Sustainable Energy The ethical aspects

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Sustainable EnergyThe ethical aspects

• Dr Brian Motherway
• Sustainable Energy Ireland

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Almost every aspect of human endeavour is related
to a greater or lesser extent to energy cost and
supply and any consideration of the ethical
aspects of these efforts will, therefore, involve
an analysis of energy.Commission on the Ethics
of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, 2001
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Global Primary energy to 2050
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• The world is facing twin energy-related threats
  that of not having adequate and secure supplies
  of energy at affordable prices and that of
  environmental harm caused by consuming too much
  of it.
• IEA World Energy Outlook

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Three pillars of energy policy
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(No Transcript)
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The energy trilemma
Climate change is the greatest and
widest-ranging market failure ever seen

• Efficiency
• Social justice
• Security

Archbishop Gaudencio B. Cardinal Rosales of
Manila urged the government and the faithful to
tackle the moral dimension of climate change
Climate change is a far greater threat to the
world than international terrorism, the UK
Government's chief scientific adviser has said.
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Trade-offs rather than utopias

• help to move beyond the limitations of utopia
  thinking to highlight what trends, trade-offs and
  choices are likely to shape the global business
  environment in which communities are served and
  value created
• Shell Global Scenarios, 2006

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Dimensions of ethics in sustainable energy

• Trade offs rather than utopias
• How then to set priorities and balance competing
  goals
• The role of political and market structures in
  this

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Predicting the future

• climate change has revived the delusion that
  computer modeling can allow us to describe the
  future
• The antidote is modesty of aspiration and
  acknowledgement that many uncertainties cannot be
  resolved
• John Kay 2007

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Irish energy policy

• My vision for the Ireland of 2020 in energy terms
  is ambitious, challenging and optimistic.
• It sees Ireland as a fully sustainable, secure,
  efficient, affordable and competitive all-island
  energy market.
• Minister Noel Dempsey, 2007

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Herald AM, September 2007
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• the history of past substantive changes in the
  energy market is that paradigms shifts are only
  recognised and acted upon once the costs and
  inefficiencies of past approaches become so great
  as to shake conventional wisdoms.
• This typically requires the costs to become
  politically apparent through power cuts,
  physical threats to supplies, price spikes and,
  now, the physical impacts of climate change
• Dieter Helm, 2005

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• Storms in 2007
• A record number of floods, droughts and storms
  around the world this year amount to a climate
  change "mega disaster", the United Nation's
  emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes,
  has warned.
• 5 Oct 2007

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• Storms in 2005
• If this makes the climate loonies in the States
  realise weve got a problem, some good will come
  out of a truly awful situation.
• Sir John Lawton, chairman of the British Royal
  Commission on Environmental Pollution

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Sustainable EnergyThe ethical aspects

• Brian Motherway
• brian.motherway_at_sei.ie