Energy and Transport in Green Transition

Perspectives on Ecomodernity

Atle Midttun, Nina Witoszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317644262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book breaks new ground in the studies of green transition. It frames the ongoing transformation in terms of a "battle of modernities" with the emerging vision of ecomodernity as the final destination. It also offers a systematic exploration of the potential for extensive transformation of carbon-intensive sectors – with a focus on energy and transport – towards a low or post-carbon economy. The book does so in a comparative perspective, by pointing to a diversity of techno-economic and institutional solutions in the mature Western economies, and in the rapidly growing East and developing South. The contributors highlight a broad spectrum of available alternatives as well as illuminate conflicting interests involved. They also demonstrate how solutions to the climate challenge require parallel technological and governance innovation. The book advocates a new, overarching vision and agenda of ecomodernity – based on a synergistic paradigm-shift in industry, politics and culture – to trigger and sustain the ecological innovation necessary to tip development in a green direction. This vision cannot be monolithic; rather, it should reflect the diverse interests and conditions of the global population.

This book is aimed at researchers and postgraduate students of energy, transport, environmental and climate policies, as well as development, environment, innovation and sustainability.

1 A Battle of Modernities

Atle Midttun and Nina Witoszek

DOI: 10.4324/9781315761138-1

Introduction

It is diabolically difficult to interpret a crisis and predict possible scenarios of exit from peril. Even the most stringent selection of data to assess the status quo is bound to be biased, and the future is always qualified by an “if.” Available literature on human responses to climate change—from the IPCC reports to studies of green innovation—shows a fuzzy landscape, where almost everything is possible: an apocalypse, a muddling-through, a glorious future, even a Brave New World with a global green hegemon. Suffice it to compare two diagnoses. First:

The world has turned green. Sustainability is more than just a business trend; it is not just a buzzword for business to find new ways of selling old products in new guises. We are experiencing a revolution, perhaps as profound as industrial revolution, which has altered every facet of life as it was known and understood. This time around, belching smoke-stacks are not part of the mix, but windmills, battery-run cars, energy-efficient appliances, and recycling systems are.

(Berger 2011: 1)

And second:

Very little has been achieved in addressing climate change in the last two decades … Coal power stations continued to be built on an enormous scale in China and India. Indeed, Europe is back in the new coal power stations business. The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme … came perilously close to collapse. The Kyoto-driven international negotiations keep lots of bureaucrats busy but still offer no hope of progress until [the] next decade at the earliest. … Politicians are … scrambling to cut subsidies for renewables.

(Helm 2012: ix)

How to square these opposing scenarios? Topical analyses generated in 2014 reinforce, respectively, Cassandra or Pollyanna trends. To start on the bright side, The New Climate Economy (UN 2014) assures us that, irrespective of income level and standard of living, all countries have the possibility to continue with economic growth, while at the same time reducing the risk of climate change. Similarly, Stefan Heck et al. in Resource Revolution (2014) play a techno-optimistic tune and insist that the climate crisis will be solved within the existing capitalist framework through a shift to a sustainable production alone: the deployment of biomass, machines and infrastructure, and new uses of information technology. Naomi Klein, in contrast, gives no chance to the current form of neoliberal capitalist production, which in her view, by its very nature is “at war with the planetary system” (Klein 2014). In Klein’s view, the situation is so dramatic that only a new “Marshall Plan for the Earth” can save us—in other words, a massive shift to the renewable economy whose main actors are no longer greedy corporations but environmental social movements and local communities.

Interestingly enough, there is one thing that these conflicting diagnoses and solutions share: an advocacy of environmental ideas which point less to a return to a Spartan, pre-modern nature-utopia, and more to the mobilization of modernity’s innovative potential to get the planet out of its current predicament.

This book is an attempt to go beyond both the extremism of the anti-capitalist critique and the radical enthusiasm of techno-economic positivism in current perceptions of the climate challenge. Instead, it focuses on exploring political, economic and technological entanglements involved in the proliferation of climate problems and the ways they can be resolved to boost a greener economy and culture. To capture the nature of these entanglements, the central concept we deploy in our analysis is that of the battle of modernities ¹—a clash of techno-economic scenarios existing side-by-side, each clamoring for dominance. First, there is “carbon modernity,” which—it has to be stressed—is far from stagnant, but stubbornly attempts to reinvent itself in the green direction. There are remnants of “nuclear modernity” which, despite the disasters of the past decades, is still considered by many to be the fastest way to produce clean energy—accepted on ethical and moral grounds only after improvements of safety standards. And finally, there is the sluggish dawn of “green modernity,” which flaunts new agendas ranging from “natural capitalism” (Hawken et al. 1999), the “Factor Five” economy (von Weizsäcker et al. 2009) to “green growth” (UNESCAP 2012).

