Energy, Sustainability and Society最新文献

Background

For decades, multinational fossil fuel companies have strategically promoted discourses to obstruct climate action. Initially, the fossil fuel industry publicized communications that denied the role of fossil fuels in climate destabilization. Recently, however, they have advanced nuanced messages to delay climate action and policy. As the climate crisis worsens and calls to phase out fossil fuels intensify, research into the industry has revealed pervasive “greenwashing” and a discrepancy between external messaging on renewable energy and internal operational positions. Corporate annual reports, which are public-facing communications, offer insights into how companies align their internal strategy with their external messaging. Based on a textual analysis of the annual reports of four of the largest fossil fuel companies (ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies), this research compares how companies have adapted their communication strategies about renewable energy between 2016 and 2022.

Results

The study reveals that each company focuses on different renewable energy technologies and highlights a variety of positive and negative messages about renewable energy. Since 2016, positive messaging about renewable energy has increased, including narratives on economic benefits, sustainable development, climate action, and strategic business benefits. Negative messaging, including mentions of variable energy intensity, potential business risks, and reductions in companies’ renewable energy businesses, constitutes a small yet consistent part of the communications. This combination of sentiments highlights the benefits of renewable energy while simultaneously undermining the positives with nuanced and negative messages about renewable energy. By promoting fossil fuels as a partner to renewable energy, corporate messages link renewable energy to fossil fuels, reinforcing discourses that slow down the energy transition and expand fossil fuel production with renewable energy development.

Conclusions

Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the annual reports of fossil fuel companies consistently employed a communication strategy of mixed-sentiment messages that link renewable energy to fossil fuels, particularly fossil gas (i.e., commonly known as natural gas). In this way, companies created and employed doublespeak and delay tactics, obscuring the need to phase out fossil fuels to achieve global climate and sustainability goals.

Background

The UN Agenda 2030 was approved unanimously by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 as the framework to guide humanity towards sustainable development. Assessing the interactions between the sustainable development goals (SDGs) has emerged as an important multidisciplinary research field, acknowledged both in official UN documentation and scholarly work. The earliest attempts at capturing SDG interlinkages began through qualitative frameworks in 2015 and continue unabated a decade later. Yet, the methodologies utilized for analyzing the SDG interactions have increased in conceptual diversity and are scattered across research domains.

Main text

In our article, we conducted a systematic review and detailed analysis of the quantitative methods used in the study of SDG interlinkages. Our findings indicate that the scientific community continues to explore the multifaceted interpretations of the 2030 Agenda. The implications of these diverse conceptualizations of SDG interlinkages are inconsistent terminology as well as multiple and incomparable operationalization efforts. A few recent frameworks break new paths towards consistent interpretations of interlinkages, but a research gap remains in operationalizing these enhanced methods.

Conclusions

The investigation of SDG interlinkages continues to occur through diverse qualitative and quantitative approaches and does not show signs of consolidation into more unified and widely applicable methods. We conclude that, rather than formulating new and increasingly sophisticated methodologies, a consistent approach in interlinkage research, driven by rigorous theoretical principles and causality, should be prioritized.

Background

Various actors use Instagram to mobilize for their causes and communicate strategically in terms of their interests in the energy transition. Against this background, the aim of this study is to analyze how the energy transition is framed on Instagram, that is, which aspects are highlighted by specific actor groups. Furthermore, the researchers study the visual representations of the energy transition on Instagram, especially the text–image relationship.

Methods

To answer the research questions, a quantitative content analysis of 907 Instagram posts dealing with the energy transition posted between January 5 and January 16, 2022, was conducted.

Results

The results of this study show that communication about the energy transition on Instagram is carried out by a multitude of actor groups, especially economic actors. Communication about renewable energy on Instagram is generally optimistic and in support of the energy transition.

Conclusions

Overall, this study’s results indicate a lively interest in renewable energies on Instagram. This is also interesting regarding future communication activities, as the group of young users of Instagram can be encouraged to act by suggesting concrete action alternatives via which everyone can contribute to a fast and successful energy transition.

Background

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of electricity consumption requires temporally resolved emission factors. Two established metrics are the Average Emission Factor (AEF), allocating total system impacts to consumed electricity, and the Marginal Emission Factor (MEF), reflecting the response of marginal generation. Previous studies in regard to Germany (e.g. Seckinger & Radgen) provided hourly AEFs but focused mainly on the Global Warming Potential (GWP) and represented storage using constant annual discharge factors, neglecting round-trip losses and construction-related (upstream) emissions. This study addresses these limitations by proposing an extended electricity impact model that treats storage as an impact storage carrying time-varying charging impacts and allocates storage construction impacts to discharge cycles.

