potential to build a strong renewable energy portfolio with a good natural environment in the Danube Delta and investor interests. The European Commission wants to push the country towards 40% of renewables in the next few years. In short, Romania holds the potential to shift away from coal and embrace renewables.
This week we speak with Agata de Ru who is a Portfolio Manager of the South and Eastern European Region for the Clean Air Fund. In this episode, we take a different turn and go into Agata’s background of moving from a Polish NGO to Shell and then her decision to do an MBA in the United States. We learn about her experience working for a US energy start-up. We learn about her decision to leave the US behind and move to Nigeria and join up with local organizations and businesses working with farmers and delivering solar power to consumers across a number of countries.
Before we begin, I want to give a bit some background. Agata and I have known each other for ten years. We were part of the first batch of ELEEP members. This is the Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy Network, which began as an initiative of the Atlantic Council and Ecologic and which was funded by the Robert Bosch Foundation and the European Commission. This was a great trans-Atlantic initiative as it really brought together a range of younger people who are still in contact today. Looking back, we can say all of them have built on their ELEEP initiative to shape their lives and careers. My point is these types of initiatives that bring people together in a loosely structured way really make a difference.
As we’ll learn from Agata, her work in Europe, the US and Africa built on her ELEEP experience. And it is here where we get to the point of the MyEnergy2050 podcast. We like to share both the knowledge and experience of people making a difference. Understanding how and why people make decisions in their lives to build a better energy system assists all of us in transforming the energy system.
My request to you this week is to help us spread the message of the MyEnergy2050 podcast. Please share this episode or others on LinkedIn or Twitter. We grow by word of mouth. And the longer we do this, our message is becoming clearer. It takes dedication of personal commitment to build and deliver a cleaner energy system. So let’s make this happen together.
How can households afford heating and transport in a low-carbon Europe? Today we speak with Dora Fazekas, the managing director of Cambridge Econometrics in Hungary. Their consultancy just released a scenario report with the European Climate Foundation, outlining the higher costs for households if the price of greenhouse gas emissions rise.
In this interview we cover a range of issues, such as, how understanding the different national energy practices influence how energy is produced and consumed.
We delve into an almost anthropological view of the benefits from researching and living in the same place.
Then we get into the research scenario report on transport and heating. The scenarios demonstrate the impact of rising prices for the European trading system for emissions. The future demonstrates the price of energy will go up. Households are foreseen to be struggling unless a greater political effort is made to assist those with lower incomes.
My take-away from our discussion is Europe is heading for a very expensive energy system to meet its climate change goals for 2050. The burden will fall on poorer households. The warning signs are already here for national governments and the EU, action is needed to ensure households can afford this transition.
The study provides different national comparisons and we discuss the impact in Poland and Germany. The scenarios demonstrate that coal, or even a switch to gas for heating, will be a very expensive options in the future.
In the end, we get back to the unattractive and unexciting option of energy efficiency as the way forward. Subsidies for energy poor households are needed. While the rich can afford the transition, it is those with meager incomes that cannot afford it.
Here, I want to interject the importance of this topic. The scenarios are based on data and envision a future where the poor struggle to pay for heating and all their energy usage. If the EU wants to be the enforcer of climate change goals, they also need to ensure effective policies are in place. There cannot be an opening for radical populist politicians to derail, steal, or use climate change policies as a means to undermine democracy. If the stated goal is creating a zero carbon future then ensuring affordable access to energy needs to be the priority. Focusing only on price and market mechanisms will leave too many people behind and derail the effort.
In this episode, we speak with Rod Janssen, a long time expert who began his career after the oil crisis of the 1970s. Rod may have decades of experience, but he is still young and stays active with the latest research and policy developments in energy efficiency.
I wanted to have Rod on to discuss both the recent history around energy efficiency and whether EU policy is making an impact. As you’ll hear we are a bit critical of the EU and the Member States for the lack of progress.
There are a number of terms that will probably be new to the listener and not everyone may know them. The first is USAID, which is the United States Agency for International Development. It sounds like an organization for Africa, but it was active in Eastern Europe – and still is in non-EU member states. After countries in the East joined the EU, USAID moved on, thinking the EU would assist in development. We have a few words to say on how well the EU took on its role to promote energy efficiency.
We discuss the ‘acquis’, which is “the body of common rights and obligations that are binding on all EU countries”, which now is being stressed by some countries. But there was a time when the former Communist countries transformed their economies and legislation to make it look like they could be good EU members. They did a tremendous amount of good in revamping public administration and shifting economies onto a market footing.
