Category: Energy

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Sustainability as a Key Idea informing Social Practice and Order

tl;dr: Sustainability is a social phenomenon of political, economic and ethical struggles to change social practices towards more ecological and societal equity with care.

Why on Earth another scholarly book, an introduction even, on Sustainability? Because most introductions focus on a list of definitions, principles, and cases for Sustainability and sustainable development. They present a panopticum of »everything sustainable« but lack the focus on its social and political nature. This is often reserved for more advanced texts but we – Thomas Pfister, Martin Schweighofer, and I – were deeply convinced that you have to introduce Sustainability as essentially political and thus essentially contested.
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Energy a-changing

The energy system we built over the last 100 years or so is in for a big change. In fact, the change looks close to a complete restart of the way we produce and distribute electricity for our everyday purposes. The obvious role model and primary example is Germany’s Energiewende, the transition of the entire German energy system away from coal and nuclear towards renewables. The nature of the Energiewende until now is that of a bottom-up, decentralized change strengthened by the German Renewable Energy Act set up in 2000.… Read more

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Nuclear Energy, Sustainable Energy?

Recently, German environmental minister, Norbert Röttgen, made some interesting remarks on the remaining operationg time of Germany’s nuclear power plants. After the Schröder-Fischer government neogiated a fade-out of nuclear power until 2022, the newly elected center-right government of Merkel-Westerwelle proposed an extension for nuclear industry between 10 and 20 years beyond that date. The argument was, that renewables needed that extra time to become a susbstantial part of German energy supply. Röttgen now made it clear, that nuclear energy’s time will be up when renewables will reach about a share of 40% in Germany’s energy supply.… Read more