The Energy Transition, the inevitable shift away from cheap, centralized, largely fossil-based energy systems, is one of the core challenges of our time. This book provides a coherent and novel insight into the nature of this challenge and possible strategies to accelerate and guide such transitions. It brings together prominent European scholars and practitioners from the fields of energy transition research and governance to draw attention to the current complex dynamics in the energy domain, and offer elegant and provocative explanations for current crises and lock-ins. They identify multiple energy transition pathways that emerge and increasingly compete, and emphasize the need and possibilities for novel governance. By analysing the complexity of energy transition processes and the difficulties in shifting to sustainable pathways, this text questions the extent to which actually governing energy transitions is already reality, just an illusion, or a bare necessity.

Rapidly rising carbon emissions from the intense development of Western Canada’s fossil fuels continue to aggravate the global climate emergency and destabilize democratic structures. The urgency of the situation demands not only scholarly understanding, but effective action. Regime of Obstruction aims to make visible the complex connections between corporate power and the extraction and use of carbon energy. Edited by William Carroll, this rigorous collection presents research findings from the first three years of the seven-year, SSHRC-funded partnership, the Corporate Mapping Project. Anchored in sociological and political theory, this comprehensive volume provides hard data and empirical research that traces the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry through economics, politics, media, and higher education. Contributors demonstrate how corporations secure popular consent, and coopt, disorganize, or marginalize dissenting perspectives to position the fossil fuel industry as a national public good. They also investigate the difficult position of Indigenous communities who, while suffering the worst environmental and health impacts from carbon extraction, must fight for their land or participate in fossil capitalism to secure income and jobs. The volume concludes with a look at emergent forms of activism and resistance, spurred by the fact that a just energy transition is still feasible. This book provides essential context to the climate crisis and will transform discussions of energy democracy. Contributions by Laurie Adkin, Angele Alook, Clifford Atleo, Emilia Belliveau-Thompson, John Bermingham, Paul Bowles, Gwendolyn Blue, Shannon Daub, Jessica Dempsey, Emily Eaton, Chuka Ejeckam, Simon Enoch, Nick Graham, Shane Gunster, Mark Hudson, Jouke Huizer, Ian Hussey, Emma Jackson, Michael Lang, James Lawson, Marc Lee, Fiona MacPhail, Alicia Massie, Kevin McCartney, Bob Neubauer, Eric Pineault, Lise Margaux Rajewicz, James Rowe, JP Sapinsky, Karena Shaw, and Zoe Yunker.

The world is currently undergoing an historic energy transition, driven by increasingly stringent decarbonisation policies and rapid advances in low-carbon technologies. The large-scale shift to low-carbon energy is disrupting the global energy system, impacting whole economies, and changing the political dynamics within and between countries. This open access book, written by leading energy scholars, examines the economic and geopolitical implications of the global energy transition, from both regional and thematic perspectives. The first part of the book addresses the geopolitical implications in the world’s main energy-producing and energy-consuming regions, while the second presents in-depth case studies on selected issues, ranging from the geopolitics of renewable energy, to the mineral foundations of the global energy transformation, to governance issues in connection with the changing global energy order. Given its scope, the book will appeal to researchers in energy, climate change and international relations, as well as to professionals working in the energy industry.

Transitions of energy regimes are phenomena that have profoundly affected economies and civilisations over the last 600 years. The shifts from wood to coal, from coal to oil and the potential change to another resource that might be pending now have influenced the ways in which we work, produce, and live. Though they are fundamentally influenced and steered by economic forces these changes have seen little analysis from the viewpoint of economic theory. This book seeks to contribute to filling this gap. To this avail, it firstly provides insight into the historical and present transitions that have taken place. It then gives an overview of the existing economic approaches to energy regime transitions and develops a new interpretation based on evolutionary economics. For this, an approach based on complexity theory and complex adaptive systems is created and applied and the mechanisms behind regime changes are interpreted according to this framework. The analysis is supported by further research into certain aspects of transitions: Historical and present research on resource depletion is compared, the working of path dependence in the constitution and decline of the oil regime is analysed, and the role of entrepreneurship in a regime change from the oil regime towards a potential renewable energy regime is investigated. The book closes with an appraisal of energy regime transitions as a future field of research for evolutionary economics.

