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This paper explores the opportunities for a 'just transition' to low carbon and sustainable energy systems; one that addresses the current inequities in the distribution of energy benefits and their human and ecological costs. In order to prioritize policies that address energy poverty alleviation and sustainability concerns, national action and higher levels of international cooperation and coordination are required to steer public policy towards a broader range of public interests. This also implies re-directing the vast sums of private energy finance that currently serve a narrow set of interests. This paper considers how national and global energy governance must adapt and change to ensure a just transition to low carbon and sustainable energy systems. Creating a low carbon and sustainable energy transition will face significant challenges in overcoming opposition from a broad array of interest groups. The challenges of guiding a just transition are amplified by the relinquishing of government control over the energy sector in many countries and the current weak and fragmented state of global energy governance. The necessary changes in energy decision making will entail complex trade-offs and rebound effects that make strong, participatory and transparent institutional arrangements essential in order to govern such challenges equitably. In this respect, procedural justice is critical to achieving distributive justice and to creating a simultaneously rapid, sustainable and equitable transition to clean energy futures.

Contributors: Gillian McEachern, Charles Campbell, Matt Price. BlueGreen Canada is a partnership of Environmental Defence and United Steelworkers. The report compares the government investment in clean energy jobs between Canada and the U.S. since Obama became President, and concludes that the lack of investment in Canada is creating thousands of lost jobs for Canadians. If Canada's spending matched U.S. investment in renewable energy alone, an additional estimated 66,000 jobs would have been created. The actual job gap is much larger once energy efficiency and transportation investment are taken into account. The report suggests an improved path for Canada to try to bridge the jobs gap. Includes a bibliography.

Since the New Deal, federal preemption has precluded many state and local regulatory decisions that depart from wholesale electric prices determined under federal standards. Recent decisions treat prices that meet the federal standard as a preemption ceiling, which prohibits states from setting prices that exceed the wholesale price set in a competitive market. Both appellate courts and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ("FERCâ€) - the primary federal agency responsible for the electric power sector - have recently applied a price preemption ceiling to clean energy policies. I argue in this Article that this price ceiling preemption approach hobbles the advancement of clean energy policy under both federal and state laws. State and local governments, along with regional institutions, have adopted a number of clean energy innovations, including feed-in tariffs for renewable power, novel approaches to transmission siting and cost allocation, and energy conservation policies. As subnational governments today consider how to encourage clean energy investments, they are increasingly bumping into limitations imposed by FERC and the courts under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Imposing a legal preemption ceiling on clean energy prices thwarts the ability of subnational governments to adopt policies that advance conservation and renewable energy goals. I argue that reassessing application of wholesale price ceiling preemption to regional, state and local clean energy innovations will allow courts and federal regulators to more effectively imagine the ability of federal energy laws to advance clean energy goals.