This chapter presents the conceptual framework of the book that builds upon several strands of literature: socio-technical systems, institutional and political change, and securitisation. Drawn from existing literature the authors argue that several key factors account for national climate and energy policies, and explain the extent of the region’s climate and energy policy homogeneity and heterogeneity. Such an approach enables the book to identify the differences between individual CEE countries – for instance, the role of ideas can be used to describe the different understandings of what constitutes energy security issues, and the solutions to these. Some but certainly not all countries in the region securitise this issue (e.g., Lithuania and Poland) and frame energy security as a national security challenge, highlighting the foreign policy implications of climate and energy policy and influencing both domestic and EU policy choices.

The world needs to transition to clean energy. But this massive transformation runs up against political obstacles. Local governments, national political parties, and corporations are obstructing the clean energy transition. And yet there is bipartisan support for communities on the front lines of the energy transition to receive compensation and investment. This chapter introduces the idea that these policies face credibility challenges and questions about local economic benefits. Next, we connect this discussion around the climate impasse with earlier economic transitions due to globalization, automation, national parks, and environmental protections. Finally, we argue that top-down approaches miss these credibility concerns. Instead, a bottom-up process of listening to impacted communities is crucial to unlock the climate impasse.

Two preliminaries: US experience points to the unprecedented challenge of the rapid, drastic energy transition we face, and the labor needed to accomplish it should regarded as a cost, not a benefit. This chapter thus encourages skepticism regarding claims that the cost of meeting carbon goals will be minimal and proposes questions that should be asked of optimistic studies. The most reliable analyses draw on integrated assessment models, which show we can achieve a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 2° at moderate cost only by greatly overshooting corresponding carbon budgets, followed by decades of negative emissions using yet-to-be developed carbon removal technologies. Not predicating policy on these technologies, however, results in very high costs. Even so, these models don’t include the likelihood that much of the existing capital stock will be uneconomic to operate at high carbon prices, a potential source of enormous disruption. The closest analogy we have is the post-1989 shock in Eastern Europe when economic opening caused widespread shutdowns. It is important to be honest about costs: rosy forecasts are unconvincing, fail to prepare us for the problems we’ll need to solve and obscure the political economy of policy change.

Social-ecological transitions are fundamentally about places – especially how place meanings and attachments act as lenses for interpreting change. Our chapter focuses on energy transitions in rural agricultural landscapes in New York. Agricultural place meanings underpin attachment for many residents, but are challenged by proposals for large-scale renewable energy development. This chapter explores how people interpret these proposed facilities using the perspective of social representations of place. multiple interpretations of proposed facilities are promoted by different groups based on their position towards the development: developers and energy advocates strategically portray solar installations as ‘farms’, replete with images they believe support agricultural meanings; those who resist these developments emphasise the large-scale industrialisation of the landscape and the loss of services such as open space and amenity value. These narratives of place contribute to understanding perspectives on energy transitions and broader rural change.

This chapter summarises the aims and objectives of the book. It contextualises debates about energy transitions: why they are important and what is at stake. It accounts for the multiple drivers of energy transitions and explains what makes energy so ripe for an analysis grounded in global political economy. It sets out the structure of the book and summarises the main arguments that are made in the book.

Political science does not offer a distinct subdiscipline to address the subject of energy. Insofar as political science has addressed energy, it has focused on issues often neglected by other disciplines, notably the role of geopolitics and international relations, and the domestic politics of resource-rich states. Apart from the different subfields, we examine different approaches including realism, constructivism, liberalism and Marxism. The rise and fall and rise again of academic articles on energy in leading political science journals is reviewed and linked to exogenous forces such as the price of oil. Two distinct energy topics which have received attention are nuclear power and the oil crises of 1973–79 because of their wider geopolitical ramifications. Perhaps the most prominent or consistent thread through studies of the politics of energy is the question of energy security or energy independence. Finally, in recent years, energy has increasingly emerged as a focus for study in environmental politics and climate change politics in particular.

It is not just economics and technology but stakeholder interests which have shaped the evolution of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as an option with a portfolio of low-carbon technologies. We trace how over the course of the 2000s, CCS went from largely unknown to being seen as a flexible, dispatchable technology applicable to coal, gas or biomass, which could address concerns over security of supply with minimal disruption to the existing power system and business models while addressing hard-to-abate sectors including heat and process industries. Four general themes are identified as explaining why the politics of CCS has been so difficult: (i) there is no pressure for politicians or other stakeholders to seek more efficient solutions; (ii) the lack of a coherent logic or overarching industrial policy narrative for supporting CCS, except perhaps in a few isolated locations; (iii) the nature of CCS requires a much larger initial investment and greater systems integration than other low-carbon options; and (iv) changing energy industry business models, which, over the past decade, had eroded some of the factors that had worked in favour of CCS.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.

This chapter discusses the importance of the legal aspects of energy policy. It advances two main propositions: (a) different legal expressions of similar energy policies have different implications for the effectiveness and overall impact of a policy, and (b) the choice of legal expression is highly constrained by (i) law as a technology (i.e., the tools available to translate a policy into legal terms), (ii) the need to fit the policy within a broader legal framework and (iii) the underlying economic, social and political considerations affecting the choice of certain legal expressions. The chapter illustrates these two propositions by reference to three case studies relating to the extraction of shale gas in the EU, decarbonisation in the United States, and state support for renewable energy in India.