Methods

The reference model by Seckinger et al. and the new approach are applied to a consistent hourly dataset for Germany covering 2020–2070. Hourly AEFs and MEFs are calculated for GWP, AP, EP(_{fw}), ODP, POCP, ADPF, and ADPE. The new model accounts for storage round-trip efficiencies and consumption-based accounting of imports, exports, and charging. It also allocates construction impacts to discharge events using a cycle-based approach linked to the state-of-charge distribution. The results are compared with those achieved by existing studies, and a sensitivity analysis evaluates key assumptions on storage construction and power plant characterization factors.

Results

The new model yielded higher hourly emission factors than that from Seckinger & Radgen, particularly during periods of high storage activity. Differences increased over time with rising storage deployment and are primarily driven by construction-related impacts, while hourly attribution introduces additional temporal variability. Across most impact categories, the refined storage representation leaded to higher average and marginal emission factors in storage-rich scenarios. In contrast to GWP and several other categories, ADPE increased over time, indicating a shift in environmental burdens toward non-fossil resource use as renewable generation and storage expand.

Conclusions

Energy storage representation strongly influences time-dependent electricity emission factors, especially in future systems with high storage penetration. Although differences between modeling approaches are small in early years, explicitly accounting for time-varying charging impacts and storage construction emissions improves accuracy and avoids systematic underestimation of future electricity footprints. Extending dynamic LCA beyond operational emissions is therefore essential to capture emerging trade-offs in highly renewable electricity systems.

Background

Energy poverty remains an urgent social and economic challenge, exacerbated by rising energy costs, climate change, and inequalities in access to renewable technologies. Renewable energy communities (RECs) offer a promising approach that combines local energy production, democratic participation, and shared benefits, with the potential to reduce costs and improve energy access for vulnerable households. However, their effectiveness depends on economic viability, equitable distribution of benefits, regulatory support, and active community involvement. This study is relevant in that it assesses the viability, critical success factors, and benefit-sharing mechanisms of a photovoltaic REC, providing insights into how such models can foster sustainable, inclusive, and socially cohesive energy transitions.

Results

The analysis assesses the profitability of an 80 kW photovoltaic system for a REC located in Northern Italy. The project’s profitability ranges from 2556 to 5791 €/kW for self-consumption levels of 30% to 70%. Even without incentives, the investment remains economically sustainable, with profits ranging from 1693 to 3777 €/kW. Profitability is strongly influenced by self-consumption, but the incentive also makes the project much more attractive to prosumers. Sensitivity, scenario, and risk analyses confirm the project’s robustness with respect to other variables, including energy purchase and sale prices, investment costs, and the opportunity cost of capital. A new methodology for distributing benefits across stakeholder categories (producers, consumers, households in energy poverty, territorial redevelopment, and the State) is proposed, also including ESCOs as facilitators and catalysts for RECs.

Conclusions

RECs can be a tool for energy transition, capable of generating economic and social benefits even without government incentives in a mature photovoltaic market. However, incentives significantly enhance the project’s economic viability and promote broader participation in the creation of these communities. From a policy perspective, this suggests a shift from direct subsidies to creating conditions conducive to community development, through programs that protect vulnerable families and aim to balance the needs of all stakeholders. From a managerial point of view, profitability depends above all on optimising self-consumption, while the equitable distribution of benefits among stakeholders strengthens legitimacy, fairness, and social cohesion.

Background

The aim of the energy policy proclaimed by all German federal governments since the Fukushima incident of 2011 is a fundamental transformation of the national energy system towards renewable (excluding nuclear) energies. However, since German energy policy is embedded into a European multilevel governance system, not only national but also European forces shape the German Energiewende.

Main text

By analysing the complex political and legal interlinkages, this study identifies fits and misfits between national and European policy initiatives in functionally related energy fields. First, it finds broad coherence between the EU and German energy transition objectives. Objectives deviate in one area, the phase-out of nuclear power in Germany which is not paralleled at the EU level. Secondly, it observes more extensive misfits around the preferred policy instruments that have pressured Germany to change. This concerns instruments tied to the support of renewable energy and the operation of electricity networks in support of the transition. Here, the German policy approach saw a misfit with internal energy market regulations in the EU.

Conclusions

Whereas European adaptation pressure caused a shift in the German renewable energy support policy, resulting in a slowdown in the expansion of renewable energies, EU pressure to end coal subsidies helped accelerate the phase-out of coal in Germany.

