Climate change governance increasingly unfolds through energy transitions, yet the symbolic conditions under which these transitions are publicly interpreted remain insufficiently mapped. This study examines the representation of climate change in digital discourse during 2025, focusing on the structural positioning of energy-related framings. Drawing on Social Representation Theory, we analyse 537,953 Reddit comments using ThemeScope, a network-based approach combining community detection with a two-dimensional mapping of structural salience and lexical concreteness. The results reveal a differentiated and hierarchically organised architecture of meaning. Energy Transition and Political Economy of Decarbonisation emerges as a materially grounded and structurally central domain, indicating that climate change is predominantly articulated through infrastructures, markets, industrial strategy, and energy security concerns. Institutional politics, scientific legitimacy, and moral-epistemic contestation constitute highly salient interpretative layers through which governance conflicts and expertise are negotiated. By contrast, vulnerability narratives, geopolitical framings, media reflexivity, and scientific–environmental monitoring occupy more peripheral or supporting positions within the communicative structure. These findings suggest that, within this Reddit-based digital public, climate discourse is organised around energy systems as primary symbolic anchors through which broader institutional, ideological, and societal tensions are interpreted. Policy legitimacy depends not only on technological feasibility but also on resonance with structurally central domains of meaning. By integrating socio-technical transition theory with large-scale discourse mapping, the study contributes a scalable framework for analysing the symbolic architecture within which energy transitions are debated and legitimised.
Decarbonising the United Kingdom's housing stock is a critical component of government strategy to achieve net zero by 2050, and social housing providers have a significant role in delivering the energy retrofit measures necessary to achieve this aim. However, social housing tenants retain the right to refuse retrofit measures, and tenant refusal remains a significant and ongoing barrier to successful retrofit delivery. Research on barriers to retrofit uptake has focused primarily on information and communication, tenant engagement and inclusion in decision-making, tenant learning about retrofit technologies, and reducing disruption to tenants.However, little attention has been paid to the organisational transformation necessary to support these outcomes. Drawing on a government-funded intensive action research project and a case study of a single housing association, this paper examines organisational understandings of retrofit refusal and the organisational conditions of retrofit delivery. The findings identify organisational fragmentation, weak internal coherence, and misaligned delivery practices as conditions associated with tenant-facing experiences of retrofit. Rather than directly explaining individual tenant refusal decisions, the paper develops a relational model of how organisational coherence shapes the conditions under which retrofit is experienced, negotiated, and potentially accepted or refused. The paper therefore shifts attention from tenant refusal as an individual decision toward the organisational conditions that shape retrofit experiences and negotiations, highlighting the importance of organisational coherence in the delivery of social housing retrofit.
In order to accelerate the energy transition, policies have proven successful to reduce emissions, but more policy innovations are needed to reach carbon neutrality. Despite some understanding of the process of such innovations, the role of knowledge is not addressed in a systematic way. In particular, the role of energy models has not been investigated thoroughly. In this article, we examined the types of knowledge utilization and the ways in which they influence the development of policy innovation. We focused on energy modelling and conducted a case study of the European Union's (EU) 55% climate target for 2030, and analytically distinguish three uses of model outputs (rational, legitimizing and enlightening), for which we nuance who uses what knowledge to what effect. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 33 text documents and 12 semi-structured interviews with EU policy modelers and policymakers, the results indicate that energy models enable and constrain policy innovations. Model outputs were mainly utilized to legitimize the previously formulated 55% target, but also in rational and enlightening ways for the development of a policy mix to achieve this target. However, the absence of assessments of higher targets might have inhibited the adoption of a more ambitious policy. Based on these results we identify enabling and inhibiting factors for the use of energy models in policymaking. Beyond energy modelling, the study develops our understanding of how different uses of knowledge affect policy innovation and lays the foundation for future studies on the uses of different kinds of knowledge.
