Dancing to the Rhythms of the Fossil Fuel Landscape: Landscape Inertia and the Temporal Limits to Market-Based Climate Policy

• This article makes a contribution to the critique of market-based mechanisms for climate and energy policy. It explores the environmental effectiveness of market instruments by engaging a broadly conceived “fossil fuel landscape”, or the material, social, and political inertia of fossil energy dependence, as a factor delimiting policy outcomes. The argument is developed through a focus on the idea of economic efficiency as a key ideological construct underlying market-based policy, and draws on examples from two different market instruments, namely the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and the Flemish tradable green certificate scheme. I argue that an understanding of the shortcomings of these, and similar, policies requires acknowledgment of the political and socio-economic power that emanates from the temporal dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism, which are reproduced when economic efficiency becomes the key focus of climate policy.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

market-based mechanisms

EU ETS

tradable green certificates

fossil fuel landscape

landscape inertia

Publikations- och innehållstyp

art (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)