Central European - 1 years ago

PhD graduate Masahiro Suzuki, from CEU’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, received one of the university’s Best Dissertation Awards this year in recognition of his thesis research titled “Political Acceleration in Energy Transitions: Historical Interventions and Their Outcomes in the G7 and the EU, compared to Net-Zero Targets”. For the thesis, which he defended in May, Suzuki raised the question of whether climate policies have accelerated the shift to clean energy in the G7 and the EU. His research contributes to understanding the feasibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide to keep the global temperature increase below one point five degrees Celsius, which is the current international target to avoid the dangerous effects of climate change.  Suzuki was recently awarded the prestigious Early Career Scientist Award by a top journal in the environmental sciences, Energy Research Social Science, for a paper based on his dissertation. Suzuki published this paper with his supervisor Aleh Cherp, and CEU graduate Jessica Jewell, an associate professor at Chalmers University of Technology. Suzuki’s research was supported by CEU, NewClimate Institute, and an EU Horizon 2020 international research project (ENGAGE). CEU spoke with Suzuki to learn about his research and how meeting the international climate target requires radically different energy transitions in the future.    What is your research aim?  The main theme of my dissertation research is climate change and energy transitions. My primary aim was to better understand how energy transitions have been politically accelerated, with a particular focus on investigating whether climate policies have accelerated the shift to clean energy, an important mechanism to meet the current climate target to keep the global temperature increase below one point five degrees Celsius. To give you a little more background, our economy remains predominantly dependent on fossil fuels today across all sectors, including electricity generation, transportation, building heating and cooling, and industry. Mitigating climate change requires rapidly replacing this dependence on fossil fuels with low-carbon alternatives, which must be completed within the coming decades. Such low-carbon transition radically differs from the historical development of our economy over the last few centuries, during which we continuously increased the use of fossil fuels and added low-carbon technologies on top of, rather than replacing, existing fossil infrastructure to grow our economy. This is why strong political efforts are necessary to change the course of action, including by significantly accelerating the growth of low-carbon technologies and the decline of fossil fuels. How much acceleration is necessary? In developed countries, governments must ensure the complete decarbonization of electricity generation already by 2035, because decarbonized electricity is necessary to reduce emissions in other sectors through electrification. But is such a level of acceleration possible? Interestingly, I found that the literature is split on this question with two major groups of scholars characterizing this acceleration in opposition as either impossible or possible. One group analyzes long-term global energy transition and argues that the required acceleration is impossible because they observed no such acceleration in the past, even in recent years, where energy demand and emissions have continuously grown throughout the last centuries. However, this approach is problematic because potential acceleration in some countries (for example, in Europe) may be masked by developments elsewhere (for example, in fast-developing economies) in such aggregated analyses. In contrast, the other group of scholars arguing that the required acceleration is possible conducts more granular analyses to identify what they characterize as “successful” or “leading” technological developments, such as the recent growth of solar and wind power in Germany and the U.K., or the recent decline of coal use in Canada. However, this approach is also problematic because it does not compare these cases with the historical development of other technologies. Without such benchmarks, we would not know whether these cases are truly accelerated. Another shortcoming is that these studies tend to focus on one or a few technologies and do not clarify whether the individual technological changes have led to any significant systemic transitions for decarbonization. For example, the decline of coal use in Canada was replaced by the rapid growth of natural gas, which is not a transition in line with keeping the global temperature increase below one point five degrees Celsius. Therefore, my dissertation aimed to develop a framework and methods to conduct a more appropriate scope of analysis to examine political acceleration in energy transitions focused on systemic transition in the energy sector at a national level because energy transitions are mainly driven by national policies. For empirical research, I focused on analyzing electricity transitions in the G7 countries and the EU, both because of the importance of decarbonizing electricity and because these countries possess the largest technological and financial capacity in the world for climate change mitigation through their repeated political commitments to lead the global decarbonization process. In other words, if they are not accelerating transitions, who would and who can? What did your research find? I find that climate policies have not accelerated electricity transitions in the G7 and the EU beyond historical trends and rates of energy transitions. Throughout the last six decades, the transition speed has strongly correlated not with changes in polices but with changes in energy demand. The fastest technological changes in the electricity sector in the G7 and the EU