The paper deals with the impacts of emission reduction targets on fuel policy for electricity, and vice versa. It does so by comparing policy responses in two different institutional contexts. Supportive links were created, in Germany, between the reduction of acid emissions from power stations and the protection of nuclear power. This higher cost option was justified to an ‘aware’ public on environmental grounds. Politically this required a tacit alliance between coal-based and nuclear industries realising that the well-being of both depended on public support, the common challenge being fossil fuel suppliers in world markets. Cooperation with the State was therefore desirable and, in Germany, available. The British story is very different and not without irony. Similarities between the energy politics of acid rain and the global warming/climate change debate are explored. It is concluded that institutions and linkages between them matter very much.
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References
1.
Nuclear power had to be excluded from privatisation and will be subsidised by a 10.6% levy on fossil fuels. It was approved in Brussels in March 1990 until 1998 ‘in the first instance’. For all other electricity a ‘spot market’ has been created.
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This raises complex questions of wasteful versus non-wasteful investment which are not addressed here, but need to be analysed for energy/atmospheric pollution issues from a global perspective.
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I am indepted to Prof. John Surrey for this important insight into the history of both nuclear power and enviromentalism.
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The author does not argue that energy policy should be based on public opinion surveys, only that social acceptability (for which such volatile and often manipulated measures are no satisfactory indicator) is an important incredient of any policy. To create such acceptability is a task of government, education, the churches etc., not of directly interested parties.
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29.
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