From the Coal Age to Carbon Democracy: The Co-Evolution of Energy Regimes and Economic Thought

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Take the historical co-evolution framework to better understand why current carbon pricing debates persist and how policy sequencing theory supports cap-and-trade designs.

🏢実務担当者:Limited direct applicability, but the discussion on instrument choice under uncertainty can inform long-term transition risk assessments in scenario analysis.

🏛政策担当者:Consider the finding that quantity instruments outperform price-based approaches under high uncertainty when designing national carbon budgets or emissions trading systems.

本研究は、エネルギーキャリアの物質的・ネットワーク的性質が、経済学の言語と共進化してきたと論じる。石炭をめぐる埋蔵量と効率性の論争から、電力のグリッド論理、石油時代の豊かさと安定性の体制、1973年以降のエネルギー強度と節約の言説、そして炭素時代の大気予算編成に至る変容を時代区分する。方法論的には、学術テキストの精読と比較言説分析を、行政規制、工学報告書、公的執筆体制の横断的読解と組み合わせる。英国、米国、欧州に関するミニ事例を通じて、効率性の機械からシステム運用・ルール設計への移行、希少性の地下から大気への移行、代替性の価格シグナルからインフラ埋め込み性への移行、外部性の局所から地球規模への移行を描き出す。知見は、高不確実性の下では数量型手段（予算・上限）が価格ベースのアプローチより優れており、効果的な政策アーキテクチャは規模–分配–配分の順序付けを必要とすることを示す。貢献は、エネルギー体制と経済思想の間の双方向的な翻訳・流通プロセスを明るみに出すことで、理論–測定–ルールの連鎖を再構築することにある。

AI 翻訳（deepseek-v4-flash）。 正確を期す場合は下の原文を参照してください。

The study argues that the material and networked properties of energy carriers have co-evolved with the language of economics. It periodises the transformations from coal’s debates on stocks and efficiency, through the grid logic of electricity, the oil era’s regime of abundance and stability, and the post-1973 discourse of intensity and conservation, to the atmospheric budgeting of the carbon age. Methodologically, it combines close reading and comparative discourse analysis of disciplinary texts with cross-readings of administrative regulations, engineering reports, and public writing regimes. Through mini-cases on the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, it maps the shift of efficiency from the machine to system operation and rule design; of scarcity from underground to the atmosphere; of substitution from price signals to infrastructural embeddedness; and of externalities from the local to the global scale. The findings indicate that, under high uncertainty, quantity instruments (budgets/caps) outperform price-based approaches and that effective policy architectures require the sequencing of scale–distribution–allocation. The contribution is to reconstruct the theory–measurement–rule chain by bringing to light the bidirectional processes of translation and circulation between energy regimes and economic thought.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.29182/hehe.v29i2.1117first seen 2026-07-15 04:49:01