Reviewed by: Energy & Ethics: Justice and the Global Energy Challenge by Benjamin K. Sovacool Richard Wolfson (bio) Energy & Ethics: Justice and the Global Energy Challenge. By Benjamin K. Sovacool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xxii+ 278. $100/$29. Benjamin Sovacool is director of the Danish Center for Energy Technology, professor of social sciences at Aarhus University, and visiting associate professor of law at Vermont Law School. In Energy & Ethics he brings his considerable experience with the social science and humanitarian aspects of energy to bear on contemporary energy issues and policy. Sovacool’s introductory chapter gives an overview of human energy usage, followed by a framework of eight key principles of energy justice. Eight chapters then focus on each of the key principles, and a concluding chapter presents survey results quantifying perceived importance of the principles. Sovacool’s principles include availability, affordability, due process, information, prudence, intergenerational equity (oddly named, since there doesn’t seem to be much about it that’s intergenerational), intragenerational equity (which maybe should have been intergenerational, because this one deals with obligations to future generations), and responsibility. The eight separate chapters dealing with these principles are nicely constructed around a common formula: Each begins with a description of a global energy issue that relates to the principle, giving several specific instances. The chapter then focuses on a case study of a governmental, NGO, or international policy that addresses the issue and, specifically, its environmental justice implications. These range from a Danish energy policy that promoted rapid growth of renewables and a nearly 30 percent decline in energy intensity, to the World Bank’s Inspection Panel that helps ensure the bank’s projects adhere to environmental justice standards, to the impressive effort to bring solar electricity to off-grid villages in Bangladesh, to the Yasuní-ITT initiative that leaves undeveloped the oil deposits beneath an Ecuadorian national park in return for international payments amounting to half the oil’s market value. The other four are equally notable, and the reader may well end the description of each case in a state of optimism about the world’s ability to make progress in environmental justice. But Sovacool doesn’t leave it there. He wraps up each case study with a careful accounting of the practical outcomes and the pros and cons of the policy being described, and ends with a more balanced assessment of environmental-justice progress. Taken together, though, the eight case studies provide an inspiring look at what humankind might do, in a larger context, to assert environmental justice on the planetary scale. Sovacool writes with the authority of an expert, has amassed an impressive list of references, and makes his points quantitatively with numerous graphs and tables. Sometimes, though, it feels like he’s grabbing for every citation, table, and statistic relevant to the immediate discussion—even [End Page 569] when cited conclusions are contradictory or inconsistent. Much of the tabular data presented could have benefited from considerable editing; does the reader really gain much, for example, from Sovacool’s Table 6.3—an eight-column, two-page table projecting São Tomé e Principe’s oil flows by individual year from 2012 to 2050? Or the nearly full-page Table 7.7 showing the number of solar home systems installed in Bangladesh by every one of the thirty-three organizations doing such installations—especially when they’re listed by obscure acronyms, not all of which are in Sovacool’s otherwise commendable glossary of acronyms? More useful are some of the qualitative tables, including Table 10.1 summarizing the eight principles, the challenges they pose, suggested solutions, and the case studies that exemplify those solutions. As a scientist, this reviewer is particularly attuned to clarity of presentation in technical and quantitative matters. Here Sovacool gets mixed reviews. On several occasions he makes the unfortunate but all-too-common mistake of confusing energy (the “stuff”) with power (the rate at which we use that “stuff”). He lumps uranium with the fossil fuels, saying all took some two billion years to accumulate—too low by a factor of three or more for uranium and too high by a factor of ten for fossil...
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Oct 12, 2016
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