Background

The clean energy transition required for the decarbonisation of societies to meet climate, energy and sustainability goals make policymakers targets for broad business and non-business advocacy, ensuring that their often-conflicting interests are protected or considered in public policies. The concept of policy entrepreneurs foregrounds the role of agency in understanding such advocacy acts. This paper aims to further the understanding of policy entrepreneurship by comparing strategies used by policy entrepreneurs from various social spheres, who advocate policy change or the status quo, in four longitudinal cases related to EU energy and climate policy from 2011 to 2023.

Results

Policy entrepreneurship was mainly of a cultural-institutional nature, aiming at altering or diffusing people’s perceptions, beliefs, norms and cognitive frameworks, worldviews, or institutional logics. However, the European Commission’s (EC) actions also included structural entrepreneurship, aiming at overcoming structural barriers to enhance governance influence by altering the distribution of formal authority and factual and scientific information. The motives of policy entrepreneurs in the four cases differ, but strategies do not differ significantly between actors from the public, private and civic spheres of society. However, the results indicate that civil society policy entrepreneurs focus on building broader coalitions, than do public and private sector entrepreneurs. There is no indication that policy entrepreneurs from a certain sector are more successful than others in setting the agenda, changing the perceptions of policy actors, or influencing actual policy change.

Conclusions

It is concluded that policy entrepreneurs advocating policy change are more active and use more elaborate strategies than policy entrepreneurs advocating the status quo. They are also more successful in influencing policy outcomes. The EC was the only policy entrepreneur using structural entrepreneurship, but other policy entrepreneurs were also found to act in non-transparent ways, hiding who takes decisions. The EC acts to expand its reach into areas where the EU holds no or limited legal competence according to the Treaty of the EU. In all, this comes with democratic deficits related to accountability and legitimacy and raises concerns about technocratisation of EU policy processes. These tendencies should be combated to reinstate and reinforce the position and powers of both national and European legislators in formally making important decisions that impact the lives of European citizens and sustainability in the EU.

Background

Many of the problems currently facing our societies are long-term. Long-term problems are complex, often large-scale, and may require considerable planning and resources to avert undesirable outcomes in the (far) future. Consider issues such as climate change, nuclear waste disposal, and the sustainable management of ecosystems. The ability of a society to adequately address the most relevant problems depends on appropriate long-term governance, i.e., strategic, consistent, and coherent governance over an extended period of time.

Main text

Serious obstacles are inherent in long-term governance. These include short election cycles, intergenerational trade-offs, and the uncertainties involved in long-term decision-making. Liberal democracies appear to encounter difficulties in providing adequate responses to pertinent long-term issues, such as climate change, due to the institutions’ current design, which primarily focuses on safeguarding the interests of the present generation.

Conclusions

This paper introduces long-term governance as a distinct philosophical topic by defining it in relation to a novel perspective on long-term challenges. The paper defends an obligation to engage in long-term governance based on the basic rights of those who do not yet vote. This includes, in particular, an obligation to engage in research into long-term governance institutions.

Background

The target of the Swedish climate policy framework is to reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2045, implying large transformations of the current industry, energy and transport sector. Electric vehicles, wind and solar power, biomass, carbon capture and storage, climate-neutral concrete and green hydrogen are considered key technologies in the Swedish climate transition. There is, however, a growing need to identify how such technologies impact the broader scope of sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to determine the positive and negative effects of the large-scale implementation of key technologies on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Additionally, the aim of this study is to allocate the effects as domestic or international spillovers. The study is based on expert opinions elicited from workshops in which the effects of each key technology on the SDGs were addressed. The workshop results were qualitatively analyzed to construct causal relationships and compared against published literature to gain empirical support.

Results

This study identified impacts for 11 out of the 17 SDGs. More than half of the impacts in Sweden were positive, whereas most negative impacts were identified as international spillovers. Positive impacts in Sweden are foremost linked to economic growth and job creation as well as sustainable industrialization and innovation. Internationally, negative spillover impacts mainly stem from mineral extraction, with consequences for human health, environmental degradation, local democracy and corruption.

Conclusions

The multifaceted linkages between climate mitigation efforts and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are highlighted in this study, illustrating a need for policy coherence. Large-scale implementation of key technologies will result in more positive than negative impacts in the domestic context, reinforcing the Swedish implementation of the SDGs. However, the opposite is true for international spillovers, where the Swedish climate transition might hamper the fulfillment of specific SDGs in other countries. To achieve a sustainable climate transition, a holistic view incorporating all the SDGs and the core principle of “Leaving No One Behind” needs to be employed. The next steps could include stakeholders in policy and industry to identify actions and initiate collaborative approaches to strengthen positive and minimize negative impacts from climate mitigation efforts on the SDGs.