Energy Seminar – MT25 Week 4: Energy Abundance: Powerful vision for a better future or a flawed fantasy?

Dr Tina Fawcett

  • Start  Tuesday 04 Nov 2025 5:00pm
  • Finish    Tuesday 04 Nov 2025 6:15pm
  • Venue  School of Geography & the Environment
  • Postcode OX1 3AN
  • Register for event
Dr Tina Fawcett, Senior Researcher and Associate Professor Energy programme

THIS IS AN IN PERSON AND ONLINE EVENT

Summary: ‘Abundance’, a best-selling 2025 book by Americans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, makes the claim that “we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Building much more low-cost energy supply is a key part of the authors’ vision. They reject what they call the seductive ideologies of scarcity.  Using OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) data, their claims and assumptions around energy are interrogated. Alternative approaches such as ‘energy sufficiency’ are also explored. Can the abundance agenda realistically deliver a just energy transition? If not, what will? This talk aims to start a discussion – please come and join in.

Speaker: Tina’s research concerns energy use by households and organisations. She uses a multi-disciplinary approach to understand current patterns of use, and to identify opportunities and policies for reducing energy use and carbon emissions.

Tina is leading social research in EDOL (Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory), a major five-year project collecting high-quality, longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data from over 2,000 UK households (2023–2027). She is also contributing to the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Network for the Decarbonisation of Heating and Cooling.

Tina is the Convenor of the Oxford Energy Network which brings together energy researchers across the University and facilitates knowledge exchange with industry, policy makers and civil society.