Super Polluters : : Tackling the World’s Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions / / Andrew Jorgenson, Don Grant, Wesley Longhofer.

Power plants are essential to achieving the standard of living that modern societies demand and the social and economic infrastructure on which they depend. Yet their indispensability has allowed them to evade responsibility for their vast carbon emissions. Fossil-fueled power plants are the single...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
VerfasserIn:
Place / Publishing House:New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2020]
©2020
Year of Publication:2020
Language:English
Series:Society and the Environment
Online Access:
Physical Description:1 online resource
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Other title:Frontmatter --
Contents --
List of Illustrations and Tables --
Acknowledgments --
1. Who Is Responsible for This Mess?: The Climate Crisis and Hyperemitting Power Plants --
2. Cleaning Up Their Act: Potential Emission Reductions from Targeting the Worst of the Worst Power Plants --
3. Recipes for Disaster: How Social Structures Interact to Make Environmentally Destructive Plants Even More So --
4. A Win-Win Solution?: The Paradoxical Effects of Efficiency on Plants’ CO2 Emissions --
5. Bottom-Up Strategies: The Effectiveness of Local Policies and Activism (with Ion Bogdan Vasi) --
6. Next Steps: Future Research and Action on Society’s Super Polluters --
Appendixes --
Notes --
References --
Index
Summary:Power plants are essential to achieving the standard of living that modern societies demand and the social and economic infrastructure on which they depend. Yet their indispensability has allowed them to evade responsibility for their vast carbon emissions. Fossil-fueled power plants are the single largest sites of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, making them one of the greatest threats to our planet’s climate. Significant as they are, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the social causes that enable power plant emissions and continue to delay their reduction.Super Polluters offers a groundbreaking global analysis of carbon pollution caused by the generation of electricity, pinpointing who bears the most responsibility for the energy sector’s vast emissions and what can be done about them. The sociologists Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer analyze a novel dataset on the carbon dioxide emissions and structural attributes of thousands of fossil-fueled power plants around the world, identifying which plants discharge the most carbon. They investigate the global, organizational, and political conditions that explain these hyper-emitting facilities’ behavior and call into question the claim that improvements in technical efficiency will always reduce emissions. Grant, Jorgenson, and Longhofer demonstrate which energy and climate policies are most effective at abating power-plant pollution, emphasizing how mobilized citizen activism shapes those outcomes. A comprehensive account of who bears the blame for our warming planet, Super Polluters points to more feasible and effective emission reduction strategies that target the world’s most profligate polluters.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780231549691
9783110710977
9783110704716
9783110704518
9783110704808
9783110704600
DOI:10.7312/gran19216
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Andrew Jorgenson, Don Grant, Wesley Longhofer.