Why does China act as it does in its pursuit of energy security? Are "resource wars" inevitable? Going beyond traditional analyses that focus on China as a regional and global threat, Jean Garrison ...sheds new light on the roots of the country's energy policy and the constraints that it faces. Garrison eschews the zero-sum approaches that underlie much conceptualization of the subject, arguing that they are in large part based on the erroneous notion that China is a unitary actor with a coherent energy strategy. Her attention to the competing developmental and environmental priorities at play in China's domestic politics is a critical contribution to the global energy-security debate.
In recent years, the efforts of nations to promote energy security have been hotly debated. Fuels Paradise examines how five major developed democracies—Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the ...United States—have sought to enhance their energy security since the oil shocks of the 1970s and in response to the more diverse set of challenges of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on a vast range of primary and secondary sources, John S. Duffield explains the actions taken—and not taken—by these countries to address their energy security concerns.
Throughout the book, Duffield argues that state strength and policy legacies are essential for understanding national responses to energy insecurity. In addition to identifying feasible energy policies and the constraints faced by policy makers, he evaluates the prospects for international cooperation to promote energy security and considers the implications of recent advances in the production and distribution of energy, particularly the fracking revolution.
An ambitious cross-national and longitudinal study grounded in promising theories of national behavior, Fuels Paradise will contribute substantially to broader debates about the determinants of state action and public policy.
The United States and Germany started out with very similar policies for renewable energy after the energy crisis of the 1970s. By the year 2000 they were on very different policy paths and, as a ...result, the German renewable energy industry has moved well ahead of that in the United States, both in terms of installed capacity in the country and in terms of creating a highly successful export market. In this paper, we reject some of the conventional explanations for this difference. Instead, these differences arise from the intersection of contingent historical events with the distinctive institutional and social structures that affect policy making in each country. Our analysis of the historical path-dependent dynamics of each country suggests that those who wish to further renewable energy policy in the United States need to take into account these institutional and social factors so that they will better be able to exploit the next set of favorable historical circumstances.
