{"text":[[{"start":5.84,"text":"The writer is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace"}],[{"start":9.8,"text":"With a significant proportion of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the US-Iran war, the world has been rushing to find readily available alternatives to fossil fuels."}],[{"start":22.88,"text":"The conflict has accelerated a clean energy boom that was already under way. The clearest real-time measure is sales from China, the world’s green workshop. In March, April, May and June 2026, Chinese exports of solar panels and components, batteries and electric vehicles were 47 per cent higher by value ($84.9bn) than in the same period last year."}],[{"start":47.72,"text":"Anyone who cares about the climate should be glad to see millions of people installing technologies that will cut future emissions. Unfortunately, this pursuit of self-interest can only take the clean energy transition so far. The idea that incremental individual decisions will be enough to curb the threat of climate disaster is a fantasy. Governments must keep tilting the playing field, for three reasons."}],[{"start":70.88,"text":"First, self-interest is most effective when the investments are small and the payback is fast. This cleantech boom is mostly driven by many individual purchases of solar panels for Nigerian roofs, heat pumps for European apartments or batteries for Australian garages. It would take expectations of a much longer gas and oil shortage to drive change in industrial sectors that remain nearly completely reliant on fossil fuels."}],[{"start":97.04,"text":"Admittedly, there have been two large investments in clean heavy industry outside China in the wake of this latest fossil fuel shock. The UK-listed company Atome has taken a final investment decision on a $665mn plant in Paraguay that will produce ammonia-based fertiliser without natural gas. And the green steel company Stegra has secured another $1.65bn in financing that will allow it to complete a plant in Sweden to make steel with hydrogen rather than coal."}],[{"start":126.88,"text":"Both deals required unusually favourable geography — grids fed by abundant hydropower — as well as strong policy support. Stegra’s plant is protected by the EU’s rising carbon price and new carbon border levy, while Atome got its green fertiliser facility thanks to major financing packages from multilateral institutions including the International Finance Corporation and the Green Climate Fund."}],[{"start":149.92,"text":"Whereas buying an EV today is a bet that petrol will be expensive this year, investing hundreds of millions in a green fertiliser facility is a bet that natural gas-based fertilisers will be comparatively expensive or undesirable in the 2040s. Self-interested economic actors take such decisions only if governments point them in the right direction."}],[{"start":171.56,"text":"Second, the quest for economic resilience drives policymakers towards domestic coal as well as domestic sunlight. India, for instance, has approved about $4bn in subsidies to gasify coal. China, too, is pairing its long-term investments in clean heavy industry with major new spending on highly polluting coal-to-chemicals projects."}],[{"start":194.28,"text":"Rebound effects also cut against a self-interest-driven transition. When China shifts to EVs and massively cuts its own oil demand, it makes it more affordable for Americans to keep driving their big trucks when the Strait of Hormuz is closed."}],[{"start":208.2,"text":"Finally, one essential step of the transition cannot be taken out of narrow self-interest or a desire for affordability: carbon removal. Even if emissions were to fall rapidly, the scenarios for keeping global warming below 2C entail gigatonnes of carbon removal through novel technologies each year by mid-century. Today the world removes only about 2 megatonnes per year by such means. So the world needs a thousandfold scale-up in two or three decades of a technology that is, in effect, a global public good."}],[{"start":240.72,"text":"It’s a wonderful thing to have clean energy progress driven by economic self-interest and the need for energy security. But there’s still no avoiding the need for states eventually to force fossil-fuel operations to shut down and mandate carbon removal."}],[{"start":259.16,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785978352_4653.mp3"}