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Energy Policy and Security under Climate Change pp 1–33Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

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Abstract

After briefly introducing the climate change challenge, this chapter discusses how policy responses remain shaped by dominant understandings of geopolitical, global political economy, and domestic politics’ concerns. It then moves on to present and evaluate the new climate regime established at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21), the opportunities it presents, and its limitations. The analysis ties the ineffective responses to climate change to the imperative of growth, and introduces the implicit trilemma faced by global society involving growth, energy security, and climate change mitigation. In taking issue with growth, the chapter lays the groundwork for the analysis that follows. This rests in the designation of a steady-state energy policy and its profound implications for climate change mitigation, energy security, geopolitics, and development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Failure to render this technology commercial at a wide scale , not least due to high storage and associated infrastructure investments costs , means that we remain some distance from its potential implementation (Brown and Sovacool 2011: 106). In a similar note, nuclear fusion has been on the table as a viable large-scale alternative due to its low carbon and security credentials, but remains so far prohibitively expensive and demonstrates no learning curve. High safety standards for nuclear reactors exponentially raise the cost of production of nuclear energy and decisively discourage further investments. What is more, nuclear energy can lead to toxic leaks, and calls for safe storage facilities operative well into the future. Finally yet importantly, decommissioning toxic waste remains an unresolved issue (Brown and Sovacool 2011: 100–2; Kuzemko et al. 2015: 53, 121–3).

  2. 2.

    Geo-engineering methods also feature enormous geopolitical disruption potential. For one, great powers may acquire control of the planetary thermostat, and meddle with it for all sorts of geopolitical goals (Fuhr 2016). This stands for nothing less than ecological imperialism, since unilateral actions are certain to have global consequences. At a broader level, corporations, powerful institutions and even affluent individuals can also undertake such practices with unpredictable consequences. The spectre of such methods being used by terrorist groups speaks to the magnitude of the problem in its direst form (Brown and Sovacool 2011: 137–8).

  3. 3.

    As Noreng (2013: 172) indicatively asserts, a coalition of the automobile industry, oil, real estate, and construction interests has much leverage in the Congress to thwart any proposed measures on reduction of oil consumption in the US .

  4. 4.

    Peter Haas (2017: 2) estimates a range from 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100.

  5. 5.

    Two caveats are crucial here. Firstly, such a scheme obscures more ambitious agendas, like fully renewable energy systems. Secondly, while gas is certainly cleaner than oil and coal , shale gas is not that cleaner and also brings other detrimental side-effects to the environment (Franca et al. 2016; van der Veen 2015; IFRI/CIEP 2015).

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  1. University of South Wales, Cardiff, UK

    Filippos Proedrou

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Proedrou, F. (2018). Introduction. In: Energy Policy and Security under Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77164-9_1

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