In progress, Journal article How the Transition to Net Zero will Redefine Energy Security: A Survey of Emerging Risks. Louis Fletcher & Michael Bradshaw.

In the past, energy security has centred on managing predictable threats to a systemically stable system, like infrastructural aging, demand peaks and technical failure, and preparing for acute supply-side shocks. We examine how the global transition to net zero, and its potential disorder and disruption, is creating a new and unfamiliar energy security landscape. We survey the 'transition security risks' of three areas: critical mineral supply chains, the build-out of low-carbon technologies, and the managed decline of fossil fuels.

In progress, Report ‘The Future of Natural Gas in the UK’s Energy System: Managing Energy Security & Transition Risks’, UKERC, eds., Michael Bradshaw, Louis Fletcher & Rob Gross.

We bring together work from across the UK Energy Research Centre and the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, as well as findings from a one-day stakeholder workshop, to look at the future energy security challenges facing the UK’s declining gas system - from LNG, to pipelines, to heating.

Under Review, Journal article Rethinking Energy Geopolitics: Towards a Geopolitical Economy of Global Energy Transformation. Caroline Kuzemko, Mathieu Blondeel, Michael Bradshaw, Gavin Bridge, Erika Faigen, and Louis Fletcher.

We develop a tentative framework through which to make sense of the global energy system transformation, one that does justice to its scale, dynamism, and active construction. We attend to three areas of geopolitical economy: the wide-ranging material dimensions of the transformation, its geographical space-making, and its conflict-ridden politics. We then apply this framework to two case studies, one looking at the fraught role of fossil gas as a ‘transition fuel’, the other at the global production networks of electrochemical energy storage.

2023, Journal article A Modern Theodicy: John Rawls' and ‘The Law of Peoples’, European Journal of Political Theory. Online First. [link]

I argue that John Rawls’ final work, his normative theory of world politics, The Law of Peoples, is a secular theodicy. Rawls wants to show that the ‘great evils’ of humankind do not condemn our species by establishing a basic of practical hope in the possibility of perfect justice. I pursue this revisionist interpretation tributary to the wider aim of unfurling the quasi-religious basis of Rawls’ idealising and moralising approach to political theory - which has exercised enormous sway over the discipline for the past half-century.

2023 Report ‘The Shale Gas Endgame? A Review of the United Kingdom’s Short-Lived Revival of Shale Gas Exploration, 2021-2022’, UKUH, Louis Fletcher & Michael Bradshaw. [link]

A capstone to the £8m, ESRC-NERC research programme, Unconventional Hydrocarbons in the UK (UKUH), setting out why ‘fracking’ died in the United Kingdom and will never make a successful return

2022 Report ‘Failure by Design: Is the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative Broken?’, Universal Owner, Louis Fletcher & Thomas O’Neill. [link] [Bloomberg]

We correctly concluded that the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero was ‘broken’ months before the alliance publicly lapsed into crisis, forcing it to break from its UN accreditation

2022 Report ‘Refinancing Coal: Do Private Decommissioning Funds Have Misaligned Incentives’, Universal Owner, Louis Fletcher & Thomas O’Neill. [link]

We draw out how the pecuniary motives of private schemes to buy-out and retire coal plants in the global South leads to a host of contradictions. The ADB Forum, a coalition of ~300 civil society groups in South-East Asia, presented our findings to the Asian Development Bank. Our report fed into the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero’s founding white paper on retiring high-carbon assets.

2021 Report ‘Missing the Target: Why Asset Managers Have Not Committed to Net Zero’, Universal Owner, Louis Fletcher & Thomas O’Neill. [link] [Bloomberg]

We show how, on close inspection, most of the 2030 targets released under the Net Zero Asset Managers’ Initiative are consistent with reducing just a few percent of these investors’ portfolio emissions. The New York State Comptroller, responsible for one of the largest public pension funds in the US (the $250bn New York State Retirement Fund), foregrounded our analysis in a public letter criticising BlackRock’s to help evidence its greenwashing.

2021 Report ‘Vanguard and Universal Ownership’, Universal Owner, Louis Fletcher & Thomas O’Neill. [link] [Bloomberg]

We dissected Vanguard’s desultory climate policies, like its $1.2bn of investments in Albertan tar sands, and the fact it has just 1 stewardship staff for every 300 companies in its portfolio.

2021 Report ‘Maximising Investor Impact: An Analysis of Climate Engagement in the Utilities Sector’, Universal Owner, Thomas O’Neill, Louis Fletcher & Sam Brown. [link]

We developed a novel methodology to measure the impact of the different ways investors pressure their firms on climate change. We then ran a pilot study on the world's 15 highest-emissions utilities, and determined that leading investors decidedly favour ‘asks’ with lower average impact. Our report was placed on the Oxford Smith School’s reading list for the postgraduate course ‘sustainable finance’.