Mobility justice in low carbon energy transitions

Mobility systems raise multiple questions of justice. Work on mobility justice and policy often treats different elements of the debate separately, for example focussing on environmental justice or accessibility. This is problematic as it can privilege policy solutions without a full view of the winners and losers and the values implicit in that. Using analysis of current policy, we investigate how mobility justice can reconcile its different components, and find two major consequences. First, is doubt about the justice of the existing policy approach which tries to tackle transport pollution primarily through a shift to low emission vehicles. This approach privileges those with access to private vehicles and further privileges certain sets of activities. Second is a need to reassess which basic normative ideas should be applied in mobility justice. Work on mobility justice has tended to appeal to conceptions of justice concerned with access to resources including resources enabling mobility. These conceptions say little about how resources should be used. We show that avoiding stark inequalities means collectively thinking about how resources are used, about how we value activities involving mobility, and about what sorts of goods and services we create

Barriers of solar energy uptake and the potential for mitigation solutions in Barbados

Understanding the barriers that inhibit the deployment of renewable energy technologies to achieve long-term reductions in carbon emissions from the use of fossil fuels is paramount to Barbados. Although there are targets towards renewable energy (solar, wind, biomass, geothermal) uptake, the share of these technologies in the energy mix does not exist in Barbados due to the total dependence on fossil fuels. In this paper, a review of potential challenges and the main problems for deployment of alternative energy sources is presented. Through interviews, questionnaires with a focus group of key personnel’s, the paper documents the lack of renewable energy sources (with emphasis on solar energy) as one of the main alternatives to meet the carbon emission targets set by the country. The barriers and challenges facing the implementation of solar energy deployment have been clarified. From the results, it is evident that significant policy barriers still exist at the country level, which has reduced the effectiveness of a concerted national effort to deploy renewables. The current policy landscape which benefits from fossil fuel imports, the lack of technical know-how and the lack of research and development in the renewable energy space are amongst the key barriers identified. The paper also outlines the key policy’s frameworks, regulatory environment and the lack of incentives, which encompasses the renewable energy sector, and presents a critical analysis of the barriers faced by the industry. A mitigation framework is proposed to bridge the gap of solar energy (renewable energy) deployment

Challenges towards renewable energy : an exploratory study from the Arabian Gulf region

Considering the importance of energy for social and economic development, access to clean, affordable and reliable energy has been adopted as one of the United Nations sustainable development goals that all countries aim to achieve by 2030. However, much of the world's energy is still produced from fossil fuels and thus the progress towards clean and renewable energy is slow. This paper explores the key challenges towards renewable energy in Gulf Cooperation Council countries blessed with plenty of oil and gas reserves. The key challenges identified through literature review were ranked using a quantitative approach through the data collected from a selective sample across the six countries. These challenges in order of importance were found to be policies and regulations, manpower experience and competencies, renewable energy education, public awareness, costs and incentives for renewable energy and government commitment. The findings could be helpful to decision makers and government organisations in the region to develop strategies to overcome these identified challenges

Comprehensive life cycle assessment by transferring of preventative costs in the supply chain of products. A first draft of the Oiconomy system

A major part of global unsustainability is embedded in consumption and the processes involved in the lifecycle of products, but there is currently no comprehensive and objective method for product sustainability measurement, including both environmental and social issues. This requires a life cycle approach. Current life cycle assessment (LCA) systems, developed to compare environmental performance of products and production alternatives, have many shortcomings if used to comprehensively measure product sustainability. The most important shortcomings are: the lack of a measuring standard, the top-down approach, the weighting of different issues, the very laborious procedures of addressing specific supply chains, limitation to environmental aspects, the very complex nature of impact based data, and difficult database maintenance. This article presents a new type of “bottom-up” and “product-specific LCA” for the comprehensive measurement of the hidden environmental and social costs of products. Every supply chain actor collects the upstream supply chain hidden costs, calculates and adds its own contribution and transfers the result to the next link by means of a monetary unit, the “Eco Social Cost Unit” (ESCU). Every ESCU allocation is the product of a quantitative factor for an issue and a price factor. The uniform measurement of the quantitative factor, their transfer through the supply chain, and the creation of a self learning database of the price factors is achieved by means of a standard. The price factor represents the marginal preventative costs for the relative impact category of sustainability issues. For initial determination of the price factor this article extends the EcoCost/Value ratio system, developed by Vogtländer et al., to social issues, discusses implications of the system, its principles, advantages, research challenges and limitations and proposes system boundaries for application of the system and future research contributions to the project