Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Approaches to Energy Transition: Why the Societal ‘Ends’ Are More Important than the Technical ‘Means’ of Any New Paradigm
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic researchers in technical and policy fields tend to pay little attention to the metaphysical and ontological ‘priors’ that nevertheless structure and determine scientific strategies and results. Green political agendas rooted in ecological modernization (EM) are distinguished from antecedent visions predicated on biophysical limits. Net zero is shown to be rooted in a project of global EM. Ecomodernism is analyzed in relation to its principal actors, geopolitical context and underlying metaphysics and anthropology. It is driven by non-negotiable societal priorities (‘ends’), which themselves derive from a particular set of technical ‘means’. The top-down version of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4.0) and new paradigm of global net zero constitute an integrated agenda of eco-modernism. Global net zero cannot hope to achieve its own metabolic goals in respect of either energy flows or the circular economy. A competing, bottom-up and distributed model of the IR4.0 could potentially achieve these targets without falling prey to the Jevons paradox. This potential turns on the greater capacity of low-overhead, prosumer models to nurture less materialist cultural priorities that are more communitarian and family-oriented. A smart energy system that emerges in the context of distributed, domestic and informal production is much more likely to mirror the complex, infinitely gradated and granular pattern of oscillating energy transfers that are characteristic of biological systems. From an ecological economic perspective, such a bottom-up approach to the IR4.0 is much more likely to see the orders of magnitude reduction in the unit energetic cost of social complexity envisaged, in principle, by net zero. Through this comprehensive review of the metaphysical and ontological priors of mainstream IR4.0, researchers in the linked fields of energy and circular economy are presented with a wider range of potential options less constrained by preconceived assumptions about the ‘ends’ of societal development and progress.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it