Community Energy Literature Review

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...

Daniel Susskind’s 2024 book Growth: A Reckoning has received some enthusiastic reviews. Kate Barker described it as “an excellent book, developing a clear argument and not afraid to look really big questions squarely in the eye” (Barker 2024).  Susskind is a professor at King’s College, London, and Robert Bellafiore Jn. wrote that his book “considers the debates over growth’s causes, its recent elevation as a priority for governments, policies for promoting it, and rising concerns about its downsides” describing the work as “a concise and informative study of the idea, its past, and its potential future” (Bellafiore, 2024).  Alexander Bishop wrote at greater length in his article “Why not degrowth?” He noted that for Susskind growth “is a recent development. For most of the world’s history, from when humans started farming until roughly 1800, there was no meaningful growth. This is the period that Susskind calls “the great stagnation”. It is only since the industrial revoluti...