Analysing Climate Change Mitigation Policy Options in the Renewable Energy Sub-Sector in Tanzania

Public policies influence reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Also the extent to which policies are developed and implemented can influence the achievement of the national, regional and international climate change mitigation policy framework in the renewable energy sub-sector. This paper provides a critical overview of key policy options influencing the development of renewable energy sub-sector through climate change mitigation policy options in Tanzania. Questionnaire surveys were used to collect primary data from 100 relevant experts who represented 64 organizations in Tanzania. Secondary data were collected by literature review. The state of climate change mitigation policy options in the renewable energy sub-sector was assessed by using Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) version 26.0 and content analysis. The results showed Tanzania lacks adequate climate change mitigation policy and renewable energy policy frameworks. A specific national climate change policy and national renewable energy policy are needed to guide stakeholders to undertake climate change mitigation actions in the renewable energy sub-sector in Tanzania. Perceptions gained and recommendations made are essential for undertaking climate change mitigation actions in Tanzania, and can be relevant for other developing countries because of similar climate change mitigation contexts. Keywords: climate change, renewable energy, greenhouse gases, policies, Tanzania

Current surveys may underestimate climate change skepticism evidence from list experiments in Germany and the USA

Strong public support is a prerequisite for ambitious and thus costly climate change mitigation policy, and strong public concern over climate change is a prerequisite for policy support. Why, then, do most public opinion surveys indicate rather high levels of concern and rather strong policy support, while de facto mitigation efforts in most countries remain far from ambitious? One possibility is that survey measures for public concern fail to fully reveal the true attitudes of citizens due to social desirability bias. In this paper, we implemented list-experiments in representative surveys in Germany and the United States (N = 3620 and 3640 respectively) to assess such potential bias. We find evidence that people systematically misreport, that is, understate their disbelief in human caused climate change. This misreporting is particularly strong amongst politically relevant subgroups. Individuals in the top 20% of the income distribution in the United States and supporters of conservative parties in Germany exhibit significantly higher climate change skepticism according to the list experiment, relative to conventional measures. While this does not definitively mean that climate skepticism is a widespread phenomenon in these countries, it does suggest that future research should reconsider how climate change concern is measured, and what subgroups of the population are more susceptible to misreporting and why. Our findings imply that public support for ambitious climate policy may be weaker than existing survey research suggests.

Demoralizing: integrating J.D. Peters’ communication “chasm” with Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) ecological communication to analyze climate change mitigation inaction

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems. Design/methodology/approach The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts. Findings The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code. Social implications In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

Supreme Court affirms federal role in climate policy

Significance The ruling ends a concerted effort by a group of Conservative premiers to have federal carbon pricing overturned. It is now an established pillar of Canada’s climate change mitigation policy and is expected to survive largely unchanged even if the Conservatives win the next federal election. Impacts A Conservative government may alter some aspects of the Liberal carbon tax but will retain most of the current pricing regime. Conservative governments in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, which opposed the federal scheme, may lose upcoming provincial elections. Carbon pricing will have a particular impact in Western Canada and rural areas as fuel prices for transport and heating increase.

Knowledge Integration in the Politics and Policy of Rapid Transitions to Net Zero Carbon: A Typology and Mapping Method for Climate Actors in the UK

The types of political and policy knowledge required to guide rapid transition to low-carbon economies remain largely disconnected in the fields of political science, psychology, and sociology. The composition and key features of the main actors involved, and their relationships have also not been systematically described. This paper attempts to address these knowledge gaps by proposing a new, integrative typology of actors involved in climate change mitigation policy in the United Kingdom (UK) and a method for mapping these actors and selecting their typological descriptors onto a 2D space. The mapping method enables stakeholders to visualise and evaluate the strength of support for the UK government’s net-zero-by-2050 “green growth” strategy and the tensions, challenges, and strategic opportunities potentially facing more radical alternatives. The methodology could be replicated for climate actors in other countries and, in principle, for any geographical scale or level of governance.

The continuing failure of UK climate change mitigation policy

Failure to take climate change seriously enough has resulted in the world now facing a climate emergency, with rising global temperatures, melting polar ice caps, increasingly frequent and severe storms, floods and droughts, and rising sea levels. Despite being the first country in the world to set statutory carbon emissions reduction targets (in the Climate Change Act 2008), the UK government since 2012 has fallen increasingly behind, even by its own standards. This paper details what this has meant in terms of specific policies and identifies some of the reasons for this policy failure: in particular, a negative attitude towards regulation and a return to a reliance on market forces, plus an overriding concern to continue with ‘business as usual’, in terms of support for fossil-fuel industries and ever-increasing energy demand and supply. Ironically, this has resulted in a situation where radical solutions seem even more necessary and more urgent.