Asia & the Pacific

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.

Windfall is the boldest profile of the world’s energy resources since Daniel Yergin’s The Quest. Harvard professor and former Washington policymaker Meghan L. O’Sullivan reveals how fears of energy scarcity have given way to the reality of energy abundance. This abundance is transforming the geo-political order and boosting American power.

The chapter discusses the EU as an actor in global energy, and shows that the EU – short of a strong set of policy tools – relies more than other players on exporting its own rules. It explores the areas in which the Commission is capable of exerting (regulatory) external power in the energy sector and assesses the Commission's actions with regards to the challenges facing the EU along the energy value chain: upstream, midstream and downstream.

The development and deployment of cleaner energy technologies have become globalized phenomena. Yet despite the fact that energy-related goods account for more than ten percent of international trade, policy makers, academics, and the business community perceive barriers to the global diffusion of these emerging technologies. Experts point to problems including intellectual property concerns, trade barriers, and developing countries' limited access to technology and funding. In this book, Kelly Gallagher uses analysis and case studies from China's solar photovoltaic, gas turbine, advanced battery, and coal gasification industries to examine both barriers and incentives in clean energy technology transfer.

Energy policy is on everyone's mind these days. The U.S. presidential campaign focused on energy independence and exploration ("Drill, baby, drill!"), climate change, alternative fuels, even nuclear energy. But there is a serious problem endemic to America's energy challenges. Policymakers tend to do just enough to satisfy political demands but not enough to solve the real problems, and they wait too long to act. The resulting policies are overly reactive, enacted once damage is already done, and they are too often incomplete, incoherent, and ineffectual. Given the gravity of current economic, geopolitical, and environmental concerns, this is more unacceptable than ever. This important volume details this problem, making clear the unfortunate results of such short-sighted thinking, and it proposes measures to overcome this counterproductive tendency.

Over several years, some of the most distinguished Chinese and American scholars have engaged in a major research project, sponsored by the China- U.S. Exchange Foundation (USEF), to address the big bilateral and global issues the two countries face. Historically, the ascension of a great power has resulted in armed conflict. This group of scholars—experts in politics, economics, international security, and environmental studies—set out to establish consensus on potentially contentious issues and elaborate areas where the two nations can work together to achieve common goals. Featuring essays on global warming, trade relations, Taiwan, democratization, WMDs and bilateral humanitarian intervention, Power and Restraint finds that China and the United States can exist side by side and establish mutual understanding to better cope with the common challenges they face.

Proceedings of the 1st National Conference on Advances in Energy Research held on December 4–5, 2006 sponsored by the Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

This chapter of the Proceedings of the 1st National Conference on Advances in Energy Research highlights the role of the coal sector.

This is the first handbook to provide a global policy perspective on energy, bringing together a diverse range of international energy issues in one volume.