The aim of this chapter is two-fold. First, the authors present a practical application of multidisciplinary research based on the experience of editing a book comprised of multidisciplinary cases and focusing on two chapter cases. There are many theoretical accounts of how one may approach multidisciplinary research, but here the authors aim to offer a practical account of how the theoretical goal of multidisciplinary research can play out in the ‘real world’. After addressing the current conceptual understanding of multidisciplinary versus interdisciplinary research, the authors will explain how useful these concepts, in fact, are when applied to the typical constraints that many academics face today in conducting joint research. The authors, who are both editors of the book, will provide lessons for future multidisciplinary collaboration and suggestions for developing methods of multidisciplinary research.

As the modular backbone of the technological revolution, data centers are essential. As the infrastructure of the twenty-first century, data centers must align with the challenges of twenty-first-century infrastructure. While data centers are far less power hungry than distributed computing, the technology revolution in the making will choke without a satisfactory solution of clean energy for scaling data centers. Key innovations in predictive intelligence make a world of PUE ratios near one likely. But absolute power draw will continue to grow the footprint of data centers on local power networks and their carbon intensity. Two key factors to overcome the clean energy barrier of scaling data centers are energy optimization via on-site production and intelligent location siting. For humanity to thrive in the digital age, data center infrastructure much be efficient, decarbonized, and resource neutral at scale.

Environmental quality is a non-excludable public good in that good quality for one is good for all; security may have similar characteristics. The resulting market failures mean that without remedies markets will undersupply. Each consumer has a different valuation that cannot readily be revealed, often requiring public action to remedy. Climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen, with global long-lasting impacts requiring collective action best addressed by credible global rising carbon taxes that will be challenging to deliver. Policy needs to choose instruments well targeted to objectives, correcting market failures through taxes or standard setting, leaving distributional justice to the tax and benefit system. This chapter argues that the concept of market completeness is helpful in designing appropriate energy policies to address both problems.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

This chapter presents a critical appreciation of the influential encyclical letter of Pope Francis on the environment, Ladauto Si’, issued on the eve of COP 21 in 2015. After placing the document in the context of earlier papal statements and noting its immediate impacts, the chapter sets out the theological, diagnostic and normative substance of the document and explores the multiple challenges it presents to diverse actors in the field of energy policy, from consumers through to global institutions. The chapter appreciates the originality, radicality and inspirational quality of the document but observes that it leaves much work for these actors if its message is to be effectively translated into workable, strategic environmental and energy policy guidelines. The document does well at the macro-level of broad cultural analysis and at the micro-level of illustrative concrete examples but falls short at the meso-level in terms of defining guidelines for specific sectors such as technology, markets and states.

The chapter proposes public participation as a principle of ‘good’ energy governance that legitimatises energy decisions and fosters their social acceptance. Adopting a public international law perspective, it highlights how the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) constrains domestic decision making in the energy sector. Paying special attention to the contribution of the committee charged with reviewing state compliance with the convention’s obligations, it offers a detailed analysis of its conclusions and recommendations in the context of two cases: the United Kingdom’s decision to build a nuclear power station in Hinkley Point and the design of a renewable energy policy in Scotland. On that basis, the chapter concludes on the increasingly important role that international law plays in democratising energy decision-making processes.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

This chapter is a multidisciplinary analysis and case study on one of Russia’s newest pipelines, the Power of Siberia, designed to deliver natural gas from Siberia to the Chinese market, connecting the two countries by pipeline. The authors conclude that the Power of Siberia project, although in its infancy, appears to have a mixed track record. On the one hand, it provides both Russia and China with important market and supply diversification. And although this contributes to greater energy security, the economic advantages look to be more one-sided, benefitting Russia in the short term but raising questions about the long-term viability of the project. The pipeline evades the scrutiny of international norms and legal frameworks, on which both countries seem to place less emphasis compared to similar pipelines connecting Russia to Europe. Related to this, the construction of the pipeline has not met the same international environmental standards of westbound pipelines, and this is adversely affecting indigenous communities in the Russian Far East. On a more global scale, however, the authors also raise the prospect of greater geopolitical instability in the region.

