by Paul Conlan
The aim of this blog post is to reflect philosophically on questions of our individual moral obligations in the face of climate change. In doing so, we will also respond to two objections which claim we have no obligation at all. That is, my goal as a philosopher is to replace the ‘seeming’ obviousness of our obligations with something more philosophically robust.
Throughout the summer of 2024, CEE Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Cornelia Helmcke travelled the Scottish Islands, hosting ‘townhalls’ on Orkney, Lewis, South Uist, Skye and Mull. Local community groups, energy experts and residents were invited to collectively brainstorm constraints to the national electricity grid as perceived on the islands and how to overcome these. In this blog post, Cornelia reflects on her experiences and what she has learned from those who live ‘at the end of the line’.
by Sean Field
The electrification of heat and transportation is vital to the UK achieving Net Zero. In this short piece, Sean explores how a weighted average wholesale electricity price could reduce electricity prices for consumers and substantially delink wholesale natural gas and electricity prices. This promises not just to insulate UK consumers from global natural gas price volatility, but also facilitate the electrification of heat and transport by making electricity cheaper, which is essential for meeting the UK’s net zero targets.
During the ‘Energy Debate’ panel hosted on Friday 13 November as part of Energy Ethics 2020, it became clear that the challenges of powering the world on renewable technologies were as palpable as the need to overcome them in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; and reducing this reliance is imperative if we are to limit the impacts of ongoing climate change.
by James Crooks
The production of energy through the burning of biological materials has been considered a renewable, reliable and even relatively clean alternative to the use of fossil fuels. However, as the industry has grown these claims have faced increased scrutiny; critics have claimed that biomass on a large scale has negative long- and short-term environmental impacts not only on pollution but on biodiversity generally. So we have to ask: is biomass an energy source of the future?
When half the world struggles with inadequate electricity supply, what happens when we have too much energy? In this post, I look at situations in which overcapacity leads to a “renewable overkill”, creating landscapes of abandonment where wind turbines and other renewable energy projects lie as stalled, prevented or temporarily stranded assets.