Monday 30 November 2015

Global Apollo comes to life as Mission Innovation

Global Apollo comes to life as Mission Innovation

The 'Global Apollo Programme' which aims to make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels to tackle climate change has come to life as 'Mission Innovation'.

It will be announced today at COP21 by US President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande.

The programme was supported by experts in the energy sector, economists and scientists such as world’s leading naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

Around 20 countries, including the UK, have committed to doubling their investment in clean energy research and development (R&D) in the next five years.

Lord Gus O’Donnell, Chairman of Frontier Economics and one of the architects behind the programme told ELN: “What we need now is to be clear about what the target is. We said in Apollo it should be 10 years to make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels and we needed a co-ordination mechanism.

"At the moment we haven’t got details of either both but I suspect that given now that we’ve got such a number of countries, it’s 20 countries it’s a lot more than I expected and big countries like China, India, US, Indonesia, Brazil this is fantastic and some of the big producers like Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE.

"I’m hopeful that we can now think about what is the proper target and what’s the right co-ordination mechanism to make sure that we all work together not just the public sector working together but how we work together with the private sector which is another fantastic part of this.”

Lord O’Donnell believes that pledges to reduce carbon emissions combined with investing in R&D is the "best hope the world has for a long time”.

Another initiative which aims to invest in clean energy technologies has been launched by Bill Gates and is supported by Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Written by

Bruna Pinhoni

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