We argue that Bitcoin mining can be analyzed as strategic energy infrastructure under specific institutional and electricity-system conditions, rather than being assessed only as a digital commodity activity or as aggregate electricity consumption. Our perspective links energy assets to hashpower, that is, the aggregate computational work devoted to securing the Bitcoin ledger, and, in turn, to security services that underpin censorship resistance and settlement finality, which refers to the increasing practical difficulty of reversing confirmed transactions. We assemble insights from the operational realities of mining as a potentially location-flexible and conditionally interruptible industrial activity that may locate near stranded, curtailed, or seasonally variable generation, thereby linking local energy conditions to the production of hashpower. We then consider geopolitical and policy dimensions: the spatial distribution of hashpower, exposure to sanctions and financial blockades, and the emerging industrial-policy race to attract or restrain large-scale compute loads. This reframing highlights broader trade-offs for regulators and policymakers concerning siting, environmental impacts, infrastructural resilience, and cybersecurity. We acknowledge uncertainties, including price volatility, jurisdictional risk, and heterogeneous lifecycle emissions, and avoid complete empirical modeling, aiming instead to clarify where social science and policy analysis can add the most value. We conclude with a research agenda on the conditions under which mining’s facility-level curtailment is valuable relative to alternative flexibility resources, how its siting choices distribute benefits and burdens, how hashpower concentration affects resilience, and how national interventions shift where, and under whose rules, hashpower is produced.
Residential energy efficiency plays a critical role in supporting the energy transition towards net zero. Policies aimed at the disclosure of residential energy efficiency information at the time of sale and/or lease often focus on the disclosure of home energy ratings and/or energy performance certificates. However, to date, less attention has been paid to how information about energy efficiency features is communicated to consumers in property advertising, despite information disseminated through digital property platforms having the potential to impact consumers' decision-making. To address this gap, this study conducted the first nationwide evaluation of how energy efficiency features are communicated in online property listings in Australia. The study dataset included over 1 million residential listings advertised for sale and/or lease in Australia from January to December 2023. Quantitative text analysis was applied to investigate the prevalence, terminology and mechanisms used to disclose information for seven residential energy efficiency features. The study found that information about energy efficiency features is underreported and often imperfect within Australian online property listings. To improve the disclosure of energy efficiency information in digital property advertising, it is critical to develop a data dictionary with standardised energy efficiency terminology as well as to utilise choice architecture mechanisms such as property data attribute lists. The use of those strategies will enhance how energy efficiency information is communicated through property advertising, increase the visibility of residential energy efficiency information across the building supply chain and better support residential energy efficiency disclosure initiatives.
Emerging economies face substantial pressure from some other countries to reform their climate policies and practices. Few countries have faced greater foreign criticism than Brazil. What are the effects of these foreign interventions on Brazilian citizens’ climate policy opinions? In a preregistered survey experiment, the effects of prompts about foreign aid and international shame from prominent actors on citizens’ attitudes toward various climate policies are examined. The results show Brazilians perceive climate aid as fairer than international shaming, but neither intervention shifts average policy support much, except shaming only marginally reduces support for a carbon tax. Effects emerge, however, when disaggregating by respondents’ prior environmental attitudes: foreign aid increases support for several policies among environmentally conscious citizens while decreasing it among those with weaker environmental attitudes, a polarizing pattern shaming also produces, though more modestly and for fewer policies. The results show that well intended foreign aid, as an alternative to shame, is not universally well received. Moreover, the results show clear differences in treatment effects between policies by environmental attitudes. The study overall finds foreign interventions are not straightforward in growing pro-climate policy coalitions in Global South democracies.
