This book examines organized interests in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing incisive analyses in three critically important policy areas - healthcare, higher education and ...energy. The four countries surveyed – Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic – afford rich diversity offering broad empirical material available for cross-country and cross-policy comparative analyses. Featuring interdisciplinary research, the book draws together recent developments in the evolution of post-communist advocacy organizations, their population ecology dynamics, interest intermediation, the influence of organized interests and their (bottom-up and top-down) Europeanization. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, interest groups and lobbying, post-communism, transition and consolidation studies, and more broadly to European studies/politics.
This article explores the experiences of trade unions in Croatia and Poland with societal power resources as a source of trade union revitalisation in the post-2008 crisis period. In the context of ...limited structural, organisational and institutional power resources, Croatian and Polish trade unions attempted to build their societal power through the revitalisation strategies of coalition building and political action. The paper compares three similar, partially successful campaigns run in both countries, on pensions, Sunday trading and precarious work. Our findings show that gains in societal power alone cannot fully compensate for the erosion of conventional sources of trade union power. Such a configuration of power resources runs the danger of trade union demands being taken up by populist forces wanting to increase their own legitimacy, rather than furthering workers’ interests. Therefore, what starts as an attempt at union revitalisation based on the novel use of societal resources could easily end up as ‘captured innovation’ by populist forces.
Access to Power Naqvi, Ijlal
2022, 2022-11-13, 2022-09-16
eBook
Odprti dostop
Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn’t. This is the rare issue on which government and private sector can unite, and it is the cause of suffering for ...rich and poor alike across the entirety of the country. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road Investments, the Pakistani power sector still stifles economic and social life across the country. This book explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. It argues that the national challenges of budgetary constraints and power shortages directly result from conscious strategic decisions that are integral to Pakistan’s infrastructural state. Electricity shortages are one of the many poor governance outcomes characteristic of low- and middle-income countries. Standard development thinking points to an absence of institutions in comparison with an idealized and distant other country, with governance reform programs formulated accordingly. However, an orientation toward what Pakistan is not takes us away from how it actually functions and to whose benefit. Electricity governance in Pakistan reinforces relations of power between provinces and the federal center, contributes to the marginalization of subordinate groups in the city, and orients citizens toward a patronage-based relationship with the state through encounters with street-level bureaucrats. Looking through the lens of the electrical power sector reveals how Pakistan works, and for whom.
The field of social movement studies has expanded dramatically over the past three decades. But as it has done so, its focus has become increasingly narrow and 'movement-centric'. When combined with ...the tendency to select successful struggles for study, the conceptual and methodological conventions of the field conduce to a decidedly Ptolemaic view of social movements: one that exaggerates the frequency and causal significance of movements as a form of politics. This book reports the results of a comparative study, not of movements, but of communities earmarked for environmentally risky energy projects. In stark contrast to the central thrust of the social movement literature, the authors find that the overall level of emergent opposition to the projects has been very low, and they seek to explain that variation and the impact, if any, it had on the ultimate fate of the proposed projects.
Dictionary of energy Cleveland, Cutler J; Morris, Christopher G
2005, 2014, 2009-08-24, 2014-10-22, c2006
eBook, Book
The Dictionary of Energy, Second Edition is a comprehensive and authoritative reference on all aspects of energy and its role in society. Edited by Cutler J. Cleveland and Christopher Morris, the ...editors of Handbook of Energy, Volumes 1 and 2, this authoritative resource comes at a time when the topic of energy prices, resources and environmental impacts are at the forefront of news stories and political discussions. The Second Edition of Dictionary of Energy contains over 10, 000 terms, across 40 key subject areas in energy (e.g. solar, oil & gas, economics, models, policy, basic concepts, sustainable development, systems, renewable/alternative energy, water, etc), with additional window essays on key issues, such as Biomass, Ecological Footprint, Exergy, Fuel Cell, and Hybrid Vehicles. Dictionary of Energy, Second Edition is a valuable reference for undergraduate and graduate students, academics, and research scientists who study energy, as well as business corporations, professional firms, government agencies, foundations, and other groups whose activities relate to energy. * Comprises over 10, 000 terms and definitions covering 40 scientific disciplines and topics * Window essays on subjects such as life cycle assessment, methane, and tragedy of the commons written by leading scientists in the field * Definitions are accompanied by photos and illustrations * Over 2, 200 new or revised terms * Seventy-five percent of photos and illustrations either revised or new for this edition
In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 , Ying Jia Tan explores the fascinating politics of Chinese power consumption as electrical industries developed during seven decades of ...revolution and warfare. Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civil war, to the 1937 Japanese invasion that robbed China of 97 percent of its generative capacity. Along the way, he demonstrates that power industries became an integral part of the nation's military-industrial complex, showing how competing regimes asserted economic sovereignty through the nationalization of electricity. Based on a wide range of published records, engineering reports, and archival collections in China, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 argues that, even in times of peace, the Chinese economy operated as though still at war, constructing power systems that met immediate demands but sacrificed efficiency and longevity. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.
