The Bath Centre for Earth Systems Governance (BCESG) and the Institute of Sustainability and Climate Change (ISCC) are co-hosting a seminar by Dr Lukas Slothuus from the University of Sussex, on what can be learned from attempts to phase out fossil fuel production? The political economy of fossil fuel supply-side policy.

What can be learned from attempts to phase out fossil fuel production

Fossil fuels are the main driver of the accelerating climate crisis. The most common approach to tackling this is reducing consumption, but what about reducing production? In this presentation, Dr Slothuus will explain, justify, and explore the need for including a production-centred approach in fossil fuel phaseouts.

Drawing on fieldwork across first-mover countries that have in various ways addressed the production side (the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and Costa Rica), he will discuss the main lessons from these cases. Why, when, where, and how do fossil fuel supply-side phaseout policies emerge, what are their limits, and do they present an attractive pathway to limiting climate crisis?

About the speaker

Dr Lukas Slothuus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Sussex. He researches the politics and political economy of green transitions, with a particular focus on the phaseout of fossil fuel production. He is part of the SUS-POL: Supply-side Policies for Fossil Fuels Research Programme led by Professor Peter Newell.

His work has been published in journals such as Global Environmental Politics, Review of International Political Economy, Energy Research & Social Science, and Geopolitics. With the SUS-POL team, he is currently writing a book about fossil fuel phaseouts, under contract with Oxford University Press.