PROBLEMS OF, AND SOLUTIONS FOR, THE ENERGY TRANSITION
This is the website for an Australian Research Council sponsored research project into the disruption produced by the technology of energy and climate transitions. It primarily consists of short blog posts on various subjects, and longer more considered expositions on the same kind of subjects.
The formal name of this project is:
“Society and climate change: A social analysis of disruptive technology.”
The title was meant to indicate that the driving force of transformation is the interaction between society and climate change, and that technological ‘solutions’ would most likely be disruptive and have unintended consequences as a matter of course. Similarly, forms of social organisation, ideas, economics and so on, could also be disruptive of the technologies, so technologies might also not be applied as intended.
I call any technology which is proposed, imagined, or implemented to deal with the potential and actual social disorders coming from climate change, “climate technologies”. This means that this website is not just considering new sources of energy (although those are primary), but ideas such as:
- geoengineering,
- biofuels,
- carbon trading,
- carbon offsets,
- carbon capture and storage,
- hydrogen production and so on.
Some of the technological solutions that have been proposed to the problems seem to involve fantasies, hype or possibly deceptions, as there is little evidence to suggest they would have the desired effects – at best they might allow us to pretend that we can continue to emit greenhouse gases as we can clear them up in the future, at worst they might compound the problems.
The project has used data from official reports, news articles, interviews and fieldwork. Most of the fieldwork has been done in three country areas in NSW in Australia: Lismore, Narrabri and Bega. The reason for going to country areas was because it is easier to make comparisons, people are easier to gain access to and problems are often more stark. It needs to be said, that two years of Covid has made the field research more difficult and less thorough than was hoped for.
The purpose of the website is to explain some of the insights which have arisen during the research, in a relatively non-academic way, as I hope the ideas here will be useful to everyone, academic or not. I hope that the work here, despite its simplicity, will enhance Australia and the world’s capacity to develop new technology and industries, while giving greater understanding of the complex ways climate technology works in practice. I also hope to help policy-makers factor in the unintended social effects of climate technologies into their expectations and planning.
Important Note
The recommendations for action, which may be found here, are purely suggestions. One of the problems with recognising complexity (see below), is that every situation has the potential to be unique, and the people involved have to carefully consider those unique characteristics and contexts. What might work in one time and place, may not in another. While, hopefully, a helpful framework can be provided, good results cannot be guaranteed. I, and those others quoted on this website cannot be responsible for the results of the application of suggestions, whether those results are good or bad.