Energy transitions depend not only on technology and economic incentives, but also on legitimacy, trust, and local systems of authority. This article examines these dynamics through the case of “kosher electricity” in Israel's Ultra-Orthodox community: the use of fuel-powered generators to supply electricity during Shabbat and religious holidays without prohibited human intervention. Although this system is costly, polluting, and associated with safety risks, it remains socially legitimate in parts of the community. Based on a qualitative case study, including 23 semi-structured interviews, four focus groups, field observation, and a review of religious sources, the article analyzes how energy decisions are shaped in a high-cohesion religious community with strong rabbinic authority and relatively low trust in state institutions. The findings show that kosher electricity functions not only as an energy practice, but also as a religious, communal, and identity-based arrangement. Participants demonstrated practical awareness of electricity costs, appliance efficiency, and Shabbat consumption limits, yet this knowledge became behaviorally relevant only when filtered through rabbinic authority and communal legitimacy. The study further shows that shared infrastructure, internal financing, community-based governance, participation boundaries, and trust allow kosher electricity to function as an informal and unrecognized energy community. The article contributes to energy-community research by showing how collective energy arrangements can emerge outside formal, renewable, or state-recognized models. It also suggests design principles for future renewable-energy and storage pilots in religiously conservative communities.
Contemporary urban life depends on extensive inflows of energy and materials while displacing waste, depletion, and environmental burdens beyond the city. Although urban metabolism research has documented these flows, it has paid less attention to the everyday social practices through which they are organized and reproduced. This article develops the concept of practice metabolism to bridge critical ecological economics and theories of social practice. Practice metabolism refers to the transformation of matter-energy through everyday activities such as mobility, housing, communication, consumption, and food provision. The article advances four arguments. First, it conceptualizes resources as constitutive conditions of social organization rather than neutral inputs. Second, it shifts the analysis of urban metabolism from aggregate flows to socially organized practices. Third, it interprets everyday practices as thermodynamic processes that transform low-entropy resources into high-entropy waste. Fourth, it reframes urban-rural relations as unequal metabolic dependencies sustained through ecologically unequal exchange. By foregrounding the material and energetic dimensions of practice, the article offers a framework for understanding how urban life reproduces ecological overshoot and socio-ecological injustice. It concludes that sustainability requires not only technological improvement but also the reorganization of practices toward lower matter-energy throughput and more equitable metabolic relations.
Photovoltaic (PV) waste management is emerging as a central governance challenge for the global solar energy transition. Existing discussions typically conceptualize PV waste as a delayed consequence of cumulative deployment and module ageing. However, PV modules and related components may be repaired, replaced, refurbished, resold, exported, or redeployed before reaching final disposal. Waste generation is therefore increasingly shaped by secondary-market circulation, changing ownership, and uneven recovery capacity across markets and jurisdictions. This article reframes PV waste as a problem of mobile technological afterlives rather than only downstream recycling. Drawing on evidence from global PV markets, recycling systems, and off-grid solar sectors, it identifies a mismatch between increasingly mobile solar products and governance systems premised on local, delayed, and predictable waste generation. The article argues that effective PV waste governance requires lifecycle coordination that maintains traceability, responsibility, financing, and recovery capacity across product movements. It proposes a governance framework centred on product traceability, second-life certification, extended responsibility, pre-financed recovery, and spatially coordinated recycling systems.
Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions requires large-scale investment in clean energy infrastructure, with potentially far-reaching system-wide consequences for employment and wages. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) and Input-Output (IO) models are widely used to assess these impacts but typically rely on stylised labour market assumptions that can substantially distort projections. This paper addresses that gap by developing a unified analytical wage-setting framework. This framework encompasses nominal and real wage rigidities, money illusion, inflation expectations, and unemployment responsiveness. These factors are integrated into a dynamic CGE model linked to a bottom-up energy system optimisation model. Our results re-emphasise that labour market specification is a first-order determinant of potential outcomes. Under fixed-wage assumptions, as used in standard IO analyses, employment rises substantially above baseline by 2045 (due to the large-scale investments). However, using our preferred, empirically grounded wage curve specification, the gain is more modest. Under the most restrictive Phillips curve specification, gains are near-zero, and employment can temporarily decline during the peak investment period. Similarly, endogenous GDP, wages, and household consumption impacts vary across scenarios. These contrasting results demand fundamentally different policy responses. Optimistic fixed-wage projections may appear to justify passive policy, while empirically grounded specifications point to the potential need for active labour market intervention. We conclude that the employment dividend of green investment is modest, that assessments relying on fixed-wage assumptions risk overstating it substantially, and that impact assessment and policies should therefore be based on empirically grounded wage-setting specifications rather than the optimistic closures common in current practice.
