Frank N. Laird

Against Transitions? Uncovering Conflicts in Changing Energy Systems

Energy analysts call major changes to the energy system “transitions”. However, the very phrase “energy transition” can frame the issue in such a way as to downplay the profound social and political disruptions such energy changes portend. The phrase has appeared in energy policy studies for decades. During the 1970s energy crisis the National Energy Plan, President Jimmy Carter’s energy policy blueprint, used this term to frame its goals and policies. “America is now at an historic turning point as the postwar era of oil and gas comes to a close. America has made two major energy transitions in the past . . .” (U.S. EOP, 1977, p. 4; see also CBO, 1977, p. 4). The plan went on to note that the previous transitions, from wood to coal and from coal to oil and natural gas, took place because technological innovations enabled energy industries to use new fuels, not because they ran out of the old fuels. The plan pointed out that policymakers in the 1970s faced managing a new type of transition, one in which the old fuel was growing scarce and the possible replacements posed problems of cost and scale (U.S. EOP, 1977, p. 7). Concerns about energy scarcity, usually indicated by the price of oil, have fallen off and risen back on the political agenda since the 1970s. Joskow (2001) explains how low prices in the 1990s pushed energy policy lower on the political agenda during most of that decade. But even then, low oil prices did not eliminate talk of an energy transition. Activists and analysts concerned either with peak oil or climate change argued that those threats would sooner or later compel countries Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 2, 149–156, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.786992

Technocracy revisited: knowledge, power and the crisis in energy decision making

Technocracy is problematic because it disempowers citizens. Previously, scholars worried that technocracy empowered technical elites. When that con tention failed, technocracy was dismissed as not being a serious problem. But the literature was half right. The growing importance of scientific technology in public affairs does have an effect on the power relationships within society. The mistake was assuming that possession of scientific knowledge automati cally enhanced power for the possessors. That error came out of a conceptual confusion about the nature of power relationships and the role of scientific knowledge within them. This paper will review that conceptual ground and reformulate the concept of technocracy. It then presents a case study in energy policy, virtually a critical case, showing the empirical validity of the reformu lation of technocracy.

Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values by Frank N. Laird

Preface Acknowledgments Note on sources and archival abbreviations Introduction: solar energy, ideas and public policy Part I. Before the Energy Crisis: 1. Framing the energy problem before the energy crisis 2. Creating policy for the future 3. Advocates construct solar technology 4. Solar energys incompatibility with official problem frames Part II. During the Energy Crisis: 5. Problem frames during the energy crisis 6. Solar advocacy in the crisis 7. Limited access: solar advocates and energy policy frames 8. Solar policy in crisis 9. New technologies, old ideas and the dynamics of public policy Notes Index.

Driving energy: the enactment and ambitiousness of state renewable energy policy

U.S. states have led the federal government in instituting policies aimed at promoting renewable energy. Nearly all research on renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) has treated RPS adoption as a binary choice. Given the substantial variation in the renewable energy goals established by RPSs, we propose a new measure of RPS ambition that accounts for the amount of additional renewable energy production needed to reach the RPS goal and the number of years allotted to reach the standard. By measuring RPS policy with more precision, our analysis demonstrates that many factors found to affect whether a state will adopt an RPS do not exert a similar effect on the policy’s ambitiousness. Most notably, our analysis demonstrates that Democratic control of the state legislature is the most consequential factor in determining the ambitiousness of state RPS policies.

Risk Assessment and Occupational Health Conceptual Problems

Case studies can demonstrate abuses of risk assessment: suppressing information, ignoring data, or other forms of deception. When a clear abuse has been documented, it is easy to condemn it and point out how the risk assessment should have been done. However, abuses should not be dismissed as atypical aberrations. They may, in practice, be very hard to correct. It is worth asking why such abuses seem so prevalent. Nonetheless, cases of clear abuse may leave unexamined some other conceptual issues. Even if it is done “right,” is risk assessment a good tool for analyzing policies for occupational health and safety? This seemingly simple question contains profoundly difficult issues. Assume for a moment that we know what it means to do the assessment right, that is, in conformance with the best professional standards and with strict adherence to openness and honesty. How does risk assessment claim to be good for the policy process and what is problematic about that claim?

Avoiding Transitions, Layering Change: The Evolution of American Energy Policy

During the 1970s, the American government created policies to engineer a transition away from oil, sparking a bitter debate over form of the new system. Since 1992, US policy makers again implemented policies to change the energy system but avoided articulating the details of a new energy system, calling for a vague, new “clean energy economy.” The process incrementally layered new institutional rules on top of existing institutions and catalyzed the growth of one of the largest renewable energy industries in the world. However, in contrast to the German approach, American policy seeks to expand all energy sources, an “all of the above” strategy. Veto points and players in the US political system led to a less ambitious program for the development of renewable energy.