Abstract
The field of energy poverty and energy justice has received increasing attention over the past couple of decades and there is a strong consensus that efforts to reduce energy poverty and establish energy justice are urgently needed, made all the more pressing by the need to address climate change. The objective of this chapter is to provide an empirically grounded framework for energy justice. First, the chapter establishes a positive, progressive frame that recognizes the current ‘crisis’ is part of an evolutionary process that progressive capitalism has repeatedly, successfully navigated in the past. Second, it offers a comprehensive theory of justice that is consistent with the history of a progressive market economy. Third, the chapter identifies specific policies to achieve justice in the energy sector, while preserving the dynamic economic and social forces of progressive capitalist markets. Sections 1 and 2 establish the fact that energy consumption is not only a primary good and fundamental capability that humans must have to participate fully in daily life in the twenty-first century. It is an enabling resource for many, perhaps even most, other capabilities. Without energy justice, there cannot be social justice. Section 3 supports the policies recommended to advance energy justice in progressive capitalist societies by emphasizing approaches that diminish the tension between progressive policies and economic efficiency. It gives the general prescriptions that one finds in policy analyses specificity by grounding them on welfare economics, which has been informed by the theory of distributive justice in progressive capitalist society.
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Notes
- 1.
Their diffusion can be slowed by effects of path dependence and lock-in of earlier technology systems … high carbon technologies and supporting institutional rule systems have coevolved, leading to the current state of “carbon lock-in.” For example, reductions in cost and the spread of infrastructure-supporting coal- and gas-fired electricity generation enabled the diffusion of electricity-using devices and the creation of institutions, such as cost-plus regulation, which encouraged further investment in high carbon generation and networks. This created systemic barriers to investment in low carbon energy technologies …. The proposition that industries or technologies whose ascendancy is threatened by new competition tend to respond, carries some weight. It also suggests that actors, such as large energy companies, with substantial investments in the current system and its technologies, and relatively strong political influence, are likely to act to frustrate the implementation of institutional changes that would support the implementation of low carbon technologies.
- 2.
Cooper (2014a) shows the link between the market imperfection analysis underlying the efficiency gap literature and the emerging approach to climate change.
- 3.
Alfred Kahn (1988, pp. 14–15) claimed the same goal as Piketty (2014), but hammered away at why economics was science, applied neoclassical concepts across the board and essentially claimed welfare economics to be the bible, declaring lawyers and policy analysts who did not embrace the marginalist economic theology to be doomed to live in purgatory, if not hell.
- 4.
“Energy poverty is lack of access to modern energy services. It refers to the situation of large numbers of people in developing countries whose well-being is negatively affected by very low consumption of energy, use of dirty or polluting fuels, and excessive time spent collecting fuel to meet basic needs. It is inversely related to access to modern energy services, although improving access is only one factor in efforts to reduce energy poverty. Energy poverty is distinct from fuel poverty, which focuses solely on the issue of affordability.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_poverty. “Modern energy services are crucial to human well-being and to a country’s economic development; and yet globally 1.2 billion people are without access to electricity and more than 2.7 billion people are without clean cooking facilities.”http://www.iea.org/topics/energypoverty/. /></ExternalRef>.
- 5.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC, show US per capita CO2 at over 40 times that of Bangladesh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita, shows that North America is almost five times sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, while Europe is over twice as high.
- 6.
Laudito Si, June 18, 2011, Daniel Burke, “Pope Francis: “Revolution” needed to combat climate change,” CNN, June 18, 2015. The Encyclical was leaked two days early, which some saw as significant, Jim Yardley and Elisabeth Povoledo, ‘Leak of Pope’s Encyclical on Climate change Hints at Tension in Vatican,’ New York Times, June 16, 2015.
- 7.
Robert Wilde, “Climate Expert: Marxists, Global Warming Extremists control Vatican,” Breitbat.com, June 13, 2015; Rushlimbaugh.com, “The Pope’s Leaked Marxist Climate Rant,” June 16, 2015; Denise Robins, “Conservative Media v. The Pope: The Worst Reactions to Pope Francis’ Climate change Encyclical,” Media Matters, June 18, 2015.
- 8.
Joseph Heath, “The Pope’s Climate Error,” New York Times, June 20, 2015.
- 9.
The New York Times ran front page and major stories five days in a row.
- 10.
I do not mean to suggest that Sovacool and Dworkin (2014) ignore progress. In fact, progress is clearly noted as important at the beginning and the end of the book. In this analysis, I extend the recognition of the importance of progress by arguing it fundamentally alters the terrain of justice. Humanity does not utilize electricity and fossil fuels in a vacuum; instead, our society depends on them and other modern energy services to enable importance of progress lighting, heating, communications and transport. Perhaps for these depends on them reasons … as the human population has grown, so has its use of primary energy, and so has its economic development.(p. 48) To be sure, history is full of examples where we have dramatically improved the efficiency of various energy technologies, sometimes in the time span of a few decades. In practice, we have not seen efficiency gains dwindling as “low hanging fruit” is consumed; instead, we have seen new paths to greater efficiency developing as technologies improve. The best example is the history of lighting, as human beings transitioned from open fires to candles up to incandescent lamps, through compact florescent bulbs and, now, LED (p. 312).
- 11.
While I rely on the work of Carlota Perez and Elizabeth Anderson, who have articulated a broad theory of economic progress and distributive justice (respectively) in numerous articles and books over decades, as discussed in Sect. 2, Daron Acemoglu and Jason Robinson, Why Nation’s Fail, 2012, provides a theory that integrates the two aspects.
- 12.
The correlation coefficient between GDP/capita and energy/capital in the full period shown is 0.89. For the short period of the industrial revolutions (1800–2000), the correlation is 0.84. Other analyses of slightly different period (1820–2000) yield a correlation of 0.86 (see An Optimistic Energy/GDP Forecast to 2050, Peak Oil News and Message Boards, July 30, 2012).
- 13.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_purpose_technology, lists all three of these among the general purpose technologies.
- 14.
Brad Delong, The History of the Global Economy since 1,000,000 BC, Business Insider, May 28, 2014, p.7, shows 97 % of GDP per capita and 87 % of population growth have occurred since 1800. The Wikipeida entry on general purpose technologies (GPTs) cited above, reinforces the point. It defines GPTs as technologies that can affect an entire economy (usually at a national or global level). GPTs have the potential to drastically alter societies through their impact on pre-existing economic and social structures. Examples include the steam engine, railroad, interchangeable parts, electricity, electronics, material handling, mechanization, control theory (automation), the automobile, the computer and the Internet. It lists 10 general purpose technologies spread across 11 millennia, from the neolithic agricultural revolution to the eighteenth century and 14 during the quarter millennium of capitalist industrialization, which suggest the rate of innovation is over 50 times as great.
- 15.
The higher the general level of consumption, the more is needed by any particular individual to sustain a dignified appearance.
- 16.
Cooper (2014a) provides a discussion that links the energy efficiency and climate change literatures.
- 17.
There is a strain in the energy poverty literature that points out that while the gross cost of a comprehensive response may seem large, relative to the massive amounts of capital put into maintaining the current structure, it is quite small (see Sovacool 2014; Bazilian et al. 2014). The implication here is that the positive externalities do not have to be large to yield substantial net social benefits.
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Cooper, M. (2016). Energy Justice in Theory and Practice: Building a Pragmatic, Progressive Road Map. In: Van de Graaf, T., Sovacool, B., Ghosh, A., Kern, F., Klare, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55631-8_28
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