CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Suzuki, Masahiro |
|---|---|
| Title | Political Acceleration in Energy Transitions: Historical Interventions and Their Outcomes in the G7 and the EU, compared to Net-Zero Targets |
| Summary | Avoiding dangerous climate change requires a significant political acceleration in energy transitions, where fossil fuels must be replaced by low-carbon technologies within the next decades. Are there historical precedents for such acceleration? Are recent transitions faster with climate policies? Existing studies do not answer these questions due to their analysis being too broad, emphasising the slowness of global transition, or too narrow, highlighting recent short-term changes in specific countries without assessing their significance compared to historical experiences or climate target requirements. Against this backdrop, this dissertation develops a middle-range methodology with the typology of energy transitions to systematically categorise, trace, and compare energy transitions towards decarbonisation across countries and time-periods. I apply this methodology to comparatively examine the historical and planned transitions in the electricity sector in the G7 and the EU, where political acceleration is expected, given their leadership in decarbonisation and climate policies. I compare this historical analysis with climate target requirements to elucidate the challenges to keeping the global temperature increase below 1.5C. I find that, throughout the last six decades, electricity transitions in the G7 and the EU have been primarily driven by the changes in electricity demand, and the developments under climate policies since 1990 have not been accelerated in terms of the growth of low-carbon electricity or the decline of fossil fuels beyond historical trends. Moreover, none of these countries have yet empirically demonstrated or even planned the rates of acceleration necessary to achieve 1.5C. In other words, in contrast to the claim in the literature, there has been no ‘successful’ case of transitions comparable with the magnitude of acceleration required to mitigate climate change. Meeting the 1.5C target, therefore, requires radically different energy transitions in the future with the unprecedented level of political acceleration. The middle-range approach developed in this dissertation can be applied to track future progress in the G7 and the EU and analyse other sectors and countries. Taking stock of empirical evidence and advancing discussions on what then needs to be done is more warranted. |
| Supervisor | Cherp, Aleh |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/suzuki_masahiro@.pdf |
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