Political Feasibility of Low-Carbon Energy Transitions

Abstract

Transforming energy systems to avoid global warming above 1.5C is technically possible but is it politically feasible? The last IPCC report has moved beyond its historic focus on techno-economic feasibility of climate change mitigation and called for developing new approaches to assess feasibility in a dynamic and context-sensitive manner. However the IPCC efforts of assessing what they call ‘institutional’ and ‘socio-cultural’ feasibility have not resulted in definite conclusions of which, if any, of the climate mitigation measures in the energy sector are feasible. The problem may be the organisation of the assessment of feasibility into static ‘barriers’ and ‘enablers’ for different climate change mitigation solutions. This approach does not fully account for context sensitivity (what is politically feasible in one context may not be feasible in another one), for different capacities and motivations of actors (solutions not feasible for certain actors may be feasible for others) as well as for change over time (what is not feasible today may be feasible tomorrow). Thus there is a scientific challenge of developing an approach for rigorous assessment of political feasibility of low-carbon energy transitions compatible with attaining the climate goals laid out in the Paris agreement. This panel assembles contributions which propose systematic methods to assess political feasibility of ongoing and future low-carbon energy transitions or report empirical research which throws light on where the political feasibility frontier for specific low-carbon energy transitions lies.

Title	Details
Political Feasibility of Energy Transitions: Assessment Framework and Case-Studies	View Paper Details
Re-Visiting Carbon Lock-In in Energy Regimes: The Persistence of Coal Power in Japan	View Paper Details
Socio-Political Feasibility of Rapid Expansion of Renewable Electricity	View Paper Details
The Effect of Decentralization on Wind Energy Authorization Procedures Across Europe	View Paper Details
The cost of phasing out coal – Quantifying and comparing compensation costs of coal phase-out policies to governments	View Paper Details