Cars, capitalism and ecological crises: understanding systemic barriers to a sustainability transition in the German car industry

In the face of climate and ecological crises, it is vital that car use be reduced, while simultaneously shifting towards different powertrains and reducing the size, weight and energy demand of vehicles. This poses a challenge to the global car industry, as its business model historically centres on selling more and larger cars. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to examine the social-ecological limits of industrial restructuring in Germany. A narrative literature review through the lens of Marxian political economy sheds light on intertwined system-immanent barriers to achieving social and ecological sustainability at the sectoral level. Consequently, powertrain electrification is structured by technological dynamism, which fuels appropriation in the quest for metals and rare earths, with significant social and ecological disadvantages. This generates an impasse for the industry’s transition strategies. Understanding how capitalist tendencies generate interlaced and mutually re-enforcing barriers to achieving social-ecological sustainability is key to understanding why industrial transitions are insufficient from a social-ecological perspective

Your money or your life? The carbon-development paradox

The relationship between human health and well-being, energy use and carbon emissions is a foremost concern in sustainable development. If past advances in well-being have been accomplished only through increases in energy use, there may be significant trade-offs between achieving universal human development and mitigating climate change. We test the explanatory power of economic, dietary and modern energy factors in accounting for past improvements in life expectancy, using a simple novel method, functional dynamic decomposition. We elucidate the paradox that a strong correlation between emissions and human development at one point in time does not imply that their dynamics are coupled in the long term. Increases in primary energy and carbon emissions can account for only a quarter of improvements in life expectancy, but are closely tied to growth in income. Facing this carbon-development paradox requires prioritizing human well-being over economic growth

Progress towards high precision measurements on ultracold metastable hydrogen and trapping deuterium

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-136).(cont.) not achieve deuterium trapping through helium-surface cooling. It is proposed that buffer gas loading can be used to cryogenically cool and trap deuterium.Ultracold metastable trapped hydrogen can be used for precision measurements for comparison with QED calculations. In particular, Karshenboim and Ivanov [Eur. Phys. Jour. D 19, 13 (2002)] have proposed comparing the ground and first excited state hyperfine splittings of hydrogen as a high precision test of QED. An experiment to measure the 2S hyperfine splitting using a field-independent transition frequency in the 2S manifold of hydrogen is described. The relation between the transition frequency and the hyperfine splitting requires incorporating relativistic and bound state QED corrections to the electron and proton g-factors in the Breit-Rabi formula. Experimental methods for measuring the magnetic field of an ultracold hydrogen sample are developed for trap fields from 0 to 900 G. The temperature of the trapped sample at the field-independent point is a critical parameter, and is inferred from the IS - 2S lineshape. The detailed dependence of this lineshape on the trap geometry is examined. A search for the transition was undertaken, but no signal was observed. The systematics of the experiment are analyzed, and modifications for carrying out the experiment are proposed. In a separate study, the possibilities for trapping (never previously trapped) deuterium in the same cryogenic cell and magnetic trap used to trap hydrogen were investigated. Deuterium's behavior on a helium surface differs markedly from that of hydrogen due to its larger surface binding energy. We carried out a variety of studies of both hydrogen and deuterium during the trap-loading stage, working with both ⁴He and ³He surfaces. Introducing ³He in the cell decreases the surface binding energy of deuterium, and thus the rate of recombination on the cell walls; however, we couldby Julia K. Steinberger.Ph.D

Critical materials for infrastructure: local vs global properties

Introducing new technologies into infrastructure (wind turbines, electric vehicles, low-carbon materials and so on) often demands materials that are ‘critical’; their supply is likely to be disrupted owing to limited reserves, geopolitical instability, environmental issues and/or increasing demand. Non-critical materials may become critical if introduced into infrastructure, owing to its gigatonne scale. This potentially poses significant risk to the development of low-carbon infrastructure. Analysis of this risk has previously overlooked the relationship between the ‘local properties’ that determine the selection of a technology and the overall vulnerability of the system, a global property. Treating materials or components as elements having fixed properties overlooks optima within the local–global variable space that could be exploited to minimise vulnerability while maximising performance. In this study, a framework for such analysis is presented along with a preliminary measure of relative materials criticality by way of a case study (a wind turbine generator). Although introduction of critical materials (in this case, rare earth metals) enhances technical performance by up to an order of magnitude, the associated increase in criticality may be two or three orders of magnitude. Analysis at the materials and component levels produces different results; design decisions should be based on analysis at several levels

Enabling low-carbon development in poor countries

The challenges associated with achieving sustainable development goals and stabilizing the world’s climate cannot be solved without significant efforts by developing and newly-emerging countries. With respect to climate change mitigation, the main challenge for developing countries lies in avoiding future emissions and lock-ins into emission-intensive technologies, rather than reducing today’s emissions. While first best policy instruments like carbon prices could prevent increasing carbonization, those policies are often rejected by developing countries out of a concern for negative repercussions on development and long-term growth. In addition, policy environments in developing countries impose particular challenges for regulatory policy aiming to incentivize climate change mitigation and sustainable development. This chapter first discusses how climate policy could potentially interact with sustainable development and economic growth. It focuses, in particular, on the role of industrial sector development. The chapter then continues by discussing how effective policy could be designed, specifically taking developing country circumstances into account

Understanding China’s past and future energy demand: an exergy efficiency and decomposition analysis

There are very few useful work and exergy analysis studies for China, and fewer still that consider how the results inform drivers of past and future energy consumption. This is surprising: China is the world’s largest energy consumer, whilst exergy analysis provides a robust thermodynamic framework for analysing the technical efficiency of energy use. In response, we develop three novel sub-analyses. First we perform a long-term whole economy time-series exergy analysis for China (1971–2010). We find a 10-fold growth in China’s useful work since 1971, which is supplied by a 4-fold increase in primary energy coupled to a 2.5-fold gain in aggregate exergy conversion efficiency to useful work: from 5% to 12.5%. Second, using index decomposition we expose the key driver of efficiency growth as not ‘technological leapfrogging’ but structural change: i.e. increasing reliance on thermodynamically efficient (but very energy intensive) heavy industrial activities. Third, we extend our useful work analysis to estimate China’s future primary energy demand, and find values for 2030 that are significantly above mainstream projections

Combining energy efficiency measure approaches and occupancy patterns in building modelling in the UK residential context

The UK faces a significant retrofit challenge, especially with its housing stock of old, hard-to-treat solid walled dwellings. In this work, we investigate the delivery of heated thermal comfort with a lower energy demand through four types of energy efficiency interventions: passive system, conversion device, method of service control, and level of service demanded. These are compared for three distinct household occupancy patterns, corresponding to a working family, a working couple and a daytime-present couple. Energy efficiency measures are considered singly and in combination, to study whether multiple lower cost measures can achieve comparable savings to higher cost individual measures. Scenarios are simulated using engineering building modelling software TRNSYS with data taken from literature. Upgraded insulation of wall and roof resulted in highest savings in all occupancy scenarios, but comparable savings were calculated for reduced internal temperature and partial spatial heating in scenarios in which the house is not at maximum capacity. Zonal heating control is expected to achieve greatest savings for the working couple who had a flexible occupancy pattern. The results from this modelling work show the extent to which energy consumption depends on the appropriate matching between energy efficiency measures and occupant type