New energy spaces: Towards a geographical political economy of energy transition

By G. Bridge, L. Gailing. Environment and Planning, 2020

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The implications for energy transition of existing patterns of production, employment and accumulation have begun to emerge as a central concern of public policy. The need to transform high-carbon energy systems in the context of climate change is widely acknowledged, and the last two decades have seen a raft of policy initiatives directed towards expanding renewables. It is increasingly clear, however, that carbon-centric initiatives aimed at switching technologies and resources are insufficient, given the scale and pace of decarbonization required (Galvin and Healy, 2020). Programmes like the US Green New Deal or the European Green Deal (and the subsequent COVID Recovery Plan, Next Generation EU) suggest that a broader and more structural perspective on energy transition is emerging within some policy frameworks. These programmes look beyond specific energy resources and technologies, or the functioning of energy markets, to target net-zero emissions in the context of prevailing patterns of economic production, employment, investment and mobility. Their ‘economy-wide’ perspectives recognize the need for deep decarbonization beyond the energy sector, and typically align decarbonization with broader social goals such as improving societal welfare and reducing socio-spatial inequalities. These initiatives are significant because they open the door to thinking about energy transition in the context of a geographically differentiated political economy. They have the potential to acknowledge, for example, how pathways to decarbonization are conditioned by existing geographies (in relation to legacies of investment in infrastructure, for example) and that carbonintensive sectors (from energy and heavy industry to food production and housing stock) do not sit ‘on the head of a pin’. Similarly, their recognition of the ways emissions are

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce2723214ffe35404cd9609598cc3bdbff47aa5d