Rod and I discuss these topics and we also cover how energy efficiency policy making has changed in the EU and where it is going. That 2050 goal? Is enough being done? Rod has an opinion. Community engagement? We discuss this too.
Welcome to the MyEnergy2050 podcast where we speak to the people building a clean energy system by 2050. I’m your host, Michael LaBelle. In this episode, we are speaking with Amelia Mutter a Researcher at the Division of Environmental Communications at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. The reason to have Amelia on was to discuss her research comparing biogas and electric transport options in Sweden. As you’ll hear, we have a great discussion and really delve into the following topics:
The intent of the MyEnergy2050 podcast is to spread knowledge about how the energy system can assist our transition towards a greener future. If you enjoy this episode or any episode, please share it. The more we spread our message of the ease of an energy transition, the faster we can make the transition. And now for this week’s episode.
On this episode of the myenergy2050 podcast, we are speaking with Andy Judge, lecturer in international relations and deputy head of Politics and International Relations at the University of Glasgow.
In the first part of the episode, we cover energy as a topic of study–how teaching energy prompts and imposition into new teaching methods. And as a means to convey our research, we drive home the point there is great importance in learning to communicate complex energy topics into understandable summaries for normal people.
Later, we delve into the non-existent topic of Brexit and energy. It is not exciting, and this is the best part because the energy system between the UK and EU countries continues to operate like normal. The lack of crisis means the energy relations are still working. And this is something for us to pay attention to. We cover the potential independence of Scotland and its ability to rejoin the EU.
Lastly, we discuss Andy’s cutting edge co-research into pandemics, elites and energy, which turns out he was doing pandemics before the present pandemic, which means for me, we need to listen to Andy because he knows what’s coming. before it comes. We discuss his latest research into elite messaging around pandemics that stay at home order. Having no choice turns out to be the only choice for politicians to control the pandemic.
This week we speak with Simone Tagliapietra, a research fellow at Bruegel. We discussed the broader research shift from an energy security perspective, just how society and politics shape the energy system. For Simone, the broader focus allows us to address how we can mitigate climate change.
With Simone, we delve into the European Union’s Green Deal and spend time looking at the new green industrial strategy of the EU. This includes understanding how the industry plays a role in the transition with the green industry, which is essential for the EU’s competitiveness in the future.
We then move on to discuss the social impact the energy transition has on communities in the EU, and how politics and community involvement is key to the success of the Green Deal. Simone addresses the role that international finance can play to assist developing countries create their own sustainable energy system.
This week we are speaking with Leonardo Meeus. He is the professor of strategy and director of the Energy Center at Vlerick Business School in Brussels. He is also the deputy director of the Florence School of Regulation, and professor at the European University Institute in Florence. He has numerous academic articles on regulation and market design. his new book just came out in 2020, the evolution of electricity market design in Europe with Edward Elgar Publishing.
And today we’ll be asking him questions about his book and about how Europe’s electricity market works. And the institutions involved in developing an EU wide electricity market.
How do we get to a low fossil-fuel system by 2030 in Central and South-East Europe? The latest IRENA report outlines a new scenario – for lower cost fossil fuels are displaced with renewables. This is a summary of the podcast interview with members of the IRENA, CESEC report team.
The energy policies adopted during the current decade (1970s) will determine the range of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000.
Ivan Illich, 1974
Mapping the energy consumption since the 1970s indicates we chose a high consumption route with low social benefits. An equitable energy transition requires observation of overall consumption of our energy resources. Regardless of energy technologies, whether powered by fossil fuels or the sun’s rays, social inequality is dependent on society’s ability to ensure an equitable consumption of resources. Certain groups, whether divided by country, region or social strata, need to ensure an equitable range of consumption. Rather than seeing our natural resources as limitless, we need to perceive the consumption of these resource as finite as time. Even if these resources exist in the future, we threaten the viability of the future by over consuming our resources.
Framing our present climate crisis, we can consider society borrowed against the future of the environment and society. We are now stuck in a downward spiral dealing with the effects of climate change due to the overconsumption of fossil fuels. Another view from the 1970s is provided by Kurt Vonnegut in his book Jailbird, which is when the main character recounts the story of the tragedy of how life ended on another planet.
But they ran out of time on Vicuna, he says. The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere – to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make cloches out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.
