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Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
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9 - Energy resources and future generations
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
In 2001, President Fradique Menezes of the Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Príncipe was in trouble. São Tomé is an archipelago of roughly 1,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Guinea. With a population of 160,000, it is West Africa’s smallest democracy, Africa’s second smallest country after the Seychelles, and the third smallest economy in the world. To put its size in perspective, the country is about five times the area of Washington, DC.
During this time, President Menezes’ country was almost entirely dependent on foreign aid, notorious for somewhat humorous cases of petty corruption and, due to lack of money, government neglect and a highly undiversified economy. For instance, throughout the 1990s, foreign aid represented 97 percent of government revenue, making it the largest recipient of donor aid per capita in the world. São Tomé also had the highest debt to GDP ratio of any country in the world. São Tomé had to import everything – every light bulb, car battery, computer, sock, fork, plate, curtain, shoe, and so on – from vast distances, since neighboring countries also produced little and imported almost everything from Europe. The national economy was dependent on cocoa production as the main commercial crop which produced less than $4 million per year, and income from tourism was marginal. Due to its sheer lack of resources and high rates of debt, the São Tomé economy featured numerous “creative” state-sponsored enterprises such as offering black market passports, licensing flags of convenience for international shipping companies, producing commemorative postal stamps featuring Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles, and even government-endorsed X-rated telephone calling centers.
Analytical table of contents
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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3 - Virtue and energy efficiency
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
Pretend that the management committee of a large electric utility is reaching a point where standard projections indicate that demand from customers will soon exceed their ability to provide power. Two options have been presented to senior management. One is to spend $3 billion to build a new generating station which is expected to produce enough energy to meet demand growth for ten years at a cost of approximately 5 cents per kWh at the busbar, which would mean a cost delivered to consumers of about 8 cents per kWh. Another option is to invest $2 billion in insulating the homes and businesses of customers, which is expected to avoid the otherwise anticipated increase in demand for at least ten years, at a cost of approximately 3 to 4 cents per kWh, which with overhead will equal 4 to 5 cents per kWh on customer bills.
Which of these alternatives would you choose? Should you be affected by the fact that traditional rulemaking will grant your shareholders a high probability of earning an 8 to 10 percent return on the $3 billion investment in the power plant, while the direct expenses of insulation are recovered, but generate no return on investment?
5 - Energy and human rights
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
The externalities and premature deaths associated with energy production and use elaborated on in Chapter 4 raise another interesting ethical dilemma: how are we to value human life when we weigh costs and benefits? Imagine that it is a quiet autumn afternoon in Washington, DC, and you are sitting in your office at the US EPA, preparing your memorandum to the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. She has asked you to recommend a permissible level for toxic emissions coming from large electricity generating plants. You know that stricter standards will cost significantly more in terms of air pollution equipment (and result, ultimately, in higher energy prices), but you also know that tougher standards will save many lives from death or ruin by reducing the health effects of mercury and other heavy metals emissions.
Thus, there is an obvious tradeoff between protection of human health and costs of emissions control. How can you turn this from an abstract, “gut reaction,” personal-values comparison to a quantifiable one of “deaths and dollars” that you can present for recommendations and debate? On the one hand, the electric utility industry asserts that stricter standards could result in the closure of sixty-eight coal-fired power plants – 8 percent of the country’s entire fleet – risking blackouts and massive job layoffs. The industry will also have to spend $11 billion by 2016 installing better scrubbers and pollution abatement equipment at their power plants, costs that will be passed onto households. On the other hand, EPA analyses and National Academies of Science studies suggest that stricter pollution controls will yield annual monetized benefits of $59 to $140 billion through 17,000 fewer annual deaths caused by PM and mercury pollution. As the EPA’s own report concludes, “the benefits outweigh costs by between 3 to 1 or 9 to 1 depending on the benefit estimate and discount rate used.”
Acknowledgements
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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6 - Energy and due process
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
In 2000 and 2001, during the height of the California electricity crisis, the City of San Diego faced consistent rolling brownouts and electricity shortages. Fearing that the predicament was a taste of things to come, city planners, in association with the local utility San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) and the California Independent Systems Operator, proposed creating a $130 million, 100-mile-long high-voltage (500 kV) above ground transmission line to connect the Valley Substation with the Rainbow Substation. Backed by these supporters, the Valley-Rainbow Interconnect Project had a number of large potential benefits. It would increase SDG&E’s ability to import electricity into their service area by approximately 700 MW. The project would help interconnect SDG&E’s network with that of Southern California Edison. It would improve system reliability, minimizing the risk of future blackouts, especially given that Riverside County, and the Project area as a whole, was at the time one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. It had “significant economic benefits to the State” in the form of “significant reductions in energy costs” and “substantial cost benefits to ratepayers” in the form of “avoided customer outage costs,” ultimately benefiting about 3.4 million San Diego customers with improved connectivity and lower spot prices for electricity.
