The responses of older adults to smart energy monitors

By 2020, every UK household has the option to have a Smart Energy Monitor (SEM) installed, displaying electricity consumption monetarily. The success of the £11 billion scheme in enabling people to reduce energy consumption is questioned amongst researchers and relatively little is known about older adults' (60 + years) responses to SEMs. This paper explores older adult responses to SEM feedback and compares them to those of younger-middle aged adults (25–59 years). A qualitative, interpretative methodology was used with participants from 20 households recording their SEM experiences during one month through a diary, and post-study semi-structured interview allowing methodological triangulation. Data analysis indicated that older adults were generally more aware of their energy use pre-SEM and practiced energy saving behaviours learnt from upbringing. This appeared to result in negligible positive benefits and low engagement with the device. Other limiting factors included lack of technical skills and confidence, and the risk of losing the comfort and convenience of using electrical appliances. The device also triggered negative emotions and depression amongst some older adults surrounding electricity usage, potentially leading to dangerously cold homes. Consequently, the scheme's appropriateness is questioned, especially for older adults, and improvements are suggested for SEMs and the scheme

The pore space scramble:challenges and opportunities for subsurface governance

There is a rich literature on environmental governance that provides critiques and conceptual tools on how various environmental 'arenas' or overlapping global systems should be governed eg. climate, energy, oceans (Cherp et al., 2011, Berkes, 2006, Underdal, 2010). In this paper we argue that the geological subsurface should be considered as a new arena for governance in its own right. The arguments for this are presented by considering current and future challenges the subsurface will face as its utilisation evolves and intensifies, particularly in the context of both energy security and low carbon energy. Three main challenges are highlighted; ownership, access and long term stewardship. These challenges are presented using the illustrative context of subsurface pore space for the long term storage of CO2 from Carbon Capture (CCS). This is presented in the UK context but ultimately has implication for global subsurface governance going forward

Towards a cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence by negative emissions technologies (NETs)

This paper offers a new theoretical perspective on the risk that geoengineering interventions might deter or delay mitigation (previously typically described as moral hazard). Drawing on a brief review of mitigation deterrence (MD) in solar geoengineering, it suggests a novel analytical viewpoint going beyond and contrasting with the methodological individualist, managerialist and economist analyses common in the literature. Three distinct registers to assist identification and interpretation of situations and processes through which MD might arise are elaborated and compared. The paper shows that moving from a realist register via a cultural register to a cultural political economy register, makes it clearer how and why misperceived substitutability (between negative emissions technologies (NETs) and mitigation) and narrow climate policy goals matter for MD. We have also identified several plausible mechanisms for MD under a neoliberal political regime. The paper argues that MD cannot be overcome simply by better informing decision makers (the ‘realist’ response), or even by opening up the standard techno-economic framing of climate change and our responses (the ‘cultural’ response). The paper also concludes that the entire political regime that has evolved alongside specific economic interests is implicated in MD, and that the likelihood and significance of MD probably remain underappreciated and understudied

Promises of climate engineering after neoliberalism

The apparent, if uncertain, rejection of neoliberalism manifested by the election of Donald Trump in the US (alongside the slim, but clear majority for Brexit in the UK, and a growing racist and protectionist nationalism across Europe) necessitates renewed analysis of the future of both promises of technical fixes to climate change, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) (in this chapter collectively referred to as climate engineering), and the potential future hegemonic political regimes that may replace neoliberalism. Drawing on a cultural political economy analysis of the co-evolution of political regimes and promises of technical fixes to climate change (Markusson et al. 2017), we here discuss what the current moment of radical destabilisation might augur. The election of Trump indicates a potential unsettling of an established dynamic whereby promises of technical fixes to climate change co-evolved with, and imperfectly supported, the neoliberal power regime and its preferred market-based solutions to the climate change problem. We identify two key and interacting dialectics, between neoliberalism and illiberalism, and between continued neoliberal (but illiberally challenged) US hegemony and budding China-centred liberalism 2.0. Both these dialectics appear conducive to prolonged attention to the promise of climate engineering, as talk and research, or even as limited deployment

The political economy of technical fixes:the (mis)alignment of clean fossil and political regimes

This paper argues that existing critiques of technical fixes are unable to explain our simultaneous enamourment and distrust with technical fixes, and that to do so, we need a political economy analysis. We develop a critical, theoretically grounded conceptualisation of technical fixes as imagined defensive spatio-temporal fixes of specific political economic regimes, and apply it to the case of geoengineering, or ‘clean fossil’, as an attempted technical fix of the climate change problem. We map the promises of clean fossil as proposed solutions to the problem of climate change in discrete episodes since the 1960s. The paper shows that clean fossil promises have been surprisingly poorly aligned with the neoliberal regime, and explains how they have been moderately stable due to those misalignments. We also show that different liberal capitalisms could be supported by different clean fossil technologies, but also that illiberal or more egalitarian regimes remain possible alongside particular, perhaps radically re-envisioned, versions of clean fossil. Ambivalence towards clean fossil technical fix promises is intelligible, given the inherent instability of their co-evolution with neoliberalism and future political regimes

Technological optimism in climate mitigation:the case of carbon capture and storage

This chapter explores and critiques technological optimism and the socio-political appeal of technological fixes with regard to energy and climate mitigation. The term ‘technical fix’ is frequently used by academics and activists to describe the application of a technological solution to a social problem, where a reductive problem definition leads to only a partial and superficial solution. As the transition to lower-carbon energy systems proceeds, technological change, rather than social change, is consistently prioritized in climate policy discourse, despite well-established recognition of cultural and institutional changes involved in reducing fossil fuel reliance. The history of development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies provides an illustrative example of technological optimism in climate mitigation. The political appeal of CCS as a prominent climate change mitigation approach showcases the tendency toward technological optimism and how promises of technological fixes have dominated political discourse surrounding climate mitigation

Contrasting medium and genre on Wikipedia to open up the dominating definition and classification of geoengineering

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate.We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric solar radiation management rather than land-based carbon dioxide removal type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for solar radiation management type technologies more than for land-based carbon dioxide removal ones. The article also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualising tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the article contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a technology