“On Vicuna,” says the judge, “we lived as though there were no tomorrow”
.…But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips of reality were appearing everywhere.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird. 1979, p 100
Looking back over the past 50 years provides us with a clear picture of the choice humans took. They burnt the fossil fuels to speed up economic development and live like there was no tomorrow. It was the pursuit of fast economic development with an understanding that this type of energy consumption was lifting millions out of poverty. The perspective of the past fifty years can be seen in the total energy consumption in Figure 1, China, India and many other developing countries rely on fossil fuels to create economic growth and improve society. Through this narrative it seems governments did not have a choice but to build a fossil fuel energy system. Looking at the choices made it is only recently that renewables begin to tick upward while only coal begins to level off.
The scientists have found more and more efficient ways to extract fossil fuels from the Earth. Most recently, this is in the form of shale gas using hydraulic fracturing technologies to create fissures of natural gas and oil. This technique ensures lower economic costs and a perpetuation of fossil fuels as the main driver for many national economies. The United States switched from being an oil and gas importer to exporter because of this technology. The prosperity of countries and society is dependent on these fossil fuels and the business of science behind it. The fossil fuel economy moves ahead regardless of the impact on future generations. Just like on the planet Vicuna, we live as there is no tomorrow and only now we begin to see the rips of reality in the form of disappearing icecaps, desertification, and firestorms consuming towns.
The Jesuit priest, Ivan Illich outlined the choices we had in the 1970s. He laid out two scenarios for society to take which would determine how we live in the year 2000. Similar to the projections of the International Energy Agency (IEA), he provides a ‘low energy policy’ which allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. The second scenario is a ‘high energy consumption’ where social relations are “dictated by technocracy and will be equally distasteful whether labelled capitalist or socialist.”2
The low-energy policy ascribes to a rationed approach to energy consumption with an upper national limit, thereby ensuring greater energy efficiency and a higher level of equity for society. The upper echelons of society must also limit energy use just as the lower (or even 90%) portion of society limits their energy consumption due to cost. Social well-being is connected to per capita energy use. However, for a low energy route, there needs to be a limited use by elites of their energy consumption, with resource management and a “thermodynamic thrift” for industry. Low energy consumption by all of society (and industry), according to Illich, produces a more equitable energy system
Looking back the world chose the high energy scenario in pursuit of economic and social development. No limits on consumption and behavior akin to the planet Vicuna where our use of oil-based plastics is akin to our overflowing garbage cans with plastic packaging and objects. Our present wealth derives from our scientific discoveries which opens up an equity gap where the seen route to economic and social prosperity is to also participate in the pursuit of consumer goods, rather than the pursuit of equity.
In 2000 Illich’s choice can be shown. The connection of economic growth to the use of energy can be seen as coupled with energy consumption and economic output. Represented by the connection between MWh of consumed energy compared to the Total Primary Energy Footprint (TPEF) of a country. Accounting for a country’s footprint is “a well-established method to trace the total resource needs and environmental impacts of a country’s consumption”3 In the below map we can see the degrees countries have and have not decoupled their economic growth from energy consumption.
The identification for the threshold for the energy footprint aligns with Illich’s identification of “the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative.”2 The disparity in the 1970s were identified by comparing the energy in transport. “250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1,300 million Chinese and Indians for all purposes.”2 The dramatic economic growth of China and India since the 1970s can be seen by the huge increase of energy production and consumption, so that by 2014 these countries economic growth were directly connected to their energy consumption. To economically grow the economies through a quick route required a tremendous scaling up of energy production to deliver economic growth for their societies. While the developed countries also pursued this route, they are now leveling off and decoupling this growth.
This macro perspective of the GDP to energy footprint ratio covers up the internal disparities between the elites of each country and the dipropionate consumption of energy. If in the 1970s, the disparity was observable at the macro perspective between countries, in the 2000s the internal disparities even in developing countries is observable. But so too are the huge transport networks in China and India observable for moving the population around at a quick pace. The impact of the choice made in the 1970s in the year 2000 is clear. The world chose the high energy scenario leaving huge inequalities at global and local scales. This inequality now spreads into the future for generations who must grapple with our overconsumption of fossil fuels like there was no tomorrow.
The tragedy for our Earth, reframing Vonnegut’s perspective of events on Vicuna, was the technological developments that resulted in the mining of time through fossil fuel extraction. There are two central ways to assess an equitable energy transition. Drawing from Sen, these central ethical issues for the analysis of equality are: “(1) Why equality? (2) Equality of what?” To date the representation in the above map indicates the spatial inequality of countries and who has and who is consuming unsustainable levels of fossil fuels. The pursuit to decouple energy consumption from economic growth is perceived to be the pinnacle of a sustainable energy system. The goals of 2050 to be ‘carbon neutral’ are held up by politicians, scientists and the believers in climate change as a means to save our Earth. This argument answers Sen’s first question, ‘why equality?’ This question was important in the 1970s when we could have chosen a low or high energy scenario. Fifty years later, this question is moot.
