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What is Strategic about Energy? De-simplifying Energy Security

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The Political Economy of Renewable Energy and Energy Security

Part of the book series: Energy, Climate and the Environment ((ECE))

Abstract

Modern and postmodern production and consumer societies rely on an abundant supply of energy to implement key policy goals. In pre-industrial society, the prevailing energy source was biomass as found in forests and marshlands From the 1830s, biomass was increasingly supplemented by coal. From 1900, coal was the world’s dominant energy source, fuelling manufacturing processes and heating urban dwellings. The dominance of coal in the world’s energy consumption lasted well into the 1950s, when the petroleum-fueled automobile was made broadly available in North America and, increasingly, also in other parts of the industrialized world. By the 1970s, a triad of fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — was established as the backbone and prevailing energy mix of the world’s energy supply (North and Thomas, 1976; Smil, 2010).

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  1. Gunnar Fermann
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Espen Moe (Associate Professor) & Paul Midford (Professor) (Associate Professor) &  (Professor)

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© 2014 Gunnar Fermann

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Fermann, G. (2014). What is Strategic about Energy? De-simplifying Energy Security. In: Moe, E., Midford, P. (eds) The Political Economy of Renewable Energy and Energy Security. Energy, Climate and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338877_2

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