Energy transitions in a divided world: abstracts


The abstract book from the Fourth Energy and Society Conference ‘Energy transitions in a divided world’ held on 3 – 5 September 2018, at the University of Exeter, UK, can now be downloaded from
https://geography.exeter.ac.uk/energyandsociety/conferenceprogramme/
along with the conference programme.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Climate fiction and climate action

The interactions between climate fiction and environmental activism are the subject of a paper by Alacovska and Holt (2023). They describe environmental activism as “grassroots, decentralised social movements” which attempt to address issues of “inequality and systemic injustice arising from anthropogenic climate change, environmental degradation and ecological collapse” by means of non-hierarchical collective organising. The main object of their paper is to propose methods for future research, but here we will only draw on their introduction to the subject and its background. They believe that the popular genre of climate fiction influences climate activism , with the potential to stimulate the imagination and to energise the “quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives”. This stands in contrast with much writing on climate change, which is concerned with data and “mathematical prediction models for forecasting and comprehending the gravity of global environmental challeng...
Read more

Future Homes and the Carbon Budget

The Future Homes Standard [1] is a consultation document about changes to the building regulations for new dwellings in the UK. It refers to “our commitment to deliver 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s”. In view of the present concern with meeting carbon budget targets, this post seeks to examine the carbon implications of this building program. A 2010 newspaper article was headed “What's the carbon footprint of ... building a house” [2]. The answer proposed for a “newbuild two-bed cottage” was 80 tonnes CO2e. Details of the house were not provided, and it is clear that the writer was seeking only to give an indication of the carbon footprint. Is this figure still a useful guide today? We might expect that even if the total energy needed is the same, the CO2e figure might be lower, due to decarbonisation of at least some of the energy used. A 2013 article proposes that “the average house contains about 1,000GJ of energy embodied in the materials used in its construc...
Read more

Climate Storytelling

Climate scientists have great difficulty in making known the risks brought about by climate change. They face denial, scepticism and distrust in science in a world of misinformation and divisive politics (Woodley et al., 2022). Some of the difficulty comes from the scientific community itself, which tends to assume that providing scientific information “will necessarily lead to desired behavioural changes” and is constrained by its own standards of “strict objectivity and political separation”. The authors of the paper argue that conventional communication methods put distance between scientists and their intended audiences and may “fail to generate inspiration and connectivity”. They believe that scientists should be willing to “radically adapt their communication strategies” and they discuss three relevant factors. First, they examine the problems of communicating climate change risks arising from the inherent difficulties of the subject, the activities of vested interests and lobb...
Read more