Contested Energy Futures: Capturing the Renewable Energy Surge in Australia

This book unpacks the politics of climate change in Australia in the context of successive conservative Coalition governments resisting any moves to mitigate emissions and as local communities and transnational corporations struggle with each other to control the transition to a sustainable energy future. As Australia has abundant clean energy resources in terms of solar and wind, the book offers a test case for study of the energy policy transition in the 21st century. It does so by using tools from political economy and sociology, teasing out public attitudes to renewable energy technologies and innovative infrastructure investments, unpacking the complex parameters of this historical debate, tracing the rise of household 'prosumers' and arguing the case for grassroots ownership of renewable infrastructure or 'energy sovereignty' - already pioneered by some isolated communities in Australia. The cultural and emancipatory benefits of cooperative ventures are well known. However, capitalism is not readily defeated by democracy. The promotion of individual households as 'virtual power stations', of 'smart technologies' and even of cryptocurrency into the energy transition innovative mix opens up ever new horizons for corporate control.

Stuart Rosewarne has established a rich research record in the field of environmental and ecological political economy. His research has been published in international journals and the book Climate Action Upsurge: The Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics published in collaboration in 2014 on the development of the climate movement politics was well received. The collaboratively-researched and authored Beyond Coal Rush: A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy, which is a comparative study of reliance on coal in Australia, Germany and India was published in 2020. Stuart has led the development of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney as one of the world’s leading research centres for studies on the political economy of climate change. He designed and lectures in the long-running innovative program on multi-disciplinary based Political Economy of the Environment’.