Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
accountability, while Jiusto (2006) shows how seemingly technical choices in the
design of indicators to account for emissions associated with interstate power fl ows
produce dramatically different pictures of state emissions levels and trends and
embody sharply different state policy incentives.
In contrast with these 'bottom-up' strategies for addressing climate change, the
UK set ambitious national climate goals that required local and regional authorities
to develop new energy management capabilities. McEvoy, Gibbs, and Longhurst
(2000; 2001) looked at these new sub-national responsibilities and concluded that
their potential to 'reduce energy costs, increase local employment, mitigate both
local and global pollution, and achieve social goals through the relief of fuel poverty
and improved living conditions' (2001, pp. 18-19) will likely go unrealised barring
a radical commitment to sustainability in every aspect of local development and
more effective intergovernmental collaboration.
In the developing world, where many lack basic energy services and investment
capital is limited, priorities for energy sustainability differ and countries face diffi cult
tensions in their energy investment decisions. Taylor (2005), for example, shows
that although a major rural electrifi cation program in Guatemala has brought grid
access within spatial reach of 90 percent of the population, many rural people
simply cannot afford to buy power or electrical appliances. The investment therefore
offers little immediate benefi t to rural people and leaves unaddressed a crisis in
fuelwood supply that represents half the national energy balance and the essential
cooking and heating fuel for almost all rural Guatemalans. The study is an interest-
ing example of political ecology concerns and methods - village-level surveys explor-
ing how changing land-use patterns and institutions increasingly limit rural people's
access to fuelwood - combined with national energy policy analysis. The gendered,
social impacts that come with land degradation and institutional restrictions on
access to lands where biomass fuel harvesters compete with others have been well
studied by geographers (e.g., Robbins 2001), but rarely in an energy policy frame-
work. Such work will be increasingly important as the Kyoto Protocol fosters
fi nancial fl ows and regimes of accountability for 'clean development' carbon offset
projects in the developing world that, while often of questionable value, reduce
pressure for curbing fossil fuel use elsewhere.
Nowhere are the unevenly distributed spatial consequences and contradictions
of low-carbon energy development more apparent than in the case of large hydro-
power dams, now pursued mainly in developing countries with large untapped
hydropower potential. The scale of such projects can be staggering: China's Three
Gorges project has inundated over 1,000 square kilometers and 'displace[d] the
most people in a single project in human history' (Heming and Rees 2000,
p. 440). The developmental discourses and politics legitimizing energy megapro-
jects are explored by Magee (2006) in China's Yunnan Province, where the
physical and discursive construction of a 'powershed' of eight hydropower dams
served also to reconfi gure institutional relationships and decision-making processes
among state and provincial agencies and power utility companies. Such projects
illustrate tensions between the need for electricity, irrigation and fl ood control
and the upheaval often experienced by rural communities and river ecosystems
with few effective civil society institutions to represent their interests. Ironically,
in the USA, problems of a massive, ageing hydropower infrastructure have made
eliminating
rather than erecting dams the principal policy focus (Kuby et al.
2005).
