Dear all, I’m never sure whether this is appropriate/not on this list, but taking the risk I have some new articles out which might be of interest: some reflections on Trump, climate and energy transition; a follow-up piece on Syria and climate change; and a piece on energy demand policies. Abstracts and links below.
Best wishes Jan ‘The Trump presidency, climate change, and the prospect of a disorderly energy transition’, Review of International Studies This article reflects on the implications of the Trump presidency for global anthropogenic climate change and efforts to address it. Existing commentary, predicated on liberal institutionalist reasoning, has argued that neither Trump’s promised rollback of domestic climate-related funding and regulations, nor withdrawal from the Paris framework, will be as impactful as often feared. While broadly concurring, I nonetheless also in this article take a wider view, to argue that the Trump administration is likely to exacerbate several existing patterns and trends. I discuss four in particular: the general inadequacy of global greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and implementation efforts; the inadequacy of contemporary climate financing; the embrace between populist conservatism and opposition to action on climate change; and not least, the current global oil and gas boom which, crucially, is being led by the US. I submit that these patterns and trends, and the Trump administration’s likely contributions to them, do not augur well for climate change mitigation, let alone for an orderly transition to a low-carbon global economy. Given current directions of travel, I suggest, this coming transition is likely to be deeply conflict-laden – probably violently so – and to have consequences that will reverberate right across mid-twentieth-century international order. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/trump-presidency-climate-change-and-the-prospect-of-a-disorderly-energy-transition/25455686A9E1853569592D9DDB307E21 ‘Climate change and the Syrian civil war, part II: the Jazira’s agrarian crisis’, Geoforum This article is the second in a series on the alleged links between climate change, drought and the onset of Syria’s civil war. In a previous article it was argued that there is little merit to the Syria-climate conflict thesis, including no clear evidence that drought-related migration contributed to civil war onset. Building on this earlier work, the present article investigates an issue which was not fully analysed in the previous one: the nature and causes of the pre-civil war agrarian crisis in Syria’s northeast Jazira region, and especially in the governorate of Hasakah. This crisis is usually represented as rooted essentially in a severe multi-year drought which, it is claimed, led to multiple crop failures and in turn large-scale migration. Here it is argued, by contrast, that the central causes of Hasakah’s agrarian crisis were long-term and structural, involving three main factors: extreme water resource degradation; deepening rural poverty; and underpinning these, specific features of Syria’s and Hasakah’s politics and political economy. The article contends, most notably, that the exceptional severity of Hasakah’s crisis was a function of the nationwide collapse of Syria’s agrarian and rentier model of state-building and development, combined with Hasakah’s distinctive political geography as an ethnically contested borderland and frontier zone. I thus conclude that rather than supporting narratives of environmental scarcity-induced conflict, the Syrian case actually confirms the opposite: namely, political ecologists’ insistence on the centrality of the political, and of conflict, in causing environmental scarcities and insecurities. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718518301829 'Invisible energy policies: A new agenda for energy demand reduction', Energy Policy (with Sarah Royston and Elizabeth Shove) This article makes the case for a new and ambitious research and governance agenda for energy demand reduction. It argues that existing ‘demand-side’ approaches focused on promoting technological efficiency and informed individual consumption are unlikely to be adequate to achieving future carbon emissions reduction goals; it points out that very little attention has so far been paid to the impacts of non-energy policies on energy demand; and it submits that a much fuller integration of energy demand questions into policy is required. It advances a general framework, supported by illustrative examples, for understanding the impacts of ‘non-energy’ policies on energy demand. It reflects on why these connections have been so little explored and addressed within energy research and policy. And it argues that, for all their current ‘invisibility’, there is nonetheless scope for increasing the visibility of, and in effect ‘mainstreaming’, energy demand reduction objectives within other policy areas. Researchers and policymakers, we contend, need to develop better understandings of how energy demand might be made governable, and how non-energy policies might be revised, alone and in combination, to help steer long-term changes in energy demand. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518305810 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
