Page - 141 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Exploring post-carbon futures ČERNÝ, Martin, KIMMICH, Christian, KERSCHNER, Christian Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic Introduction Revealing potential paths to a post-carbon future requires qualified estimates of possible trajectories in particular areas of the socio-economic system, especially regarding available technologies, infrastructures, policies and labour demand. With our approach, we aim to identify implications of the post-carbon transformation (inspired by the European Union’s energy roadmap and its goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80–95 % by 2050) for labour demand, in order to gain a better understanding of the system and guide our choices and actions at the present. We propose a stakeholder-supported, evidence-based decision support system for economic, social, and biophysical impact assessments of the post-carbon transformation. Participatory modelling combined with input-output analysis (IOA) is proposed as a tool to address these requirements. The input-output model provides an analysis of the structural economic impacts of the post-carbon economy in terms of monetary flows between economic sectors and associated changes in labour demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We briefly describe the approach and discuss some methodological challenges that have to be addressed. Post-carbon economy We approximate the post-carbon economy as an economy fully based on renewable energy sources (RES). Decreasing electricity costs from renewables as a whole, and the low costs from the best solar PV and onshore wind projects in particular, represent an important change. Therefore, wind onshore and solar PV energy is taken as a basis for the post-carbon economy because of their increasing importance in the energy mix and also very promising competitiveness in comparison with conventional energy sources (IEA 2017). Moreover, especially wind and solar energy are often said to have positive effects on employment (Bernardo and D’Alessandro 2016). The transformation process requires explicit assumptions about possible future developments in sectors crucial for the transformation. As the first step and as an example of the proposed approach, we focus on modelling changes in the sector of electricity production (i.e. replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources), based on expert judgements regarding possible future development trajectories. Electricity production is one of the largest sources of GHG emissions from human activities from burning fossil fuels (together with heat and transportation) worldwide as well as in the European Union (EU) (IEA 2018). Nevertheless, if we approximate the post-carbon economy as a RES based economy, then we also have to replace every input from the refinery sector, providing fossil fuels, fully to electricity or other renewable source of appropriate form of energy. To do so, similar analyses can be replicated for other GHG emissions intensive sectors such as transportation. But as our aim here is just to provide an example of the proposed approach, we focus only on the sector of electricity production. 141