• Energy Research

Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use the UK shale gas case to explore how energy democracy themes are used and countered in the framing strategies of discourse coalitions in national political sites. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which these national political sites and discursive strategies are effective as institutions and practices through which to achieve energy democracy. We achieve this through an analysis of the success of the UK anti- and pro-shale gas development discourse coalitions in recruiting national political figures and influencing thinking and decision-making in parliament. In doing so, we bring together the literatures on discourse coalitions and energy democracy. We conclude with implications for both national policy as well as critical inquiry into environmental politics.

The energy efficiency and consumption of mobile networks have received increasing attention from academics and industry in recent years. This has been provoked by rapid increases in mobile data traffic and projected further rapid increases over the next decade. As a result, dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of mobile networks are required to ensure that future traffic levels are both environmentally and economically sustainable. In this context, a good deal of research has focused on technologies and strategies that can improve the energy efficiency of 5G and future mobile networks more broadly. However, existing reviews in the field of green or sustainable mobile communications on the topic of the energy use implications of 5G overlook a number of issues that broader literatures on the energy use impacts of ICTs suggest could be significant. Addressing this gap, we conduct a literature review to examine whole network level assessments of the operational energy use implications of 5G, the embodied energy use associated with 5G, and indirect effects associated with 5G-driven changes in user behaviour and patterns of consumption and production in other sectors of the economy. In general, we find that these issues and their energy use implications have received insufficient attention in publicly available studies on the energy use impacts of 5G.

We set out to study how the 'promise of green 5G' is produced and circulated. We conducted an analysis of a UK-focused corpus of documents that represent key sites through which the promise of green 5G is produced, circulated and challenged. By the promise of green 5G we refer to an emerging, overarching, dominant expectation that 5G will produce positive environmental sustainability benefits of various kinds. We employed an analytical approach informed by the sociology of expectations and the concept of technoscientific promises. We asked: what are the particular contents of this promise (i.e. the more specific promises and expectations it is built upon), how do ‘enactors’ seek to boost its legitimacy and credibility, what activities are involved in its production and circulation and what are its present-day material effects, does the promise exclude or overlook alternative options, and is it challenged? We pursued these aims and questions through a document analysis of a diverse corpus (n=260) comprised of UK newspaper articles and newswire results, and reports and webpage content from industry, standardisation bodies and research consortia.

Abstract It is critical to ensure climate and energy policies are just, equitable and beneficial for communities, both to sustain public support for decarbonisation and address multifaceted societal challenges. Our objective in this article is to examine the diverse social outcomes that have resulted from climate policies, in varying contexts worldwide, over the past few decades. We review 203 ex-post climate policy assessments that analyse social outcomes in the literature. We systematically and comprehensively map out this work, identifying articles on carbon, energy and transport taxes, feed-in-tariffs, subsidies, direct procurement policies, large renewable deployment projects, and other regulatory and market-based interventions. We code each article in terms of their studied social outcomes and effects, with a focus on electricity access, energy affordability, community cohesion, employment, distributional and equity issues, livelihoods and poverty, procedural justice, subjective well-being and drudgery. Our analysis finds that climate and energy policies often fall short of delivering positive social outcomes. Nonetheless, across country contexts and policy types there are manifold examples of climate policymaking that does deliver on both social and climate goals. This requires attending to distributive and procedural justice in policy design, and making use of appropriate mechanisms to ensure that policy costs and benefits are fairly shared. We emphasize the need to further advance ex-post policy assessments and learn about what policies work for a just transition.

In January 2014, then British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that his government was ‘Going all out for Shale.’ In November 2019, during an election campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Government imposed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing bringing to a halt industry hopes of developing shale gas in the UK. This paper explores what happened, integrating research employing a mixed methods research design including a review of the literature, expert interviews, household interviews, a series of nationally representative and local surveys, and a content analysis of political testimony. It starts with a brief history of the shale gas debate in the UK and social science research on the issue. It then examines the UK's Shale Gas landscape, and in particular energy policy failure, by considering three issues: first, the framing of the shale gas debate in the national Parliament, exploring the arguments for and against it; second, changing public perceptions and attitudes towards shale gas development; and third, the attitudes and lived experiences of the communities most affected by shale gas exploration activities. These three dimensions are combined to explain the UK Government's shale gas failure to-date. The paper concludes by identifying the lessons learnt from the Government's initial policy failure, both in relation to further shale gas exploration, but also for other technologies required for a future Net-Zero energy system.