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Carmen McLeod and Brigitte Nerlich The UK government has made significant investment into so-called ‘fourth-generation’ biofuel technologies. These biofuels are based on engineering the metabolic pathways of microorganisms in order to create chemicals compatible with existing infrastructure. Bacteria play an important role in what is promoted as potentially a new ‘biological’ industrial revolution, which could […]

Giovanni Frigo Recent improvements in algal microbiology and bio-engineering are paving the way for a switch to an algae-based energy system. This paper argues that algae harvesting systems (e.g. NASA’s OMEGA project) have the potential to generate, not just energy, but a new politics and ethics of energy. Even though algae harvesting plants may be […]

Jennifer Richter The modern nuclear age began with a blast of light in the central New Mexican desert in 1945. Since that moment, the thorny problem of what to do with the waste from nuclear weapons and energy development has been a defining aspect of human existence, and in the ensuing seventy years, little action […]

Kirsten Jenkins Energy is moving up the global political agenda, with poverty, climate change and energy security bringing new awareness of the links between energy and social justice. Amidst these challenges, the new and emerging concept of energy justice has developed with an aim “to provide all individuals, across all areas, with safe, affordable and sustainable […]

James Drew Africa’s largest wind-farm is under construction in northern Kenya. Many pastoralists, including Samburu have grazed livestock in this landscape for generations. This paper explores the history of how one such Samburu community’s lives, including ethical perceptions and identities, are entwined with ways of knowing landscape. Lkirriti (the way of the sheep) and nkanyit […]

Rita Kesselring While the West discusses the ethics of energy production, many developing countries grapple predominantly with the ethics of energy distribution. In the new and booming mining town Solwezi, North-Western Province in Zambia, it becomes particularly evident how energy as an infrastructure differentiates among its inhabitants. Most energy in the Southern African country is […]

Andrew Walsh Charcoal producers are among the most frequently maligned entrepreneurs in Madagascar, often singled out in conservation reports and targeted in conservation measures as enemies of the island’s threatened forests and ecosystems. And yet charcoal remains the island’s dominant cooking fuel, and, thus, primary energy commodity. In recent years, international organizations and Malagasy state […]

Jessica M. Smith The US coal industry appears to have entered a terminal bust, spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling, low natural gas prices, and federal clean power regulations that will hasten the retirement of coal-fired plants. With few exceptions, the collapse is celebrated as a victory in mitigating climate change. […]

Catherine Alexander Certain normative statements about environmental problems and how to address them have become pretty well accepted. We might call them environmental principles or ethical dicta. Briefly, they are that a) primary resource use and CO2 generation is excessive (we therefore ought to cut resource use), and b) too much waste is produced (we […]

Cymene Howe Whether the Sharp-shinned Hawk is killed by a turbine blade or befalls another fate should not pose a different moral conundrum than it did when humans first trapped wind to power machines in the first century AD. But it does. Our current demand to have energy at our disposal surfaces an equation between […]