38
failed to get off the ground. This normalising of mitigation targets in various forms at the urban scale, in Haarstad’s rendering, enables energy transitions. It does so by establishing new accountability relations in a
graduated manner that imbricates them within existing routines of
decision- making and configurations of power. For strategies to legitimate
carbon reduction, discretion may well be the better part of confrontation
in shifting policy-making over vital domains to the urban scale for implementation in line with climate target creep.
Benjamin Sovacool bases his reflections on engagement with electric
vehicle roll-out in the five Nordic countries, a region that is in the global
lead on this energy infrastructure and mobility decarbonisation transition.
Drawing on an impressive range of empirical material, this case highlights
the many urgent reasons for a shift to electric mobility. It engages closely
with the materiality and political economic dynamics of how this transition actually pans out in order to throw into relief how electric mobility
alone can hardly address the problems it is commonly portrayed as resolving; these problems are deeply embedded within systems of mobility
themselves. Sovacool flags unfolding accountability crises linked with
inequitable access to electric vehicles, exclusionary and elitist planning,
global externalities, and exacerbated social vulnerabilities. The chapter
problematises the perpetuation of car-centric mobility alongside planning
centred on public transport electrification and points to the perils and
promises of how roll-out interfaces with electric grid flexibility and the
integration of renewable energy sources. His treatment spans sectoral
actors from national authorities to vehicle dealerships and from those
affected by extraction to those buying Teslas, in keeping with an appreciation of accountability relations as multi-scalar, multi-sited, polycentric and
amorphous in a sectoral layering of regimes.
Steven Wolf thinks through a case of dysfunctional habitat exchange
markets around the sage-grouse in Colorado to interrogate the construction of hollow accountability. On the one hand, science-based assessment
presents energy extractive industries with clear costs associated with oil
and gas extraction activities so as to compensate for the displacement of
this endangered species by provisioning for habitat replacement.
Institutional orchestration creates the requisite paraphernalia around this,
including actors to execute compensatory habitat exchange, a quantification tool and a market to facilitate these transactions. On the other hand,
power trumps substantive assessment, as the extractive majors refuse to
entertain the estimated costs and the habitat exchange fails to record a
S. SAREEN
failed to get off the ground. This normalising of mitigation targets in various forms at the urban scale, in Haarstad’s rendering, enables energy transitions. It does so by establishing new accountability relations in a
graduated manner that imbricates them within existing routines of
decision- making and configurations of power. For strategies to legitimate
carbon reduction, discretion may well be the better part of confrontation
in shifting policy-making over vital domains to the urban scale for implementation in line with climate target creep.
Benjamin Sovacool bases his reflections on engagement with electric
vehicle roll-out in the five Nordic countries, a region that is in the global
lead on this energy infrastructure and mobility decarbonisation transition.
Drawing on an impressive range of empirical material, this case highlights
the many urgent reasons for a shift to electric mobility. It engages closely
with the materiality and political economic dynamics of how this transition actually pans out in order to throw into relief how electric mobility
alone can hardly address the problems it is commonly portrayed as resolving; these problems are deeply embedded within systems of mobility
themselves. Sovacool flags unfolding accountability crises linked with
inequitable access to electric vehicles, exclusionary and elitist planning,
global externalities, and exacerbated social vulnerabilities. The chapter
problematises the perpetuation of car-centric mobility alongside planning
centred on public transport electrification and points to the perils and
promises of how roll-out interfaces with electric grid flexibility and the
integration of renewable energy sources. His treatment spans sectoral
actors from national authorities to vehicle dealerships and from those
affected by extraction to those buying Teslas, in keeping with an appreciation of accountability relations as multi-scalar, multi-sited, polycentric and
amorphous in a sectoral layering of regimes.
Steven Wolf thinks through a case of dysfunctional habitat exchange
markets around the sage-grouse in Colorado to interrogate the construction of hollow accountability. On the one hand, science-based assessment
presents energy extractive industries with clear costs associated with oil
and gas extraction activities so as to compensate for the displacement of
this endangered species by provisioning for habitat replacement.
Institutional orchestration creates the requisite paraphernalia around this,
including actors to execute compensatory habitat exchange, a quantification tool and a market to facilitate these transactions. On the other hand,
power trumps substantive assessment, as the extractive majors refuse to
entertain the estimated costs and the habitat exchange fails to record a
S. SAREEN