Community Energy Literature Review

A recently published article from the Centre for Climate Integrity marked ten years since “investigative journalists first exposed Exxon’s secret internal climate knowledge and campaign of deception”. The journalists were from Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times and Columbia Journalism School, and their investigations and reports became known as #ExxonKnew. Exxon was not the only company which decided to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” about climate change and to execute decades-long campaigns of climate deception (CfCI, 2025a). The article claims that Exxon and other Big Oil companies “have faced growing scrutiny and efforts to hold them accountable” during recent years, and that ten U.S. states and many communities have sought to “hold the companies accountable for their deception and make them pay for the damage they’ve caused.” The Road Not Taken   Investigations into Exxon’s early work on climate modelling and its later attempts to conceal th...

On 2 nd October Kemi Badenoch announced that the Conservative Party would drop the UK’s Net Zero target if it came into office. An article from Energy Live quoted her saying that her party wants “to leave a cleaner environment for our children, but not by bankrupting the country. Climate change is real. But Labour’s laws tied us in red tape, loaded us with costs, and did nothing to cut global emissions. Previous Conservative governments tried to make Labour’s climate laws work – they don’t. Under my leadership we will scrap those failed targets. Our priority now is growth, cheaper energy, and protecting the natural landscapes we all love.” She now regards the 2050 net zero target as impossible and wishes to “maximise” oil and gas extraction from the North Sea. (Energy Live, 2025). The article comments that her position ‘rips up more than 15 years of cross-party consensus’. It notes that the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 under Gordon Brown’s Labour government when Ed Miliband w...

Some online resources with climate change content are outlined below. Many are blogs or include blogs. They vary in geographic scope from global to regional: many are US based, and some of the views expressed oppose the current climate change consensus. Resources are listed alphabetically and are drawn from the Feedspot online reader, which interacts with media outlets such as blogs, podcasts, magazines and news websites. URLs or web addresses for all the resources mentioned are listed in the References section. List of Resources   Carbon Brief is UK-based and covers developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy. Topics covered include Carbon Offsets: their history and impacts, with a glossary and Q&A; China Policy: its growing solar power, continued use of coal, clean-energy exports and low-carbon transition in cities; and UN Climate Talks: a carbon-pricing system for international shipping, missed deadlines for 2035 climate pledges, COP 29 outcomes ...

In May 2025 Riviera Maritime published an article about the anticipated launch of a UK energy auction in the coming August (Foxwell, 2025). While this brief account mentions many of the key features of the auction, it assumes a certain familiarity with the process and its background on the part of its readers, who are likely to be members of the maritime, offshore and energy business communities. Since the subject is of wider interest, some of the issues affecting the auction will be discussed below to provide a more complete picture of the auction and its context. Policy and the energy auctions A recent policy development affecting the auction is the UK’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan. This set out targets for clean energy which include producing at least 95% of Great Britain’s generation from clean sources. This would reduce “the carbon intensity of our generation from 171gCO2e/kWh in 2023 to well below 50gCO2e/kWh in 2030.” Achieving the target would require “rapid deployment of ...

Introduction A speaker in a recent discussion on environmental issues remarked that biodiversity always has priority over clean energy. Whatever the truth of this statement, it prompts the question of how we should try to resolve situations where clean energy and biodiversity are in conflict. Certainly the frequent mention of biodiversity in the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations supports its importance, but clean energy also has a role in efforts to control climate change, and compromise may be the best policy if clean energy projects conflict with efforts to preserve and promote biodiversity. Such conflicts and their possible resolution will be examined below (CBD, 2018; Global Goals, 2021). Biodiversity and its importance Biodiversity broadly means “all the different kinds of life” in a given area, “the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria that make up our natural world”. It is important to us because it “supports everything...

The subject of the previous post was Daniel Susskind’s book Growth : A Reckoning . Its author outlined measures that he believed could enable continued economic growth that did far less harm to society and the environment than has previously been the case. An important factor in this kind of growth would be steering technological progress in desirable directions through measures such as economic incentives. Susskind treats this idea broadly, but a more detailed exploration is found in the paper Environmental Policies and directed technological change by Gugler, Szücs and Wiedenhofer (2024). The authors examine how different environmental policies “can steer innovation towards eco-friendly technologies”, and produce numerical estimates of their effectiveness. The policies evaluated are those “designed to address environmental market failures”. Economists have seen climate change as a type of free market failure: a failure to maximise society’s welfare, since greenhouse gas emissions ar...