Author: Jenny Rinkinen, Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki, jenny.rinkinen@helsinki.fi
Fables are short stories, typically involving an animal character and often conveying a lesson, a message, a moral. They are a form of persuasive speech, and when taken to steer everyday action and decision making they are also performative. Like Aesop’s famous fables, they are a diffused body of popular knowledge.
Fables have come to populate our everyday lives and traces of them can be found in public speech. In our recent book, Energy fables: Challenging ideas in the energy sector (2019, Routledge), we turn our attention to some of the fables circulating in energy policy and research. Increasing energy efficiency, low hanging fruits, keeping the lights on, the energy trilemma, and seven other fables are some of the recurrent themes and established narratives that characterise the energy sector.
The sustainability-related ideas and concepts that we discuss in the book have become fable-like stories and normative guides to steer actions. When widely told and regularly repeated they become taken-for-granted truths that the whole policy package is built on. A good example of a widely circulated story is that of energy efficiency, which is taken to be the most crucial form of governmental response to climate change. The EU‘puts energy efficiency first’ and the International Energy Agency declares that ‘energy efficiency has tremendous potential to boost economic growth’. However, it is less often acknowledged that programmes of energy efficiency ‘justify investment in the production of more efficient appliances’, and also contribute to ‘increases in energy demand in that they reproduce and foster specific, and often resource intensive understandings of ‘service’ (Shove, 2019). Thus, energy efficiency doesn’t lead to the needed radical transformation of the dynamics of demand. Questions, such as, what is energy used for; how much energy do societies need; and how much consumption is compatible with meeting carbon targets need to come first (Shove, 2019).
Unpacking the well-established terms helps to show their often hidden assumptions and suggest new directions. Such a task is important for a number of reasons. First, the urgency of meeting carbon reductions has pushed the energy sector into flux. New means for meeting carbon reductions are desperatly needed. At the same time, dominant ideas remain rooted in the ideologies of consumer choice, growing resource economics, and trust in unlimited and ‘clean’ sources of energy. Unpacking these fables also helps to show that many of the dominant approaches steering the energy sector rely on efficiency gains and technological development, and similarly take demand for granted. Discussions about the ‘energy trilemma’, for example, are in essence discussions about how to handle tensions between energy security, affordability and carbon – but not about how much energy is required overall or for what purpose. It follows that responses and strategies are developed and evaluated as if demand was simply ‘there’.
Energy demand – and more generally the hunger for more and more resources – is growing globally at a fast phase. Too easily we become blind to this growing appetite, and the dynamics underpinning it. For example, conventions around thermal comfort have changed radically only within few decades, and the demand for air conditioners has racketed. Usually the discussion revolves around making air conditioning technology more efficient. This, however, does not take away the problem of the massive increase in global demand for these resource intensive technologies and the environmental harms caused by their use and production, nor does it help to understand why we ‘need’ more air conditioned space, and how that need could be tamed. A profound re-consideration of the dynamics of demand is needed to take more significant steps towards demand reduction (Rinkinen et al., forthcoming).
Busting sustainability-related myths is much welcomed in other fields too beyond the energy sector. SUCH scholars are actively engaged in such work when they are dealing with issues like post-growth futures, or diverse multispecies encounters and challenging the taken for granted ideas steering our everyday lives.
References
Rinkinen, J., Shove, E., & Torriti, J. (Eds.). (2019). Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector. Routledge: London.
Rinkinen, J. (forthcoming) Conceptualising demand. A distinctive approach to consumption and practice. Forthcoming in spring 2020, Routledge.
Shove, E. (2019). Energy efficiency. In Rinkinen, J., Shove, E., & Torriti, J. (eds). Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector. Routledge: London.