Abstract
Even as modern energy-society relations have produced unprecedented economic growth, they have ushered in a crisis of social inequality and ecologically unsustainable levels of resource and energy throughput. Despite the persistence of these drivers and impacts, conventional environmental responses interpret this crisis as insufficiently advanced modernity and prioritize more economic growth and more efficient technology. This conventional strategy represents a very narrow engagement with values and instead relies on technological optimism. It perpetuates the detachment of development and energy planning from democratic deliberation about ends. As such, it is an important enabler of the environmental crisis. In this light, the chapter identifies and discusses alternatives strategies and considers the synergy between them. The alternatives discussed include the DEFENDUS approach for energy planning, the Human Development and Capability Approach and the Sustainable Energy Utility as an institutional template. Together, along with “democratic technics,” these alternatives can offer avenues to resist “more of the same” as a response to the environmental crisis. They invite us to critically reconsider the ends of growth and development and reclaim human-centered imagination and creativity for charting more sustainable and equitable realities.
Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.—Elinor Ostrom (2010)
Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization.—Amartya Sen (1999: 3)
It is by institutional extension that subjective impulses cease to be private, willful, contradictory, and ineffectual, and so become capable of bringing about large social change.—Lewis Mumford (1970: 424)
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Notes
- 1.
The environmental Kuznets curve, widely known as the “inverted U-curve,” prognosticates that environmental impact, plotted on the y-axis, grows as per capita income grows, then plateaus and decreases as per-capita income, plotted on the x-axis, continues to grow. The upshot of this purported relationship is that growing per-capita income will save the day, or as John Tierney (2009) puts it, “Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet”!
- 2.
The “megamachine” is a metaphor honed by Lewis Mumford through his studies of the history of technology and inquiry into the Manhattan Project. See Mumford (1970).
- 3.
This image as conjured by Lewis Mumford (see Mumford 2000, 1963 and others), captures the confluence and complimentarity between the objective and subjective sides of the human personality. It attends to material necessities of life as well as, with equal dexterity, to the emotional and normative necessities. However, in light of the modern, one-sided valorization of instrumental values in the development discourse, the complete human personality is often backstaged and the narrow personality type, represented by categories such as the technocrat or the economic man dominate.
- 4.
Also see Sant and Dixit (2000) for a DEFENDUS inspired analysis undertaken for the electricity sector of Maharashtra, which realizes significant financial and environmental benefits compared to the conventional electricity plan.
- 5.
A scenario where the demand for the year 2000 is arrived at by NOT considering any of the efficiency or substitution measures. The only input from the LRPPP, are the clearly defined ends for the future discerned from the development focus.
- 6.
In addition to “political freedoms” Sen (1999: 38) highlights “economic facilities;” “social opportunities,” “transparency guarantees” and “protective security” as instrumentally important freedoms.
- 7.
The term was used by philosopher Paul Ricoeur while referring to the notion of institutions: “By institutions, we understand the structure of living together as this belongs to a historical community, a structure irreducible to interpersonal relations and yet bound up with these” (as quoted in Deneulin 2008: 111).
- 8.
The Middle Class Task Force, convened by the United States Vice President Joe Biden identified the Delaware SEU as an energy policy innovation to transform the market to favor energy sustainability and employment generation. Internationally locations such as the metropolis of Seoul, South Korea have commissioned preliminary studies and the nation of Bermuda has expressed interest (Chang 2008; Podesta 2009; Byrne et al. 2008, 2009; Rahim 2010).
- 9.
Faced with shrinking attention to energy efficiency, DSM and renewable energy after restructuring, jurisdictions across the U.S. began to innovate and explore measures to stem this loss of interest. Drawing on the legacy of social activism, scholarship and innovation, various policy tools to valorize and thus promote efficiency, conservation and renewable energy in the restructured environment, were developed and employed. They include: implementation of “systems benefit charge” for the promotion of environmental programs; the provision of interconnection with the grid and net-metering to accommodate diverse and dispersed generators and to reward them; implementation of “renewable portfolio standards” and “green pricing” to foster an overall demand for renewable electricity generation. In addition, states promoted the availability of information through customer education efforts and requirements for fuel mix disclosure. More recent innovations have included “renewable energy certificates” and even specifically targeted “solar renewable energy certificates” (Byrne et al. 2000).
- 10.
Gandhi’s unique understanding of the implications of large-scale industrialization also shaped his own interpretation of “socialism” (Koshal and Koshal 1973: 194–197). While not a fan of private property he was also disinclined to “dispossess those who have possessions” (Koshal and Koshal 1973: 196), a strategy often utilized by socialist politics. Instead, Gandhi offered equality of man lay in the “dispersal of industry” and not in post-fact conflict over control of concentrated means of production.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was written while I was affiliated with the University of Delaware Center for Energy and Environmental Policy. My deep gratitude to John Byrne whose guidance pointed me to some crucial ideas used in this chapter. I also thank Cecilia Martinez, M.V. Ramana, Leigh Glover and Robert Warren for discussions and guidance on my research. Thanks to Ilse Oosterlaken and one anonymous reviewer for valuable editorial comments. This chapter expresses my personal views.
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Mathai, M.V. (2012). Towards a Sustainable Synergy: End-Use Energy Planning, Development as Freedom, Inclusive Institutions and Democratic Technics. In: Oosterlaken, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) The Capability Approach, Technology and Design. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3879-9_6
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