UP150022

WiSe 21/22: Climate and energy transition policy

Johan Lilliestam

Hinweise für Studierende

Weitere Informationenen: https://puls.uni-potsdam.de/qisserver/rds?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&publishid=89190&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfo&publishSubDir=veranstaltung

Kommentar

Climate change is one of the big challenges of our time, touching all aspects of the environment and of society. There is broad recognition that governments must do something about it: the implication of the Paris Agreement and its 1.5 and 2 degrees targets is the complete elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from the energy system within the next 30 to 40 years. This is a very complicated problem. Fundamentally this is because it means doing something that humanity has never really tried before at a planetary scale: deliberately altering the ways we produce, convert, and consume energy. Modern society grew up on fossil fuels, and the huge benefits they offered in terms of energy that was inexpensive, easy and safe to transport, store and consume. How to manage a non-fossil world with 8 or 10 billion people, all aspiring to the Western living standards, is a question for which there is no easy answer. From a technical perspective, there are many answers, typically relying on a bouquet of solutions, from wind power to nuclear power, from solar heat to passive housing without any heat demand at all. The technical side of decarbonisation is difficult, but possible. The real nut to crack, however, is about the strategies and governance for how to achieve such a complete transformation: the policy side of climate and energy. Arguably a government could simply pass a law that forbids people from using fossil fuels. But politically this is simply unrealistic, at least while so many people depend on fossil fuels in their daily lives. And even worse, it is not certain that it would work, because the technological alternatives may not be available and implementable overnight. What is to be done? For this, one needs to turn to various ideas about what a government can and should do, whether and how it should influence and steer society. On the one hand are ideas suggesting that government should play a very limited role relative to private actors and should step in only to correct “market failures”, with “market-based” interventions designed specifically around that failure. On the other hand are ideas suggesting that government (meaning all of us, working together through a democratic process) needs to guide the transition more directly, including through public investments or radical reforms, designed to support the solutions determined to be the ones we want. And on the third hand, if such a hand exists, are ideas posing that the problem is our own consumption patterns and that these, and economic growth in general, are entirely incompatible with climate protection: only consuming radically less will help. Such fundamental issues come to the fore in climate and energy policy discussions and debates. This course is about all that. Schließen