Danish energy policy has reached a phase where the effects of the paradigmatic change from stored fossil fuels to very large shares of fluctuating renewable energy requires fundamentally new technical, political and economic solutions. Two archetypal technical scenarios are the locally and regionally integrated Smart Energy System scenario and a centralized export/import transmission line scenario. In analyzing the competition between these scenarios we applied a social anthropological method of GOING CLOSE to the situation of the actors and the ecological, technological and institutional context. We concluded that a smart energy scenario that can integrate large amounts of fluctuating wind power is optimal, but that the transmission line scenario has the politically strongest supporters and consequently, an advantage for being implemented. With respect to institutional factors, our conclusion is that if a country should be able to change its path against the will of politically strong actors, it is a must to have innovative democracy where the parliament, educational institutions and other institutions are independent of these political actors. In the present phase of the transition to 100% renewable energy we recommend concrete and specific institutional changes both at the EU and national levels.

The European Commission’s 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) mandates that 10 per cent of liquid fuels used in the European Union must be composed of plant-derived fuels by 2020. The forests of Borneo, like those of other tropical regions, have been and are being destroyed, their rich biodiversity and human cultures eroded, and the stored greenhouse gases in their biomass and soils released to the atmosphere, in order to generate short-term profits from primary resource markets for tropical timber and tropical plantation products including EC-mandated biofuels. However far from saving carbon and protecting biodiversity, the promotion of these fuels has the opposite effects. From an ethical perspective the regulation on biofuels reveals an ontological misunderstanding of persons and other beings, which puts short-term accumulation of economic value above longer-term values. The medium-term temporality of global climate governance, combined with the short-term utilitarian calculus, has through this regulation supplanted ancestral temporalities which have traditionally governed the viability of tropical ecosystems and the ways of life for humans and other animals to dwell energetically and sustainably.

In this chapter, the air pollution trends in historical London (1950 – 66) and contemporary Beijing (2000 – 16) are compared. In both cases, coal is the main source of air pollution, due to coal-fired electricity generation and coal-burning activities that provide heating. In London, the Clean Air Act of 1956 marked a successful milestone in the history of air pollution abatement in the UK. In Beijing, various policies have been introduced but air qualities in China have not been improved substantially. By examining the effectiveness of respective pollution control regulations/policies in a broader socioeconomic context, policy implications on respective jurisdictions are drawn. For effective implementation of air pollution control policies at the local level, it would be good for China to move beyond simply introducing stringent policies and regulations at the central or the provincial level. More resources can be re-directed to resolving the competing interests of stakeholders across different levels of jurisdictions.

Infrastructure projects require collaborative exploration of what is needed and what is possible. Good leadership creates the goodwill and team spirit which generate a good outcome. To develop a whole global industry – e.g., the wind industry – this has to be sustained over a wide geography and a long period of time. Developing a new sector of an industry – e.g., offshore wind energy – raises new problems, particularly problems of the size of larger wind turbines, and all the necessary subsea infrastructure. This is seriously expensive for a market limited in size. Creating a stable market helps reduce the risk but the investment required to establish the physically large factories to build these large turbines in quantity for what remains a limited market appears prohibitive.

It is not just economics and technology but stakeholder interests which have shaped the evolution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as an option with a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. We trace how over the course of the 2000s, CCS went from largely unknown to being seen as a flexible, dispatchable technology applicable to coal, gas or biomass, which could address concerns over security of supply with minimal disruption to the existing power system and business models while addressing hard-to-abate sectors including heat and process industries. Four general themes are identified as explaining why the politics of CCS has been so difficult: (i) there is no pressure for politicians or other stakeholders to seek more efficient solutions; (ii) the lack of a coherent logic or overarching industrial policy narrative for supporting CCS, except perhaps in a few isolated locations; (iii) the nature of CCS requires a much larger initial investment and greater systems integration than other low-carbon options; and (iv) changing energy industry business models, which, over the past decade, had eroded some of the factors that had worked in favour of CCS.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.