Asia & the Pacific

Like revolutions in the past the on-going AI revolution will produce winners and losers. The first industrial revolution in the 18th century changed the world of production and paved the way for Britain’s global leadership. Similarly, the current digital revolution is redefining the service sector and China’s role in the world.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the latest research from leading scholars on the international political economy of energy and resources. Highlighting the important conceptual and empirical themes, the chapters study all levels of governance, from global to local, and explore the wide range of issues emerging in a changing political and economic environment.

Faced with the twin pressures of a still-quickly growing economy and unprecedented smog from coal-fired plants, China is racing to expand its fleet of nuclear power plants. As it does so, Beijing is considering making large capital investments in facilities to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and recycle the resulting plutonium in fast neutron reactors that breed more plutonium. This report outlines the enormous costs China would likely face if it decides to build large-scale plants for reprocessing plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and recycling the plutonium in fast neutron reactors.

"Government support in the form of so-called feed-in tariff policies (FITs), which combine long-term, fixed-price electricity purchase agreements and guaranteed grid-access, has attracted large private-sector investments in sustainable electricity generation in the industrialized world. In an effort to replicate these experiences globally, a number of international organizations, NGOs, banks and donor countries are proposing mechanisms to cover part of the cost of FITs in developing countries. This paper reviews these proposals for supported FITs and then uses a case study of Thailand's Alternative Energy Development Plan 2013–2021 to investigate the opportunities and challenges of supporting FITs at a global scale."

High upfront costs are a critical barrier for investments in clean infrastructure technologies in developing countries. This paper uses a case study of Thailand's electricity sector to create realistic estimates for the relative contributions of local and global technological learning to reducing these cost in the future and discusses implications of such learnings for international climate policy.

"March 11, 2011, was three distinct disasters. The earthquake and tsunami fell into the category of tragedies that are often unavoidable. But the nuclear accident requires a different analytical frame, and proponents of nuclear energy shouldn't be allowed to write off the Fukushima crisis as a natural disaster. Since the industrial revolution, there have always been industrial harms. As societies require more of technology, engineering, and transportation, there will be blips in the systems. What isn't inevitable, however, is that they happen again."

This timely book examines comprehensively the drivers of and constraints on a prospective nuclear revival and its likely nature and scope. Of special interest are developing countries which aspire to have nuclear energy and which currently lack the infrastructure, experience, and regulatory structures to successfully manage such a major industrial enterprise. The Fukushima disaster has made such considerations even more pertinent: if a technologically sophisticated country like Japan has difficulties dealing with nuclear safety and security how much harder would it be for a newcomer to the technology.