This house believes that subsidising renewable energy is a good way to wean the world off fossil fuels.

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About this debate

By any measure, the world is on course to overshoot the safety limits that scientists have set for carbon emissions. A record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon was pumped into the atmosphere last year. This means that, despite a recession in the rich world, and a lot of highfalutin talk about climate change, emissions are running close to the business-as-usual scenario offered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: that comes with a 50% chance of a 4˚C temperature rise by the end of the century.

To improve the odds, a large part of the world’s energy production will have to shift to renewable sources. This will not happen unaided: renewable energy is almost always more expensive than the lowest-cost fossil-fuel alternative. According to the International Energy Agency, this means $13.5 trillion will have to be invested in promoting renewable energy by 2035. But who is going to pay for this—and how? Can the transformation be made through taxing emissions? Or must renewable energy receive some form of state subsidy—wasteful and inefficient though this tends to be?