took place in the 1970s and 1980s when these countries quickly developed nuclear power to replace the use of oil in order to improve energy security after the oil crises. Compared to these speeds, the recent growth of renewables and the current reduction of fossil fuels under climate policies have been slower. I also find that none of the G7 countries nor the EU have demonstrated or even planned to accelerate electricity transitions comparable to meeting the international climate target, despite their repeated political announcements to do so. This indicates that there are no “successful” cases of sustainable energy transitions to date. The findings are in stark contrast to some claims in the literature that there are an increasing number of such cases driven by climate policies in recent decades. The required transitions to mitigate climate change are therefore unprecedented, necessitating radically stronger efforts such as accelerating the decarbonization of electricity immediately and multiple times over compared to the latest speed observed in the G7 and the EU. My research also finds that there are several precedents that demonstrated either the necessary speed of low-carbon technology growth or fossil fuel decline comparable to achieving the international climate target goal. For example, France and Sweden rapidly developed nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s, and the U.K. has swiftly reduced fossil fuels in electricity generation in more recent decades. My research shows that these cases are historically the fastest transition examples from which we can perhaps learn best about political acceleration in energy transitions. What motivated you to carry out this research?  Before my PhD, I worked at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, an environmental think tank dedicated to sustainable transition, in Japan. My work involved participating in international climate change negotiations, including the Conference of Parties (COP), as a national delegate of the Japanese government. I also collaborated closely with representatives from other G7 and EU countries, as these nations often cooperate in climate negotiations. During the negotiations, it seemed to me that many, if not all, countries continuously conveyed a very similar message regarding their ambitions, plans, and actions for climate change mitigation: they are ambitious and doing whatever they can. While many nations often claim their actions are adequate, we know that climate change mitigation efforts have remained far from successful. I therefore became increasingly interested in investigating whether these countries are actually doing more than business as usual to mitigate climate change, which led me to pursue my PhD. What kind of sources and data do you use for this research? For energy statistics, I used data from the International Energy Agency and Ember, as well as additional national data from the G7 and the EU. For climate policies, I used the Climate Policy Database from NewClimate Institute, where I had the pleasure to collaborate as a visiting researcher. I also analyzed hundreds of policy documents published by these countries over the last decades to examine how their climate change mitigation policies have evolved over time. Based on your research, what would you like to point out more broadly on the topic of climate change mitigation?  I want to emphasize the importance of carefully identifying historical model cases to learn from in order to accelerate sustainable energy transitions. For example, there is a frequent call for Japan to learn from Germany because Japan lags behind Germany in developing renewables. But I think this advice is misguided because Germany has never achieved the comparable growth speed of low-carbon technologies necessary to meet the international climate targets. If Japan should learn from its peers, I believe that the better candidates at the moment are France and Sweden, which achieved comparable speeds in developing low-carbon electricity based on nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s. An important question is whether and how the historical efforts in these two countries can be replicated and reinforced in Japan’s current context. The research approach developed in this dissertation, which I call ‘middle-range’ compared to the existing approaches that are either too broad or too narrow, can easily be applied to track future progress in the G7 and the EU, and analyze the decarbonization processes of other sectors and countries. Recently, some European countries have shown signs of significantly accelerating the shift to clean energy in response to the Russo-Ukrainian War, though the planned speed remains insufficient for the one point five degrees Celsius target. We will yet see whether such acceleration can actually take place in these countries and beyond. However, as even greater acceleration may occur in the future, one of my future research plans is to develop and regularly update an inventory of historical model cases of energy transitions to support evidence-based research and policy-making. As I continue the line of my dissertation research in the future, I am happy to share that I will soon join the Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher. I will also continue contributing to the international research group POLET (Perspectives on technOLogical change and Energy Transitions), which focuses on analyzing the feasibility of rapid energy transitions to mitigate climate change. This interview is part of CEU s Research in the Spotlight series, which features the projects recognized in the university s 2024 Best Dissertation Awards.The full list of winners can be found here.  Category: NewsImage: Content Priority: High

Latest News

Hashtags:   

Masahiro

 | 

Suzuki

 | 

Political

 | 

Acceleration

 | 

Energy

 | 

Transitions

 | 

Research

 | 

Spotlight

 | 

Sources