Guest author: Thijs Meeuwisse
Is NIMBY’ism justified in times of climate crisis? How much of our thinking is still anthropocentric? Will sustainable technology actually lead to a better preservation of our Earth? These are but a few of the questions that were addressed during the 2024 ESDiT conference. I joined this conference to represent Alliander, a Dutch grid operator that plays a pivotal role in the ongoing energy transition.
One of the greatest challenges facing humanity at this moment is the transition to renewable energy sources. This challenge is about far more than technology alone. It requires a profound change in the way people think about and use the finite resources on our planet.
Alliander, being a distribution system operator (DSO), witnesses the energy transition from up close. Many technicians and policymakers work hard every day to enable the transition from fossil to sustainable energy sources. At the same time, many challenges that we face are of a non-technical nature. For instance, we need to consider how we include local stakeholders in the energy decision-making process, and more generally how technological interventions affect how we all relate to energy. A lot of academic research is being conducted on these topics, but not everything trickles down to everyday practice at companies. That is why I try to bridge the gap between academic research on the ethics of the energy transition, and the practices at companies like Alliander. In this blog post, I share some of the insights that I gathered during the ESDiT conference, held in Enschede from 2 to 4 October 2024.
When is influence towards acceptance of sustainable technologies justified?
A wind turbine in your backyard: yes or no? Most people are in favour of sustainable initiatives, but when one experiences any inconvenience from it, opinions change. You have probably heard of NIMBYs (‘Not In My Backyard’): people who object to a certain development in their own neighbourhood, while raising no objections to similar developments elsewhere.
Local communities are increasingly invited to participate in energy decision-making. Nynke van Uffelen, postdoc at TU Delft, is conducting research into this type of participation in the energy transition. During the conference, she highlighted a tension between the ethical importance of local participation and the serious injustices that can result from this participation.
Normally, we do not find it acceptable to steer towards a specific outcome in a decision-making procedure. Every participant should be able to speak their minds, without being manipulated. But for local participation in energy decision-making, applying this principle is not straightforward. After all, there is a discrepancy between the decision-makers and the affected group. Specifically:
- Only privileged people can participate in decision-making, because they have enough time and money. This often means that retired, white people are overrepresented, while young people and other minorities are underrepresented.
- Energy decision-making happens locally, but the consequences are global: climate change affects the entire Earth, not just the city where the energy project is planned. And you cannot possibly invite all the inhabitants of the Earth to your participation meeting.
- Energy decision-making happens now, but the consequences extend over a very long time. What we do now has consequences for future generations. But we cannot invite them to the table either.
Are you allowed to influence decision-making in a participation meeting, in order to ‘correct’ the decision for the absence of the above-mentioned groups? This is an open question in the debate on the just energy transition.
Better information provision is not enough
Would you accept drinking water that was extracted from sewage water? Cities like San Diego and Phoenix are experimenting with these types of water treatment plants, but public resistance is high—while the water quality from these plants is higher than current levels. PhD candidate Karen Moesker shared her research on how to engage the public in these types of large-scale infrastructure projects. She showed that policymakers do their best to engage the public in these projects, in order to reduce resistance. They do this by broadcasting as much information as possible about the plant, in the hope that people will learn that the new technology is desirable.
But guess what? This form of outreach is not at all successful. Despite the best intentions of the project maintainers (better water quality for everyone), Moesker stated that public resistance does not decrease by broadcasting as much scientific/technical information as possible. Citizens feel that they are not being listened to and that decisions are being made for them. There is no level playing field; like parents who decide for their children, project developers decide what is good for others (in philosophers’ jargon, this is called paternalism).
Moesker believed that we need to find ways to eliminate the persistent separation between ‘public’ and ‘expert’, and that we need to listen to each other instead of just sending information without checking whether the message is actually received. I think Alliander can learn a lot from this research, because we too are working on large infrastructure projects that often encounter public resistance. By keeping an open mind, we prevent ourselves from getting bogged down in the idea that we know better.
Sustainable technologies do not necessarily create a more sustainable world
By switching to sustainable energy sources, we can solve the climate crisis! Or is that view too simplistic? PhD candidate Ole Thijs showed in his presentation that sustainable technologies can contribute to the preservation of the planet in principle, but that this does not happen in fact.
He did this by pointing out the global nature of sustainable technologies. Although sustainable technologies have a lower carbon footprint than their fossil counterparts, they are completely dependent on the globalisation of the world for their production. The globalised world is structured as a overseeable picture in which everything is connected. We can mine rare earth metals on one side of the planet, ship the semi-finished products, then assemble them somewhere else and consume the product somewhere else still.
According to Thijs, there is nothing sustainable about this, because the limits of our planet are completely overlooked. In order to produce our solar panels and car batteries, we exhaust the Earth, in the same way that fossil fuels do. If we really want to live more sustainably, sustainable technologies alone are not enough. We have to start living in a way that recognises the Earth as finite and vulnerable.
This insight has far-reaching consequences for the current energy transition. Simply switching to renewable energy sources is insufficient for planetary preservation. Instead, something needs to change in the way we think about our scarce resources, including energy.
Conclusion
The conference shed light on the complexities that arise during the ongoing energy transition. A main takeaway for me is that the transition is not (merely) a technical one, but first and foremost a social transition, which requires us to rethink our behaviour towards energy. I hope that in my position, I can stimulate the debate on the just energy transition, and I invite everyone interested to join this debate!
About the author
Thijs Meeuwisse (MSc in Philosophy of Technology) is a technical trainee at the Ethics Office of Alliander, a Dutch distribution systems operator (DSO). Alliander is, quite literally, the connector in the energy transition in the Netherlands. Would you like to collaborate with Alliander for an ethics-oriented research project related to energy (e.g. the just energy transition)? Please reach out on ethics@alliander.com!