Global energy dilemmas: energy security and climate change
评述了Michael Bradshaw关于全球能源问题的著作，指出能源安全、经济性、公平性与环境友好之间存在根本矛盾，而非简单困境。
‘Can we have secure, affordable and equitable supplies of energy that are also environmentally benign?’ This is the central ‘dilemma’ that organizes Michael Bradshaw’s useful overview of global energy issues. Bradshaw describes the ‘global energy dilemma’ as a framework of analysis (ix), but it is more a conundrum statement than an analytical framework. This statement (which reappears several times) seems to tick all the boxes of our concerns when it comes to energy-security/geopolitical tension, economy/cost for consumers, justice/inequality/energy poverty, and all the local and global ecological impacts. What the statement does not get at is this is more than a dilemma. It is a contradiction —each of these goals is in tension with or contradicts the others. For example, the conventional wisdom in environmental policy circles is that ecological costs need to be internalized into the price of energy commodities (via a carbon tax or whatever), but this goal could have significant repercussions in terms of affordability and justice (working class and poor consumers will suffer through higher energy costs). Notions of ‘secure’ energy usually implies energy extracted in the countries that consume large amounts of energy—yet, in recent years, this definition of ‘secure’ energy has disregarded anything close to ‘environmentally benign’ with the development of ‘unconventional’ energy like shale gas or the tar sands of Alberta to fuel high-energy consuming economies.