Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions

Abstract

The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on the impacts of global warming stated that carbon emissions need to be reduced by 45 percent relative to 2010 levels within twelve years, and to "net-zero" by mid-century, to have any chance at limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. 1 The report invoked a sense of urgency in its call for "rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy" and other sectors to ensure "no or limited overshoot" of the Paris Agreement targets. In the timely and welcome Power Shift: The Global Political Economy of Energy Transitions, Peter Newell takes the urgency of environmental despoliation seriously. In response, Newell sets out to understand (a) how a rapid energy transition can be achieved and (b) the tensions such an endeavour produces vis-` a-vis issues of equity, democracy, and social justice. Uniting a concern for what is to be done with how to do it fairly, Newell's central claim is that energy transitions are not only a matter of technological substitution, but are fundamentally historical, ecological, and power-laden political processes. For Newell, energy is both a shaper of, and shaped by, contemporary social relations. Therefore, transforming energy systems means challenging and displacing incumbents-those whose power is present and derived in contemporary fossil capitalism-and answering the question "[w]ho and what is energy for?" (11) The book is motivated by the idea that climate change represents a legitimacy crisis for global capitalism and, more profoundly, the project of industrialism itself (9).