THE recent G7 statement, by Angela Merkel and the other leaders, is surprisingly ignorant about climate change. They are taking credit for promising to get rid of all fossil fuels by the end of the century, in 85 years time. If it takes that long the world as we know it will have fallen apart decades before, and it's just a political sound bite that shows they don't understand the pace of change.

Imagine those in 1815 looking ahead to 1900 – they were just getting used to the idea of steam, and still didn't know about infections for disease, but by 1900 there were cars, planes were about to take off, and heart surgery had begun.

The last century also showed the same speed of change. Ten million horses and mules died in the First World War, and a century later we are using drones, going into space, and communicating on Skype. There was no radio in 1900 and now we can Face Time.

The current rate of change is even faster, and accelerating, as the development of mobile phones suggests, so our leaders should set target dates that mean something. The ideal would be a 90 per cent CO2 emission reduction by 2050 and that is technically possible if we take the challenge seriously.

However there are a number of other factors that mean we'll probably fail, as we can't properly control world population growth, currently at 9,000 more mouths to feed every hour, and we are fixated by economic growth, national identities and power, meaning that we spend far too much killing each other, and posturing about our world status.

Over one hundred countries chipped in to pay for the Large Hadron Collider, and a similar number could sort out the fossil fuel problem though it would cost them rather more. As the USA spent £two trillion plus on destabilising Iraq, and Afghanistan cost us £40 billion it's clear that money is available given the global will.

While it would be possible to develop cleaner, and simpler, fourth generation nuclear reactors, or thorium ones, it's probably better to go solar and tidal, and world wide, and, most importantly, find a way of storing electricity that's not used immediately it's produced. Learning how to make steel and fertilisers without fossil fuels would also help.

The sun provides more energy in one minute than the whole world uses in a year, so let's use all the deserts to capture it to power a world grid, backed up by a regular tidal input, with the surplus stored in a battery technology we are just about to develop with all that money.

That's the challenge, not Mars.