However, despite these possible gains, a collection of smaller cities, community groups, environmental nongovernmental organizations, and Indian tribes staunchly opposed the project. Much of the 100-mile corridor of land needed belonged not to the state, but to private owners and cities. The project required the state to “confiscate” more than 140 properties and roughly 638 acres of land from the cities of Temecula, De Luz, Glen Oaks, Redhawk, Vail Ranch, Oakridge Ranches, Winchester, Wine Country, French Valley, Sun City, Menifee, and Lake Skinner. The Southwest Association of Realtors and the Women’s Council of Realtors protested against the line on the grounds that it would significantly lower property values across 4,600 residential units, 215 acres of commercial development, 167.2 acres of mixed-use development, three school sites, three parks, an eighteen-hole golf course and even a helicopter pilot training school.
7 - Energy poverty, access, and welfare
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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It starts as a good week. Despite the snow and cold, you celebrate your twenty-fifth birthday and first year on the job as the service engineer for an electric utility in Kazakhstan. You deposit a reasonable paycheck and are proud of bringing energy services to the households, enterprises, and industries that need it. This week, too, you have a new assignment: five houses within 10 miles of your service center have failed to pay their electric bills for the past two months. Your work orders are simple: disconnect those five homes from the electric grid.
How do you feel about this task? What do you ask yourself before you either implement the disconnection, or defer it? Does your company have any hard rules or soft policies to guide you? Does it matter whether a storm is coming in, or if a cold snap is expected? Or if you know the age, health, wealth, or merit of the people living in those homes? Does it matter if the cost of keeping “deadbeats” on the system will be paid by the utility’s investors, or by surcharges from other homeowners who do pay their bills on time?
Global Energy Justice
- Problems, Principles, and Practices
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Michael H. Dworkin
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We need new ways of thinking about, and approaching, the world's energy problems. Global energy security and access is one of the central justice issues of our time, with profound implications for happiness, welfare, freedom, equity, and due process. This book combines up-to-date data on global energy security and climate change with fresh perspectives on the meaning of justice in social decision-making. Benjamin K. Sovacool and Michael H. Dworkin address how justice theory can help people to make more meaningful decisions about the production, delivery, use, and effects of energy. Exploring energy dilemmas in real-life situations, they link recent events to eight global energy injustices and employ philosophy and ethics to make sense of justice as a tool in the decision-making process. They go on to provide remedies and policies that planners and individuals can utilize to create a more equitable and just energy future.
Dedication
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Contents
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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List of abbreviations
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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8 - Energy subsidies and freedom
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
In 1954, US President Dwight Eisenhower faced a difficult situation. Under the Atoms for Peace Program, announced in December 1953 to the UN General Assembly, he had pledged to “strip the atom’s military casing and adapt it to the art of peace.” The central theme behind Atoms for Peace was to demonstrate that the power of the atom could be converted from a terrifying military force into a benign commodity. A secondary driver, less obvious but still salient, was competition with the Soviet Union. Developments outside the nuclear industry during the 1940s and 1950s, such as the Alger Hiss case, the pro-Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet blockage of West Germany, the Chinese revolution, and Soviet progress developing atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, and nuclear reactors convinced many American planners that they were in a “race to save the world from communism.” Atomic energy was one key component of winning this race, and the reason for choosing to go forward was not necessarily to produce a “cost competitive” nuclear power plant but to demonstrate to the world the superiority of American engineering prowess. The role of the government, in other words, was to be an entrepreneurial custodian of atoms. Yet, atomic energy was then far from technically or economically feasible.
How, then, were Eisenhower and his planners to, first, decide whether his program should be done by the government as opposed to private industry? Secondly, if it was to be government sponsored, how was he to convince investors, vendors, and taxpayers to participate? The Eisenhower Administration’s answer was a program of lavish public subsidies, earmarking billions of tax dollars for research, development, demonstration projects, and offering limited liability guarantees for nuclear accidents. In the American case, government created a market for nuclear power, rather than seeing one emerge organically.
