Mark Cooper

The Political Economy of Electricity (eBook, PDF)

Progressive Capitalism and the Struggle to Build a Sustainable Power Sector

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Providing critical insights that will interest readers ranging from economists to environmentalists, policymakers, and politicians, this book analyzes the economics and technology trends involved in the dilemma of decarbonization and addresses why aggressive policy is required in a capitalist political economy to create a sea change away from fossil fuels. The environmental damage across the globe is a result of the success of capitalist industrialism-250 years of carbon pollution resulting from consumption of fossil fuels to drive the economy and the worldwide aspiration to ever-increasing levels of economic development. But capitalism has also produced the tools to solve the problems it has created in the form of a technological revolution in low-carbon renewables, distributed resources, and intelligent systems to integrate supply and demand. This book comprehensively examines the political economy of electricity and analyzes the challenge of transforming today's electricity sector to meet the dual goals of decarbonization and development expressed in the Paris Agreement. Author Mark Cooper defines the dilemma of development and decarbonization as the great challenge facing the electricity industry and documents how the economic resources costs of a 100 percent-renewable portfolio has declined to the point that decarbonization can pay for itself, making the low-carbon renewable technologies that enable desired environmental and public-health benefits an easy sell. He identifies the substantial benefit of increasing use of information, communications, and advanced control technologies; shows how targeted innovation could speed the transition by a decade or two and lower the overall cost of the transition by as much as half; and explains why the flexible, multi-stakeholder approach of the Paris Agreement is the correct approach.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 472
• Altersempfehlung: ab 7 Jahre
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. April 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781440853432
• Artikelnr.: 68183945

Autorenporträt

Mark Cooper is Senior Fellow for Economic Analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School.

Inhaltsangabe

Series Foreword PART I: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2
The Political Economy of the Paris Agreement, Technological Progress, and
the Decarbonization-Development Dilemma PART II: ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK
Chapter 3 The Technological Revolutions of Industrial Capitalism Chapter 4
The Innovation System of Progressive Capitalism PART III: THE COMPLEXITY OF
RESOURCE SELECTION IN A LOW-CARBON ELECTRICITY SECTOR Chapter 5 The Cost of
Electricity in a Low-Carbon Future Chapter 6 Energy Potential and
Institutional Resource Needs PART IV: CHALLENGES Chapter 7 Conceptualizing
Market Imperfections Chapter 8 The Nuclear War Against the Future PART V:
POLICY RESPONSES AND DECISIONMAKING TOOLS Chapter 9 The Urgent Need for
Policy Action: "Command but Not Control" Chapter 10 Decision Making and the
Terrain of Knowledge Chapter 11 Application of Multicriteria Portfolio
Analysis Epilogue: The Importance of Local Support for Global Climate
Policy If the United States Flip-Flops on the Paris Agreement Appendix I:
Democratic Equality and the Encyclical on Climate Change as Progressive
Capitalism Appendix II: Conceptual Specification of Market Imperfections
Appendix III: Empirical Evidence on Policy Directly Evaluating Price in the
Climate Change Analysis Notes Bibliography Index