The question now is, ‘Equality of what?’ Because for Sen, different perspectives lead to different views on equality “liberties, rights, utilities, incomes, resources, primary goods, need-fulfillments, etc.”4 Sen sets off his approach from the notion of a ‘utility function’ where the gain of liberty for someone is due to the loss of liberty for another. Nonetheless, through Illich’s interpretation and considering the one system’s approach of the Earth, there is a cap on natural resources and a limit to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. The distinction is important, as there may not be a utilitarian limit to liberties and rights for people, but there is a limit to natural resource consumption. The technological methods may differ – consumed in a car, factory or power plant, but energy consumption is tied to the amount consumed in a period of time. The faster the consumption the faster the economic development, and in all countries – at some point in time – the closer we come to running out of time to retain a biodiverse ecosystem supporting life.
The discussion needs to shift from a spatially uneven development of Earth’s societies and resources – since the Earth is one system not restricted by fences and border guards. Now the question is one of uneven remaining time on this Earth. As the Climate Change cycle speeds up, floods, drought and temperature shifts, the spatially uneven process is not one of economic development but retention of habitable living areas. Coastal zones are reclaimed by the sea, forested areas burn while shifting temperatures zones alter how people live and influence whether they can stay in their homes.
The question in the 2020s is Equality of time, not equality of place. Like the creatures of Vicuna, we’ve ate, burned, polluted and drank our future away. There is always a future, but in fifty years we just consumed the future health of all beings on Earth. The hang-over from this era of over consumption is now upon us. Spatially inequality is marked by not only who has benefited the most from fossil fuel consumption, but which communities can stay intact and in-place.
Our global society lived like there is no tomorrow. The energy policies adopted since the 1970s, emphasizing fossil fuel use, were backed by powerful technological developments and political guidance to ensure economic development over sustainable development of the Earth’s resources. Inequality increased as countries and societies saw the rise of elites consuming unsustainable levels of energy and products. The social inequality we examine is not caused by the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but through the consumption of fossil fuels to power a hyper-environmentally unsustainable economic development. The energy system, including transport and manufacturing, is created to ensure higher income social groups are able to benefit from low energy prices and in turn low cost consumer goods trickling down in the form of used clothes, appliances and polluting second or third-hand cars. What we perceive as wealth in our garbage cans or recycling bins, of mountains of plastic and discarded food, is paid for by our common future.
As Vonnegut puts the nearing collapse of Vicuna, “.…But by the time he [the judge] was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips of reality were appearing everywhere.”5 With these great rips of reality seen in our changing Earth from the extinction of species to melting polar ice caps, comes a more fundamental debate over the inequality of time rather than spatial inequality. We should not see we have thirty years to finally build an equitable energy system by eliminating CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Rather we need to implement three key steps to repair the rips in time: First, repair the environmental damage over the past fifty years when we chose a high energy scenario. Second, we need to build a low-energy system that is equitable by reducing over consumption by the ‘haves’ and assist the ‘have nots,’ so all groups equally draw from the same resource budget, and not utilize the future’s resources. And finally, stop fooling ourselves that we can have a technological fix to our energy requirements. Social values and the value we place on environmental resources must change. Social inequality is not caused by a shortage of natural resources, but the distribution of these. Distribution relies on humans and their social institutions. The collapse of Vicuna was because they ate their time, it seems we’ve eaten ours.
References:
1Jenkins, Kirsten E.H., Benjamin K. Sovacool, Andrzej Błachowicz, and Adrián Lauer. “Politicising the Just Transition: Linking Global Climate Policy, Nationally Determined Contributions and Targeted Research Agendas.” Geoforum 115 (October 2020): 138–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.05.012.
2Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. Great Britain: Calder and Boyars Ltd., 1974.
3Akizu-Gardoki, Ortzi, Gorka Bueno, Thomas Wiedmann, Jose Manuel Lopez-Guede, Iñaki Arto, Patxi Hernandez, and Daniel Moran. “Decoupling between Human Development and Energy Consumption within Footprint Accounts.” Journal of Cleaner Production 202 (November 2018): 1145–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.08.235.
4Sen, Amartya. Inequality Reexamined. Oxford University Press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198289286.001.0001.
5Vonnegut, Kurt. Jailbird. The Dial Press, 1979.
