Energy Justice in a Changing Climate

Karen Bickerstaff is senior lecturer in geography at Exeter University and leads the department’s Environment and Sustainability Research Group. Her research interests centre on public engagements with technological risk, innovation and low-carbon transformations. Recent projects have examined nuclear waste policy and controversy in the UK, the efficacy of domestic energy efficiency interventions and the ethical dimensions of low-carbon energy technologies. She led the Interdisciplinary Cluster on Energy Systems, Equity and Vulnerability (InCluESEV), running from 2009 to 2012, which has fostered an international collaborative network developing new ways of thinking about, and researching, energy vulnerability and justice.Gordon Walker is professor of risk, environment and justice at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. He researches and writes across a wide agenda, including matters of environmental justice, energy demand, social practice, socio-technical transitions, community innovation and renewable energy technologies, and the governance of forms of ‘natural’ and technological risk. He has led a series of research projects on these themes funded by the UK research councils, the European Union and government departments. His most recent book is Environmental Justice: Concepts, evidence and politics, and he is currently co-director of the Dynamics of Energy, Mobility and Demand (DEMAND) research centre.Harriet Bulkeley is professor of geography at Durham University. Her research interests are the nature and politics of environmental governance, and focus on climate change, energy and urban sustainability. Her recent books include Cities and Climate Change: Critical introductions to the city (2013), Governing Climate Change (with Peter Newell, 2010) and Cities and Low Carbon Transitions (with Vanesa Castan-Broto, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin, eds, 2011). She has undertaken a number of research projects funded by the ESRC, EPSRC and Leverhulme Trust, and is currently co-investigator for the Ofgem-funded Customer Led Network Revolution project on smart electricity grids (2011-14) and an ESRC project examining the role of China and Brazil in low-carbon transitions in southern Africa. Harriet was appointed an adviser to DECC in 2012, and she has undertaken commissioned research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, UNHabitat and the World Bank.

Climate change produces injustice - and the authors of this book argue powerfully that policies to mitigate it are paradoxically in danger of having the same effect. The remedy is a clearer understanding of the processes that drive mitigation injustice and Energy Justice in a Changing Climate provides exactly that understanding.

• Introduction: making sense of energy justice - Karen Bickerstaff, Gordon Walker and Harriet Bulkeley1. Household energy vulnerability as 'assemblage' - Rosie Day and Gordon Walker2. Precarious domesticities: energy vulnerability among urban young adults - Stefan Bouzarovski, Saska Petrova, Matthew Kitching and Josh Baldwick3. Energy justice in sustainability transitions research - Malcolm Eames and Miriam Hunt4. Energy justice and the low-carbon transition: assessing low-carbon community programmes in the UK - Sara Fuller and Harriet Bulkeley5. Energy justice and climate change: reflections from a Joseph Rowntree Foundation research programme - Katharine Knox6. Equity across borders: a whole-systems approach to micro-generation - Charlotte Adams, Sandra Bell, Philip Taylor, Varvara Alimisi, Guy Hutchinson, Ankit Kumar and Britta Rosenlund Turner7. Fair distribution of power-generating capacity: justice, microgrids and utilizing the common pool of renewable energy - Maarten Wolsink8. Framing energy justice in the UK: the nuclear case - Catherine Butler and Peter Simmons9. Justice in energy system transitions: the case of carbon capture and storage - Duncan McLaren, Kristian Krieger and Karen Bickerstaff