerating low-carbon transitions, developed by S-Curve and others.

Ministries of finance have huge power over the speed and wider impact of clean technology transitions, both on a country’s competitiveness, and people’s lives.

netorgft16281865.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/s-curv...

📄 Read the report: www.scurveeconomics.org/publications...

Turning inward is tempting in a challenging geopolitical context. Our analysis suggests this would be a mistake. Selective, pragmatic international cooperation—on standards, green iron trade, demand creation and investment incentives—could accelerate the shift to near-zero-emissions steel.

All countries face both first- and late-mover risks, but scenarios with higher levels of international cooperation are consistently associated with better outcomes for competitiveness and decarbonisation.

Using interviews and qualitative scenario analysis, we explored how these uncertainties could shape countries’ national steel transitions in a global context. Across the scenarios, a key conclusion is that countries can’t plan the steel transition through domestic policy alone.

Policymakers working on steel face major uncertainty: how trade disputes will play out, which technologies will scale, and—critically—how other countries will act in the transition.