Abstract
Energy systems and attendant institutions have long-term characteristics basic to the development of economies and societies. Mankind faces a wide range of serious problems connected to the world energy system. All players involved must find a delicate balance between flexibility and stability, between the demand for urgent change and the need for stable, lasting solutions. The following sections provide an introductory overview of the energy-related challenges Access and Security, Climate Change and other Environmental Impacts, and Economic and Social Development. These challenges and their interconnections are explored in depth in later chapters.
The problems that planners must deal with are wicked and incorrigible ones, for they defy efforts to delineate their boundaries and to identify their causes, and thus to expose their problematic nature. The planner who works with open systems is caught up in the ambiguity of their causal webs.
Rittel and Webber (1973, p. 167)
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In their latest update to the classic Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, & Meadows, 2004), the authors also used a ship metaphor to explain how a system’s momentum delays the transmission of negative feedback, causing the system to overshoot: ‘To steer correctly, a system with inherent momentum needs to be looking ahead at least as far as its momentum can carry it. The longer it takes a boat to turn, the farther ahead its radar must see. The political and market systems of the globe do not look far enough ahead’.
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The notion of security has to be distinguished from safety and safeguards concepts, which we subsume under ‘Environmental Impacts’ below. Safety is the protection of human beings and the natural environment from damage caused by hazard potentials. Safeguards are measures against the diversion of nuclear and dual-use material for the construction of atomic weapons.
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Almost 1.2 billion additional people will need access to electricity and 1.9 billion people will need access to modern fuels by 2015 to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people living in poverty (WHO & UNDP, 2009, p. 32).
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The examples just mentioned support the proposition that energy systems associated with a high hazard potential require stringent and independent surveillance. By ‘surveillance’ we mean regulatory oversight as well as integrative review processes (involving pluralistic expertise) and societal embedding, which are needed to overcome the evident information asymmetry among the actors involved. For nuclear energy this encompasses informed and competent supranational institutions.
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http://www.ipcc.ch. All web links accessed November 16, 2011.
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The clean development mechanism (CDM) is one of three ‘flexibility mechanisms’ of the Kyoto Protocol designed to provide cost-effective emissions reduction opportunities. CDM allows developed countries to purchase ‘cheap’ CO2-emissions certificates in developing countries by paying for projects there that, at least on paper, lead to reduced CO2 emissions. The other two mechanisms are Joint Implementation (JI: receiving credit for implementing emission-reducing projects in other Annex I signatory nations) and emissions trading (ET).
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Renewables also have high energy input requirements: Almost all renewable energy conversions have energy returns on investment (EROI) of less than 10 (Smil, 2008).
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Flüeler, T., Goldblatt, D.L., Minsch, J., Spreng, D. (2012). Energy-Related Challenges. In: Spreng, D., Flüeler, T., Goldblatt, D., Minsch, J. (eds) Tackling Long-Term Global Energy Problems. Environment & Policy, vol 52. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2333-7_2
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