List of tables
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Index
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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List of figures
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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4 - Utility and energy externalities
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
In 1945, planners in Orissa, India, faced a dilemma. The upper draining basin of the Mahanadi River passed through Orissa (later renamed the state of Odisha), causing massive floods in some years coupled with devastating droughts in others. Hydrological and engineering assessments concluded that a series of storage reservoirs, dykes, and dams could help regulate this uneven distribution of water. These assessments revealed that the best place to locate the largest of these projects would be 15 kilometers from Sambalpur, where a 5 kilometer long earthen dam could prevent the Mahanadi River from swelling during the monsoon season and regulate the drainage of 83,400 square kilometers of land, providing flood control to the districts of Cuttack and Puri. Such a dam could also help irrigate 75,000 square kilometers of crops throughout the districts of Sambalpur, Bargarh, Bolangir, and Subarnpu, in addition to providing 307.5 MW of hydroelectricity. At the time, in aggregate, these benefits would reach upwards of 3 million people.
However, achieving these benefits would come at the cost of flooding almost 150,000 acres (600 square kilometers) of land that would become a permanent reservoir. It would also require the forced relocation of more than 150,000 people from 22,000 families. In short, building the dam would necessitate “substantial mass agitation.”
2 - The global energy system
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Introduction
Joan Brown, a college student in Atlanta, Georgia, wakes up in the morning to an electronic alarm clock before she microwaves breakfast, takes a hot shower, grabs a latte at Starbucks, and drives her Sport Utility Vehicle to campus – where she texts her boyfriend during class and checks email on her iPad. Gertrude Smith, a widowed grandmother living in London, the United Kingdom, drinks watered down milk for breakfast (to make the carton last longer), walks everywhere, uses discarded newspapers as makeshift lampshades, and reuses her bathwater to clean dishes and clothes. She pays her energy bills with jars of coins. Tiemoko Sangare, a farmer in Tanzania, spends half of his day searching for wood and water and the other half cultivating crops by hand. He has never had a hot shower or bath, and rises and rests according to the sun, with no indoor lighting at night. Sometimes, if his yields are good, he can afford to purchase charcoal at the local market near Dar es Salaam.
These examples show that we are in the midst of a transformational shift in the use of energy – with some, like Ms. Brown, adopting very energy-intensive living. Modern forms of energy have also become key to industrialized lifestyles across the globe, with the late German parliamentarian Hermann Scheer once remarking that energy and raw materials are the “nervus rerum,” the “nerve of all things,” for our economies. However, these examples also reveal that the global energy system – the backbone of modern lifestyles and economic development – reflects and perpetuates vast inequities and inequalities. For some of us, lack of access to energy services is a mere inconvenience; for others, such as Mr. Sangare, it is a matter of life or death. Some of us consume staggering amounts of liquid fuels and electricity – and have significantly large carbon footprints – while others go completely without modern energy services and contribute almost nothing to climate change.
Epigraph
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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10 - Fairness, responsibility, and climate change
- Benjamin K. Sovacool, Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Michael H. Dworkin
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Summary
Imagine for a moment that you are the governor of the state of Washington in the United States, and that you are entering the final year of your first term. You fully intend to run again. Before then, however, you need to decide your position in a fierce debate that has emerged over the 6,809 MW Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, the largest hydroelectric power station in the country and a key source of energy for Washington State. On the one hand, the dam itself is old – built originally between 1933 and 1942 – and most of its thirty-three hydroelectric generators are in need of expensive refurbishing and upgrades. It lacks a fish ladder, meaning that the Department of the Interior informs you that it permanently blocks fish migration, removing more than 1,700 square kilometers of critical spawning habitat for salmon. Naturalists and recreationists have called the facility an “eyesore,” and your officers tell you that removing it would enable the Washington State Parks Foundation to convert Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake and Banks Lake, currently reservoirs for the dam, into a kayaking tourist attraction. You have read studies that project that closing and removing the dam will cost $100 million, but that the state will receive $310 million per year from increased fisheries and tourism revenues – enough to pay for the construction of new power plants in other places, offset the cost of dam removal, and still produce extra revenue for the state.
On the other hand, closing down the dam means that you may have to approve three new coal-fired power plants to offset the reduction in electrical capacity, thus doubling the state’s GHG emissions. Farmers across the Columbia River Basin warn that without the irrigable water that the dam provides, they would need to switch to more pesticide- and fertilizer-intensive crops, contributing even more to future emissions. Your advisors tell you that the remodeled Roosevelt Lake could become such an attractive tourist option that you would need to build a new highway and hotels, which would both need more energy-intensive materials (while they are being built) and sources of energy (once they are operational), again contributing to climate change.