The energy router (ER) is a current power electronic device which can integrate distributed energy, provide power for different types of loads, and simultaneously realize the free flow of energy. In ...traditional active distribution networks, power quality is affected due to the access of photovoltaics (PV) and various loads. Hence, this problem can be improved by accessing the ER. This paper shows the power quality improvement of the grid when the ER is used to integrate PV, energy storage, and AC/DC loads. At the same time, an energy coordination strategy for ER is proposed. The IEEE 13 node model is developed to analyze power quality fluctuations when distributed energy and AC/DC loads are directly connected to the grid. For the power quality analysis, five indicators were selected and the hierarchical analysis method was used to obtain the indicators of power quality. After the use of ER under the coordinated control of ER, the energy is distributed twice and the power quality of the grid improves. The feasibility of ER topology and the control strategy have been verified through an established active distribution networks model with ER. It is verified that when the ER is connected to active distribution networks, the power quality improves accordingly, and it can effectively deal with the characteristics of distributed energy fluctuations and improve the flexibility of the power grid.
Legislation on biofuels production in the USA and Europe is directing food crops towards the production of grain-based ethanol, which can have detrimental consequences for soil carbon sequestration, ...nitrous oxide emissions, nitrate pollution, biodiversity and human health. An alternative is to grow lignocellulosic (cellulosic) crops on 'marginal' lands. Cellulosic feedstocks can have positive environmental outcomes and could make up a substantial proportion of future energy portfolios. However, the availability of marginal lands for cellulosic feedstock production, and the resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, remains uncertain. Here we evaluate the potential for marginal lands in ten Midwestern US states to produce sizeable amounts of biomass and concurrently mitigate GHG emissions. In a comparative assessment of six alternative cropping systems over 20 years, we found that successional herbaceous vegetation, once well established, has a direct GHG emissions mitigation capacity that rivals that of purpose-grown crops (-851 ± 46 grams of CO(2) equivalent emissions per square metre per year (gCO(2)e m(-2) yr(-1))). If fertilized, these communities have the capacity to produce about 63 ± 5 gigajoules of ethanol energy per hectare per year. By contrast, an adjacent, no-till corn-soybean-wheat rotation produces on average 41 ± 1 gigajoules of biofuel energy per hectare per year and has a net direct mitigation capacity of -397 ± 32 gCO(2)e m(-2) yr(-1); a continuous corn rotation would probably produce about 62 ± 7 gigajoules of biofuel energy per hectare per year, with 13% less mitigation. We also perform quantitative modelling of successional vegetation on marginal lands in the region at a resolution of 0.4 hectares, constrained by the requirement that each modelled location be within 80 kilometres of a potential biorefinery. Our results suggest that such vegetation could produce about 21 gigalitres of ethanol per year from around 11 million hectares, or approximately 25 per cent of the 2022 target for cellulosic biofuel mandated by the US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, with no initial carbon debt nor the indirect land-use costs associated with food-based biofuels. Other regional-scale aspects of biofuel sustainability, such as water quality and biodiversity, await future study.
Not so long ago, people North and South had little reason to believe that wealth from oil, gas, and coal brought anything but great prosperity. But the presumption of net benefits from fossil fuels ...is eroding as widening circles of people rich and poor experience the downside.A positive transition to a post-fossil fuel era cannot wait for global agreement, a swap-in of renewables, a miracle technology, a carbon market, or lifestyle change. This book shows that it is now possible to take the first step toward the post-fossil fuel era, by resisting the slow violence of extreme extraction and combustion, exiting the industry, and imagining a good life after fossil fuels. It shows how an environmental politics of transition might occur, arguing for going to the source rather than managing byproducts, for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, for engaging a politics of deliberately choosing a post-fossil fuel world. Six case studies reveal how individuals, groups, communities, and an entire country have taken first steps out of the fossil fuel era, with experiments that range from leaving oil under the Amazon to ending mountaintop removal in Appalachia.