A volume on the political economy of clean energy transition in developed and developing regions, with a focus on the issues that different countries face as they transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon technologies.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution energy has been a key driver of world politics. From the oil crises of the 1970s to today’s rapid expansion of renewable energy sources, every shift in global energy patterns has important repercussions for international relations. In this new book, Thijs Van de Graaf and Benjamin Sovacool uncover the intricate ways in which our energy systems have shaped global outcomes in four key areas of world politics: security, the economy, the environment and global justice. Moving beyond the narrow geopolitical focus that has dominated much of the discussion on global energy politics, they also deftly trace the connections between energy, environmental politics, and community activism. The authors argue that we are on the cusp of a global energy shift that promises to be no less transformative for the pursuit of wealth and power in world politics than the historical shifts from wood to coal and from coal to oil. This ongoing energy transformation will not only upend the global balance of power; it could also fundamentally transfer political authority away from the nation state, empowering citizens, regions and local communities. Global Energy Politics will be an essential resource for students of the social sciences grappling with the major energy issues of our times.

Energy Global energy demand has more than doubled since 1970. The use of energy is strongly related to almost every conceivable aspect of development: wealth, health, nutrition, water, infrastructure, education and even life expectancy itself are strongly and significantly related to the consumption of energy per capita. Many development indicators are strongly related to per-capita energy consumption. Fossil fuel is the most conventional source of energy but also increases greenhouse gas emissions. The economic development of many countries has come at the cost of the environment. However, it should not be presumed that a reconciliation of the two is not possible. The nexus concept is the interconnection between the resource energy, water, food, land, and climate. Such interconnections enable us to address trade-offs and seek synergies among them. Energy, water, food, land, and climate are essential resources of our natural environment and support our quality of life. Competition between these resources is increasing globally and is exacerbated by climate change. Improving resilience and securing resource availability would require improving resource efficiency. Many policies and programs are announced nationally and internationally for replacing the conventional mode and also emphasizing on conservation of fossil fuels and reuse of exhausted energy, so a gap in implications and outcomes can be broadly traced by comparing the data. This book aims to highlight problems and solutions related to conventional energy utilization, formation, and multitudes of ecological impacts and tools for the conservation of fossil fuels. The book also discusses modern energy services as one of the sustainable development goals and how the pressure on resource energy disturbs the natural flows. The recent advances in alternative energy sources and their possible future growth are discussed and on how conventional energy leads to greenhouse gas formation, which reduces energy use efficiency. The different policies and models operating is also addressed, and the gaps that remained between them. Climate change poses a challenge for renewable energy, and thus it is essential to identify the factors that would reduce the possibility of relying on sustainable energy sources. This book will be of interest to researchers and stakeholders, students, industries, NGOs, and governmental agencies directly or indirectly associated with energy research.

This volume addresses renewable energy communities, and in particular renewable energy cooperatives (REScoops), in the context of the revised EU Renewables Directive. It provides a comprehensive account of the history and development of the renewable energy community movement in over six different countries of continental Europe. It addresses their visions, strategy, organisation, agency, and more particularly the challenges they encounter. This is of particular importance to gain more understanding into how renewable energy communities fare in domestic energy markets where they are confronted with regime institutions, structures and incumbents’ agency that tend to favour maintaining of the status quo while blocking attempts to empower and institutionalise renewable energy communities as market entrants having a disruptive, radical green and localist agenda. This volume will be an invaluable reference for academics and practitioners with an interest in social innovation in sustainable transitions, the role of community energy in energy markets, their agency, as well as an outlook to the impact that the EU Renewables Directive may have to change national legislation and policy frameworks to create a level playing field that is essentially more fair and beneficial to renewable energy communities.

In recent years there has been an outpouring of work at the intersection of social movement thoery, organizational theory, economic, and political sociology. The problems at the core of these areas, Fligstein and McAdam argue, have a similar analytic and theoretical structure. Synthesizing much of this work, A Theory of Fields offers a general perspective on how to understand the problems related to understanding change and instability in modern, complex societies through a theory of strategic action fields.

Dr Hajer's path-breaking study opens the way for a better understanding of the environmental conflict, showing how language can be seen to shape our view of what environmental politics is really about and how those perceptions can differ between countries. The author identifies the emergence and increasing political importance of 'ecological modernization' as a new concept in the language of environmental politics. This concept, which has come to replace the antagonistic debates of the 1970s, stresses the opportunities of environmental policy for modernizing the economy and stimulating the technological innovation. Combining abstract social theory with detailed empirical analysis, Martin Hajer illustrates the social and political dynamics of ecological modernization in a detailed analysis of the acid rain controversies in Great Britain and the Netherlands. He concludes by reflecting on the institutional challenge of the environmental politics in the years to come.