Energy policy making is complex, and policy makers have traditionally relied on evidence and assessments dominated by a handful of disciplines from the natural and physical sciences. These assessments have often focused on technological solutions with the implicit message that the answer to policy needs lies in identifying and developing the right technology. Historically, however, problems arise in the implementation process of new technologies. These obstacles may be better understood, and either alleviated or avoided, through a more holistic analysis of energy policy requirements that includes multidisciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities. This chapter introduces the main ideas of the book, including an overview of each chapter and the most important arguments of the book.

Energy and its management through policy touches on some core anthropological topics such as power, value and identity. Innovative anthropological approaches are being used to reveal the interplay between energy and societies. These include ethnographies of communities and their relationship to energy resources, analysis of the material culture of homes, as well as new areas of research into digital systems. This chapter outlines the questions that energy policy raises for anthropologists as well as current approaches being used to investigate them.

It is important to recognize that macroeconomic conditions and dynamics were important for the design of Swedish energy policy and that the transformation pressure on the Swedish energy system was exceptionally high by international comparison. Historic decisions, which were governed by a rationality fostered by the circumstances in the 1940s and early 1950s, came to form important structures which affected the outcome of the energy policy in the 1970s and 1980s. The perhaps most striking consequence of this was the emergence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve for carbon with few international counterparts. The transformative change of the Swedish energy system included several steps, which in retrospect seem accidental. The challenge today is to copy the sequence, while at the same time realizing that the structures and historical circumstances that brought about a sequence that was historically determined and of a contingent nature cannot easily serve as a ‘copy and paste’ learning example.

The final chapter presents responses to the content of the entire book by policy practitioners who have dealt with the realities of constructing and implementing policies. They include essays by Emily Shuckburgh, OBE, deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team at the British Antarctic Survey; John Deutch, currently Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former Deputy Secretary of Energy in the United States; and Lord Ronald Oxburgh, who is a British parliamentarian, member of the House of Lords, a former chairman of Shell and himself a geologist and geophysicist. These ‘technologists’ offer three different perspectives on the topic of ‘good energy policy’. Finally the editors provide the main lessons learned from the book and offer suggestions for future directions of multidisciplinary research in energy policy.

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.

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.

This chapter examines the uses of academic approaches to history in discussing energy policy. It sets out a case that the value of history is not simply in the past as a source of empirical data on policy and behaviour (which is accessible to any discipline), but a style of synthetic thinking and evaluation particular to the study of History as a disciplines. History may provide analogue situations for current dilemmas, and a long-term view on change, but does not necessarily work in large-scale or long-term phenomena. Rather, it is the blending of perspectives and the assumption of causal complexity, as opposed to methodological and explanatory parsimony, that marks the value of historical approaches. This is exemplified in the history of prediction, asking not whether predictions were accurate (generally they were not), but why demand for them arose and how they were constructed so as to be plausible to actors.

The crafting of good energy policy raises philosophical questions with respect to the deliberative processes through which policy should be formed, and with respect to the specific content of the policies arrived at. This short essay begins with a brief account of the conceptual difficulties that arise when we think about just energy policy and the benefits and harms our energy policies bring to future generations. It moves on to focus more narrowly on questions of good deliberative process. More specifically, the essay addresses a set of issues concerning whether there is a defensible version of the ‘precautionary principle’, and the proper contributions to policy formation of technically trained experts versus laypersons. These issues are explored via illustrative examples relating to climate change, to nuclear power and to disputes over fracking.

This chapter sets out the contribution to ‘good energy policy’ that might be forthcoming from the (perhaps unfamiliar) field of ‘public theology’. It argues that an environmental public theology would commend a ‘grounded’ energy policy – one rooted in an explicit conception of a ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ human life. After defining ‘public theology’, it identifies five convergent stances relevant to energy policy that seem to be emerging today among representative of most world religions: (i) nature as a ‘divine’ ordering marked by integration, equilibrium and harmony rather than as infinitely exploitable; (ii) a call for human ‘stewardship’ of nature; (iii) an acceptance of climate science and an urgent call to shift away from fossil fuels; (iv) scepticism towards unlimited economic growth and its attendant ‘consumerism’; (v) locating energy questions within a broader commitment to a just social order characterised by both an equitable global distribution of access to energy and a decentralisation of energy supply (‘environmental subsidiarity’).

This chapter discusses the importance of the legal aspects of energy policy. It advances two main propositions: (a) different legal expressions of similar energy policies have different implications for the effectiveness and overall impact of a policy, and (b) the choice of legal expression is highly constrained by (i) law as a technology (i.e., the tools available to translate a policy into legal terms), (ii) the need to fit the policy within a broader legal framework and (iii) the underlying economic, social and political considerations affecting the choice of certain legal expressions. The chapter illustrates these two propositions by reference to three case studies relating to the extraction of shale gas in the EU, decarbonisation in the United States, and state support for renewable energy in India.