Behind these colliding economic modernities, there are more encompassing, value-charged myths—with their respective icons, images and heroes—which have shaped both the relationship between techno-science and nature and a vision of a better future. There have been three such pivotal stories. The first one states that there are no limits to human dreams and pursuits. Its key concept is exemplified by the Spanish motto, Plus ultra—“further beyond”—emblazoned on the banner stretching between the Pillars of Hercules, the physical and symbolic limit of the ancient world.² The motto can be taken as a rallying cry of modernity, which has moved steadily beyond boundaries, beyond nature, beyond humanity, beyond God. This expansive vision was founded on empowering stories about autonomous, rational, and interest-driven men and women, who have been free to pursue individual happiness and self-realization. The triumphs of science and technological innovation equipped them with tools to fulfill their dreams, and the Industrial Revolution provided them with material welfare on an unprecedented scale. Ever-more efficient production and market competition have allowed them to become exuberant consumers who would buy more and more goods at lower and lower prices. Natural resources have been seemingly inexhaustible and hence could be exploited ad infinitum for greater wealth, happiness, and self-realization.³ The most mobilizing version of this story—The American Dream—tells us of men and women who progress from rags to riches, regardless of their race, gender, or class. Its iconic representations—from the ejaculating “black gold” in Texas, to the triumphant coast-to-coast locomotive, and the cool, cigarette-adorned James Dean traversing the United States in a Ford Mustang—have all declared the triumph of this Western narrative of carbon-born modernity in all its various guises. There is but one problem, though: this upbeat vision of humanity as an ever-expanding galaxy sans frontiers contributes to the destruction of the environment and our livelihood on planet Earth.

The second of these influential modern master-narratives has attempted to counteract the Enlightenment’s hubris. It has replaced the boundlessness of industrial modernity with a mantra of limits. The core narrative about the apocalyptic consequences of ongoing environmental destruction was codified by Meadows et al.’s Limits to Growth (1972), an international bestseller in global pessimism. The conclusion was dramatic: a continuation of boundless modernity entailed a whole catalog of misfortunes: the world would run out of resources, pollution would rise to intolerable levels, and there would be a food crisis and decline of world population. Jørgen Randers’s follow-up 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (2012) is slightly more optimistic, but nevertheless argues that change will come too late to avoid climate overshoot.

A crop of doomsday stories (films, novels, and media reports), as well as civic actions spurned by the master-story of limitations, has captivated public imagination but failed to generate sufficient support for a new, green paradigm. In 1987, a seemingly more pragmatic version of the story of limits was offered by the Brundtland Commission in Our Common Future (1987). The Brundtland Report insisted that the environmental apocalypse could be prevented via a sustainable development through emphasis on combined social and environmental responsibility. Sustainable development has struck an innovative, optimistic chord in its claim that humanity is capable of techno-economic advance without compromising the fate of future generations and the natural environment. Yet squaring growth with limitations has remained a challenge. While the UN’s Agenda 21 (1992) spelled out a program of active engagement with countries and communities, its main thrust was to inject responsibility into the world economy and initiate a global program of cutting down CO₂ emissions and imposing carbon taxes or emission quotas. As a result, the concept of sustainable development— initially tied to the green transition—got entangled in the discourse of cuts, limitations, and austerity. This association, in turn, led to a “sustainability aversion” among many businesses and electorates.

Following the setback for classical sustainability policy in Copenhagen at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 15th Conference of Parties in 2009, an alternative story has emerged: the story of green growth. This story flaunts the agenda of innovation rather than limitations and reinvigorates earlier ideas of eco-efficiency and ecological modernization. Green growth had its breakthrough at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio 2012, and has produced a mounting cascade of international studies, reports, and conferences, as well as business and political initiatives. By positioning the green transition as a driver of growth rather than a vehicle of limitations to prosperity, and by advancing an innovation agenda rather than the agenda of taxation and increasing CO₂ costs, green growth envisages sustainability as a tool for value creation in business and improved societal welfare.

The main problem with the green growth concept is that it fails to connect with culture. Carbon modernity creatively interacted with cultural aspirations, as in The American Dream. The concepts of “green growth” or “ecological modernization,” however, are terms reserved for economic and technological processes and do not easily lend themselves to cultural translations. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, they have largely failed to engage with the vast sphere of cultural values, images, and stories that would mobilize or inspire electorates and spirits at large. Hence, we propose a broader concept of ecomodernity as an umbrella term to integrate the commercial, technological, and cultural visions within the same “green commons.” Ecomodernity is thus a meta-concept capturing the early twenty-first century Zeitgeist. We realize that some will shrug it off as just another trendy term. But, as Quentin Skinner argues—and the success of The American Dream demonstrates—words do not just say things; they do things to us at the same time (Skinner 2002). What, then, does ecomodernity do to us that the concept of sustainable development does not?

In one “sound gesture,” ecomodernity reconciles the long-standing estrangement between modernity and nature. The prefix eco—from the Greek oikos, meaning house—tempers the Faustian ambitions of carbon and nuclear modernities and returns us back to our terrestrial home, community, and culture. Emphasis here on culture is not trivial. Ours is the first (post)-industrial revolution that is motivated by long-term public interest and therefore cannot do without a simultaneous paradigm shift in the sphere of values, lifestyles, and beliefs. Ecomodernity invites techno-economy and polity to talk to culture; after all, they are all constitutive parts of the same household and today aspire to share a project of prioritizing the well-being of humanity and the environment. Also, as we have suggested, the concept of sustainable development has become in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Biographies
• Foreword
• 1 A Battle of Modernities
• 2 Green Energy Transition in the EU and the United States
• 3 Energy Frontiers in China
• 4 Growth versus Green Transition: Energy in Sub-Saharan Africa
• 5 The Automotive Industry: Meandering Towards Green Transition in the European Union and the United States
• 6 Driven to Change: The Chinese State-Led Development of a Car Culture and Economy
• 7 Squaring Growth with Green Transition in Africa’s Automobile Sector
• 8 Towards Ecomodernity
• Index