Emil Beemer

About me

It’s great to meet you! I have always found myself wanting to help others and fight inequality which is why I was inevitably attracted to climate justice activism. Building strong communities based on curiosity and solidarity is in my opinion one of the most powerful things we can do. I derive a great deal of joy from noticing small acts of kindness or moments of beauty in life. Outside of research and activism, you will usually find me either buried in a pile of books or walking through the parks and meadows around Utrecht.

Personal Motivation

What attracted me to NEON is similar to what drove me to climate justice activism, namely the fact that the mobility transition intersects with so many social, environmental, and economic issues. I see it as a deep personal responsibility to do what I can to change society for the better. It’s vital we move beyond simply calling for emissions reductions by showing a clear positive alternative. Promoting the accessibility of mobility and ensuring our future is not only green but fair and inclusive is therefore a crucial aspect of this project to me. I’ve included a picture of my grandfather’s bike, which I’ve been using for many years. A simple reminder to me that mobility is not just technological/practical but also very much cultural and personal.

Societal values – towards fair energy and mobility transitions

DRIFT is a leading research institute in the field of sustainability transitions. We develop and share transformative knowledge to support people, cities, sectors and organisations to engage proactively with transitions. DRIFT has four main activities that complement, ground and inspire each other: academic research, consultancy, education and public dialogue & debate. The strong link between all of our activities allows us to combine theory-development with critical feedback and various ways of testing and validating our insights. It also enables us to keep our research relevant to a wide variety of actors.

I will be working on the socio-economic dimensions of the mobility transition, envisioning just and sustainable futures and determining how to embed the implications into scenarios, models, and decision-making.

Link to other neon research

There are clear linkages between working packages 7 and 8 that we want to collaboratively explore and where the cross-disciplinary connections are obvious to us.

However we want to be more ambitious than that and aim to create some true cross-disciplinary potential with some other more engineering focused work packages.

Promising other candidates are:

• work packages 6a (focusing on smart hubs and Mobility as a Service)
• work package 3 (local energy demand, storage and new market models)

Other candidates are:

• work package 4 (electric mobility) and 2 (energy transportation using electricity grids) have some potential for cross-disciplinary research and definitely should be explored further but are not the most obvious candidates