Thread by @lamb_wf

Climate policies affect not just the energy system, but society at large.

Both advocates and opponents of climate action recognise this, turning social aspects of climate policies into a key rhetorical battleground.

In a recent paper, we looked into this
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…

Our article is a review. We ask the question "What are the social outcomes of climate policies?" and set out to read the ex-post literature.

That means we found as many studies as we could on *actual implemented climate policies* where social outcomes were documented.

(Methods side note: how did we find all that literature? YES, MACHINE LEARNING. We trained a computer to read 45,000 article abstracts and sort out the relevant ones for us to review. Still ended up reading 4650 abstracts though... leading to 203 articles included in our review)

What's a climate policy? I'm glad you asked!

We looked at carbon/energy taxes, feed in tariffs (FITs), subsidies, grid-scale renewable deployment, direct procurement and "other policies" (a jumble of things like standards where we found not a lot of literature).

A summary:

You might wonder what grid-scale renewable deployment is doing on our "policy" list.

Well, it turns out that large scale renewable projects have very relevant social impacts, plus they are often supported by governments. Think about hydro dams, which directly affect thousands.

What kind of social outcomes?

Everyone talks about inequality... but we wanted to go broad and see what else exists.

In the end we found relevant impacts spanning energy access, affordability, employment and livelihoods, inequality, social cohesion and procedural justice.

Our overall results highlight diverse social impacts - both positive and negative - across all policy categories.

Stand out results include the distributional impacts of taxes, feed in tariffs & subsidies, and impacts of renewable deployment on livelihoods & procedural justice

An important takeaway is how complex these impacts can be.

Take feed in tariffs for example, which are a surcharge on electricity prices used to supplement the revenue for renewable electricity producers.

Since electricity (a basic need) is a higher share of budgets in poorer households, they tend to bear a higher burden from the policy.

Worse, poorer households and areas (e.g. inner cities) tend not to get policy benefits, because they cant afford/install solar panels.

On the other hand, FITs have led to a very rapid expansion of renewables in several countries, putting downward pressure on electricity prices. Plus, these policies are often implemented in a package of other measures, making a clear assessment of outcomes very difficult

A much clearer picture of social outcomes emerges for grid-scale renewable deployments. The literature has been *very* critical of hydro projects in the global south for serious violations of procedural justice and widespread impacts on livelihoods and social cohesion.

Imaging hearing that your land is going to be flooded the day the diggers arrive. Or that you will get "better" land and supplementary payments as compensation, but neither materialise. Or that land previously held as commons will now be privatised and sold to developers.

Worryingly, the same issues are now arising with large wind and solar power projects in the global South.

Studies from Mexico, Kenya, Brazil and India point towards new forms of enclosure and ensuing conflicts as the same mistakes of the past are repeated. ☹️

There is far too much content in our article for a short thread (please read it)! I'll finish by echoing many others with a few points...

(1) Sometimes the negative social outcomes of climate policies are overblown (especially taxes, which have had largely trivial or progressive impacts on income equality).

This is of course a rhetorical tactic to delay climate policy

https://twitter.com/lamb_wf/status/1278242106625187841

(2) Positive social outcomes can be baked into climate policy. We find many, from home energy retrofits targetting low income families first, to lump sum transfers, revenue recycling and community ownership models.

We should do all this and more in a wonderful green new deal. 👍

(3) Ignoring the social outcomes of climate policies (which much of the literature seems to do... only 203 articles? come on...) is a gift to fossil fuel interests. We can't afford to get this wrong.

Many thanks to my amazing author team @Miklos_Antal @k_bohnenberger @librand3 @Jakob_MCC, Finn Müller-Hansen, Jan Minx, Kilian Raiser, Laurence Williams and Benjamin Sovacool.