Question: What are the main political barriers to finding and implementing large-scale renewable energy plans? How do we overcome them?

Bethan Charles answered on 16 Jan 2017:

Unfortunately there are lots of political barriers to renewable energy. At the moment we still run mostly on fossil fuels and most of the world’s factories, pipelines, energy grids etc. are all designed to suit fossil fuels. It costs a lot of money and takes many years to change the existing system to suit energy from renewable sources.

Because most governments are only in power a handful of years they want to invest in things that are likely to give people benefits very quickly (e.g. more jobs). But a large scale renewable energy plan would cost a lot of money and the benefits may not be seen for a long time, which makes some governments reluctant to commit to a large scale plan.

However, with climate change seen as one of the world’s greatest challenges, countries are joining together promising to invest more in the conversion to renewable energy, the UN’s climate change agreement is just one example of this. Even President Trump (another political barrier to large-scale renewable energy plans) will have trouble stopping the world’s trend towards cleaner energy.

However we are very slow at making these changes happen, we need to get faster!