Gargantuan amounts of money are often quoted when we hear and read about the cost to transition to a low-carbon future.

Already, the climate crisis is frightening enough without also worrying about how much more we’ll have to spend to upgrade our energy sources, our grid, our homes and big-ticket consumer items such as electric vehicles (EVs).

In a world of uncertainty, we can be assured that consumers will face more misery as we pick-up the hefty tab to banish fossil fuels from our lives.

Now that’s the widespread assumption, but it’s a premise that Jens Burchardt wants to challenge. Jens is a Director of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Centre for Climate and Sustainability and an expert on the impact of climate change.

In this TED Talk from April 2021, Jens uses the example of steel in cars to highlight the fractional increase in cost it would take to adopt low-carbon manufacturing – an extra €500 for an average €30,000 car.

That’s an extra €500 to cover low-carbon manufacturing of the steel, the glass, the plastics, and everything else that goes into our vehicles. That’s not even 2%!

As Jens explains, the reason is simple enough; for cars, the manufacturing cost represents only about 15% of the total. And the same basic cost structure applies to other ‘hard-to-abate’ manufacturing sectors (glass, ceramics, etc).

Given the gravity of the problem, the examples he offers are almost ridiculously inexpensive – an extra €3 to produce a carbon-neutral smart phone, €0.70 for a pair of jeans, even the same 1% to 2% baseline for a low-carbon house.

The reward for companies which embrace low-carbon manufacturing is they get to talk in their marketing about their REAL green credentials, and to differentiate themselves from the phoney, green washing cheaters.

Jens’ presentation is a very important, and all-the-more so because it comes from someone with BCG credibility and deep knowledge about supply chains. At one level, it should reassure us that the transition to a low-carbon world is eminently within our grasp.

But the other reaction is – ‘what the hell!’ If the end cost is just a couple of percent extra, why isn’t the world making wholesale changes RIGHT NOW?

Maybe the biggest takeaway from Jens’ presentation is his final comment – for all the challenges and complications on the road to freedom from fossil fuel pollution, economics is not one of the roadblocks.