Transitioning to renewable energy in Sydney: Relational and co‐evolving energy geographies

Self Cite

This paper starts from the point that our current political‐economic‐climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward‐looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures.

Section: Repairing Electricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

For and against climate capitalism

Webber

2023

Self Cite

“…A third pair of articles asserts the importance of the politics of economic change, especially the nuances that disappear in northern theorisations of the state, and, especially, over-generalised accounts of neoliberalism including those where departures from the neoliberal norm are classified as (no more than) variants or variegations. The article by Vaughan and Webber (2022) interrogates Sydney's energy economy and its mix of marketisation and privatisation tendencies, albeit with tensions and fractures between enduring state control of market structures on one hand, and a decentralised renewable energy transformation on the other. The work exposes the shortcomings of binary explanations deployed often in expositions of energy transition: fossil fuels versus renewables; neoliberalism versus democratisation; system-wide versus local scale.…”

Section: Insights From Antipodean Economic Geographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disruption, transformation, and innovation in the peripheries

Martinus

O’Neill

2022

However, they are also viewed as necessary ingredients for economic growth and prosperity. It is not surprising, then, that economic geography research on innovation focuses on understanding the preconditions needed to stimulate new enterprise, industry, and knowledge and on how these characteristics of success might be transplanted or encouraged elsewhere, while minimising the displacement of workers in vulnerable regions. Many such studies point to the importance of industry clusters having a critical mass of firms, labour, and institutional thickness to enable knowledge spillovers, global connectivity, and creative buzz (cf. Bathelt et al., 2004;Porter, 1998). But some point to the tautological nature of such findings because of their reliance on case studies of "success" from the core urban economies. Peripheral economies are, by corollary, seen as deficit or disadvantaged because they do not host the suite of characteristics-the factors of location, the economic agents, the institutional backers, and the output profiles-believed intrinsic to a successful, innovative regional economy (Shearmur et al., 2016). Such conclusions then deflect interest from disruptive, transformative, and innovative activities in the peripheries.This special section joins a growing body of work that adopts a different stance. Our collection of articles foregrounds the characteristics of the periphery, and asks both how they might promote innovation and whether understanding the dynamics of peripheral economies might indeed aid our understanding of the core.

“…Geographers and those in allied disciplines can contribute to such efforts by examining how actors and organisations negotiate the use of carbon credits across time and space against carbon neutrality targets and the fast growth in renewable energy generation capacity in some regions. That work is important for the discipline because the production of renewable energy is place‐based and can be decentralised, and because the re‐scaling of energy governance and policy, driven by recent renewable energy developments, can create new challenges and opportunities to achieve a cleaner future under global climate change (Chandrashekeran, 2022; Martin & Strengers, 2022; Vaughan & Webber, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon offsetting and renewable energy development

2023

New carbon crediting and offsetting mechanisms are being developed under the Paris Agreement. Polluters can meet their emission reduction targets by acquiring and retiring carbon offset credits. Globally, most of these credits come from renewable energy sources. However, their additionality is increasingly questionable. Global renewable electricity capacity continues to grow. Greenhouse gas emissions from coal‐fired power generation are starting to fall, as governments and organisations pledge to curtail emissions, more capital is mobilised for energy transition, and renewable energy technologies become commercially competitive. The opportunity to earn carbon offset credits is becoming less indispensable to renewable energy development. Aggregate emissions could rise above the baseline level when polluters increase their emission budgets by using carbon credits generated from a renewable energy installation that is part of the baseline scenario. To safeguard environmental integrity, the conditions for including renewable energy in carbon crediting and offsetting schemes should be reconsidered.