Supporting householders to retrofit their homes is becoming a key lever for many countries to achieve their energy efficiency and emission reduction targets. In Australia, retrofit programs run by national and state governments are increasingly complemented by programs from local governments and community groups. Despite this proliferation, little is known about the assumptions, values, beliefs and rules that shape how these different groups design and deliver their programs. This paper addresses this gap by investigating what program organisers in state government, local government and community organisations need in order to design and deliver home energy retrofit programs. Through interviews with 19 program organisers, we identify 20 distinct needs spanning program design and implementation. Analysing how each group articulates these needs, and the solutions they employ to address them, reveals implicit paradigms guiding their work. Using an Institutional Logics perspective, we show that these paradigms rest on two contrasting logics: a Market Logic emphasising rational choice and standardised delivery, and a Community Logic foregrounding trust building and place-based relationships. State government programs are predominantly shaped by the Market Logic, community groups by the Community Logic, and local government combines elements of both. We argue that substantial energy efficiency gains depend not only on better designed individual programs but also on conditions that allow locally led, relationship-based programs to grow in number, scale and durability.
Approval-stage greenhouse gas (GHG) estimates are critical for emissions-intensive projects, including coal mines. This is because they inform decisions by regulators, investors, and project proponents about expected emission profiles and climate-risk implications. If these estimates are systematically underestimated, decision-makers may rely on a distorted assessment of climate risk and approve projects that later prove more emissions-intensive than expected. Although prior research shows that mine sites can underreport GHG emissions during operations, little is known about whether underestimation also occurs at the environmental impact statement (EIS) stage. Using a document-based case study of 19 open-cut coal mines in New South Wales, Australia, we compare EIS Scope 1 emissions estimates with subsequent operational disclosures. In cases where realised emissions exceeded initial projections, mines exceeded projected emissions by over 800,000 t of CO2-equivalent annually, with an average excess of approximately 110% among over-emitting cases. These underestimations appear to arise from optimistic pre-operational projections, discretionary use of emission factors during operations, and the absence of regulatory requirements to reconcile project-level forecasts with subsequent operational disclosures. This insight suggests that researchers and practitioners should pay closer attention to pre-operational projections when assessing the integrity of GHG disclosures. Future research should examine whether stronger reconciliation requirements, independent assurance, satellite-based monitoring, or transparent emission-factor disclosure can reduce discrepancies between projected and realised emissions across other jurisdictions and emissions-intensive sectors.
Energy security has become harder to define precisely. Once centered on fuel supply continuity, the term now spans debates on decarbonization, electricity-system resilience, industrial policy, and climate risk. Existing reviews capture parts of it but remain limited in corpus size, temporal coverage, regional comparison, or attention to shocks. This review uses large language models to classify 9992 energy security publications from the Web of Science Core Collection (1990–2024) against an established seven-dimensional framework: energy availability, infrastructure, prices, societal effects, environment, governance, and energy efficiency. Using this common baseline, we ask how the low-carbon transition has changed not only the field's content but its organizing logic. Three findings stand out. First, the literature has not simply broadened but been reorganized. Availability remains foundational, but environmental concerns increasingly shape how other dimensions are framed. Second, aggregate trends mask distinct regional logics. Chinese research remains tied to state capacity and strategic control, United States scholarship is dispersed across resilience, markets, and technology, and European work weights governance under interdependence. Global South research diverges further, from energy access in Sub-Saharan Africa to supply geopolitics in the Middle East. Third, external shocks matter unevenly. The Russia-Ukraine conflict temporarily re-centered supply, prices, and emergency infrastructure, whereas climate change has durably embedded transition risk, system vulnerability, and sustainability within energy security. Energy security in the low-carbon transition is therefore not one universal condition but a context-dependent configuration of risks, infrastructures, and transition pathways. Mapping that configuration supplies a benchmark for assessing policies advanced in its name.
