Towns in Transition: Kern County, CA as a Case Study for Justice Considerations in Decarbonization
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The 2016 presidential election revealed the political power of discourse surrounding the collapse of coal towns. In my research, I investigate the future of towns reliant on another geopolitically potent fossil fuel resource: oil. Kern County, California has some of the oldest oilfields in the nation, and typically supplies about 75% of the oil consumed in California. Unstable oil prices have caused county budget crises and plagues of unemployment. At the same time, the statewide policy push toward renewable energy has jumpstarted the solar sector in Kern County. My research takes an ethnographic and economic perspective in order to understand how the two energy industries interact in the community. The goal of the project is to build a better understanding of the cultural effects of these industries, both for academic purposes and concerned citizenry. Through a range of interviews with stakeholders from the oil and solar industries, local government and social impact sector, themes emerged surrounding the normalcy of boom-bust cycles, solar as an economic growth area non-competitive with oil, cultural resentment tied to energy policy, and complicated environmental and equity issues. Some indicators, such as the fairly comparable nature and distribution of work in oil and solar, support the idea that solar can help pave the way for smooth local transitions in a decarbonizing economy. Other considerations, such as complicated property tax schemes, reveal challenges that merit more policy attention as we move toward further decarbonization. Finally, I examine how both these social and economic indicators fulfill the goals of justice in the transition to a low carbon economy. To do so, I examine the Kern County case study under three emerging frameworks: energy justice, just transition, and climate policy equity.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Statler, Ada |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Cain, Bruce |
| Advisor | Burke, Marshall |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Earth Systems |
Subjects
| Subject | earth systems |
|---|---|
| Subject | Bill Lane Center |
| Subject | American West |
| Subject | Kern County |
| Subject | renewable energy |
| Subject | oil and gas production |
| Subject | politics |
| Subject | public opinion |
| Subject | environmental justice |
| Subject | environmental policy |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Statler, Ada. (2018). Towns in Transition: Kern County, CA as a Case Study for Justice Considerations in Decarbonization. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/rk423rt4849
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Doerr School of Sustainability
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- Contact
- adastat@stanford.edu
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