Last week, opposition leader Kemi Badenoch said Net Zero by 2050 was “impossible” and could not be achieved “without a serious drop in our living standards or bankrupting us,” bringing to an end a decade-long cross-party consensus on energy policy.

BP – the UK’s second biggest energy company – seems to agree with the sentiment, having recently cut its planned investment in energy transition businesses by more than $5bn from its previous forecast.

The government is spooked, with its Energy and Net Zero Committee noting that “vocal opposition to Net Zero – including the energy transition – has grown in strength, political consensus has fractured, and with it potentially the will to carry it through.”

But detailed studies by our team at Oxford show that not only is Net Zero by 2050 possible, a shift to clean energy would save the world $12trillion in energy costs, bringing down costs for consumers and industry, as well as increasing energy security. As the costs of clean energy technologies continue to plummet and their performance improves, shrinking UK policy ambition would only make UK energy prices higher and put British industry at a disadvantage.

The shift from fossil fuels to clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, batteries, electrolyzers, and electric vehicles is a technology revolution. And just as with other historic technology transitions – railroads, computers, mobile phones – the shift is not linear. The growth of new technologies follows what is called an S-curve. When a technology is new, it grows exponentially, but its share is tiny, so in absolute terms its growth looks almost flat. As exponential growth continues, however, its share suddenly becomes large, making its absolute growth large too, until the market eventually becomes saturated and growth starts to flatten. The result is an S-shaped adoption curve.

An important driver of clean energy adoption is exponentially decreasing costs. Our research shows that clean energy technologies are like other technologies, such as semiconductors, computers, and biotech, that experience predictable long-term declines in cost and improvements in performance.

Since 1990, the cost of wind power has dropped by about 4 per cent a year, solar energy by 12 per cent a year and lithium-ion batteries by 12 per cent a year. Like computer semiconductors, each of these technologies can be mass produced. We project that by 2050 solar energy will likely cost a tenth of what it does today, making it far cheaper than any other source of energy.

Exponential growth and exponential cost declines can be hard for people to get their heads around, as we tend to think linearly. The energy provided by solar has been growing by about 30 per cent a year for several decades. If this rate continues for just thirteen more years, solar power with batteries and other long-term storage could supply most of the world’s energy needs by about 2038.

The exponential growth of renewables will inevitably slow down as they begin to dominate the energy supply, but the S-curves for solar and wind show that they will very likely displace most fossil fuels by 2050, with the latter confined largely to petrochemicals.

In 2000, 90 per cent of UK households had a landline telephone and few would have believed they could live without it. Today less than half have a landline and 94 per cent of people have a mobile – massive technology shifts can happen in mere decades.

People often wonder how renewables could replace fossil fuels when the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But a combination of increasingly cheap battery storage, electrolyzers for making green hydrogen, and better technology to manage the grid means that a steady, zero carbon energy supply is entirely possible.

The technological and economic forces driving this transition are global and unstoppable. Britain’s choice is not whether to engage in this transition, but whether to be a leader or a laggard.

Badenoch worried that supporting clean energy would make Britain dangerously “dependent on China”. But the surest way to be dependent on China would be to stop investing in Britain’s own capabilities in this critical new sector. Badenoch ignores the fact that, with North Sea oil and gas running out, our fossil based system is dangerously dependent on global energy markets that experienced sharp price rises after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Badenoch was simply wrong when she said pursuing Net Zero would harm Britain’s standard of living. Clean energy is already cheaper today than fossil fuels in most applications. Building a clean energy system will require investment and smart policies, but the payoffs will be significantly cheaper energy with less volatile costs and greater energy security.

From a purely economic perspective, even if climate change were not a looming threat, we should still make this transition quickly. Britain led the world in the 19th century energy revolution that gave us the fossil fuel-based system we have today; we should be a leader in the 21st century revolution that is building the clean, cheap, and sustainable energy system of tomorrow.

J Doyne Farmer is Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science, University of Oxford