A new perspective on decarbonising the global energy system

An analysis of historical cost trends of energy technologies shows that the decades-long increase in the deployment of renewable energy technologies has consistently coincided with steep declines in their costs. For example, the cost of solar photovoltaics has declined by three orders of magnitude over the last 50 years. Similar trends are to be found with wind, energy storage, and electrolysers (hydrogen-based energy). Such declines are set to continue and will take several of these renewable technologies well below the cost base for current fossil fuel energy generation. Most major climate mitigation models produced for the IPCC and the International Energy Agency have continually underestimated such trends despite their being quite consistent and predictable. By incorporating such trends into a simple, transparent energy system model we produce new climate mitigation scenarios that provide a contrasting perspective to those of the standard models. These new scenarios provide an opportunity to shift the common narrative that a Paris-compliant emissions pathway will be expensive, will require reduced energy services or economic growth, and will need to rely on technologies that are currently expensive or unproven as scale. This research provides encouraging evidence for governments that are looking for greater ambition on decarbonising their economies while providing economic growth opportunities and affordable energy

Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept

My purpose in this paper is to complicate the genealogies of the concept of culture as a way of life that have held sway within cultural studies. I do so by reviewing key aspects in the development of this concept within the ‘Americanist’ tradition of anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas in the opening decades of the twentieth century and continued by a generation of Boas’s students including Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber and Margaret Mead. I focus on three issues: the respects in which the ‘culture concept’ was shaped by aesthetic conceptions of form; its spatial registers; and its functioning as a new surface of government, partially displacing that of race, in the development of American multicultural policies in the 1920s and 1930s. In relating these concerns to Graeme Turner’s enduring interest in the processes through which culture is ‘made national’, I indicate how the spatial registers of the culture concept anticipate contemporary approaches to these questions. I also outline what Australian cultural studies has to learn from the American evolution of the culture concept in view of the respects in which the latter was shaped by the racial dynamics of a ‘settler’ society during a period of heightened immigration from new sources. In concluding, I review the broader implications of the fusion of aesthetic and anthropological forms of expertise that informed the development of the culture concept