Social justice and the economics of the energy transition
Hello folks, and welcome to end of the week! If your creative juices have been spent, here’s some clickbait to round up the week in a satisfying yet effortless manner! This edition contains a somewhat eclectic collection of articles that all deal in some way with energy justice. To be more precise, I present thee articles that explain:
why the Australian environmental movement shifted to organizing for community energy
why green capitalism is capitalism nonetheless and might therefore still create or exacerbate inequality
how we see precisely that happening in a massive solar park in northern India
what we need for a robust concept of energy justice (spoiler alert: more legal scholars!)
Also, I made some serious headway in shortening the letter. If you’d be so kind, please note to self if you like it this way or not.
Moving targets: Carbon pricing, energy markets, and social movements in Australia
If you’ll remember from last week’s ‘energy values survey’, renewable energy is popular. Rebecca Pearse shows that for the Australian environmental movement, advocacy for renewables kind of became the default option. (That in itself is not necessarily bad, if you want to win the war, don’t be turning people against you before the first battle’s even begun.)
Australian activists have had to learn the hard way – when you organize around climate change, ‘you don’t know when you’ve won and you don’t know when you’ve lost’, says public intellectual and campaign consultant Dan Cass. For energy campaigner Ogge “the challenge is finding a focus, to create a ‘coherent campaign’” (1084).
Similarly, it’s been hard engaging with carbon politics at a high level (in the early 2000s):
A hard line on emissions targets or other issues such as industry compensation ‘[…] would just mean no action and we’d miss the opportunity for setting in place some sort of mechanism that could be ratcheted up’ (Connor 2014). (1088)
As a result, activist shifted to energy justice, reasoning “that public support for carbon pricing is not strong, but people like renewable energy” (1091) and “[c]alls for social and environmental protections against [extraction of] fossil fuels” had been on the rise (1092). As a result, renewable energy moved into the community and the activists learned the hard work of community organizing.
Pearse’s article should be interesting for anyone seeking some inspiration – in terms of what can be done with regard to which kind of goal, to learn from what worked and what didn’t.
Pearse R. 2016. "Moving targets: Carbon pricing, energy markets, and social movements in Australia". Environmental Politics. 25 (6): 1079-1101. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1196969
A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy
Pearse’s framework for her history of the Australian environmental movement is Polanyi’s idea that marketisation provokes resistance to capitalism in order to protect life, nature, community. In this article by James McCarthy, the idea is that capitalism averts crises by adopting green economic principles. The inspiration for this comes from the concept of the “spatial fix”, which describes how, when returns on productive economic activity diminish, capital investments shift to lowly valued areas that have high potential value (think: gentrification of a dilapidated inner city).
(For more on crises and fixes, see the first section, pp. 2486ff. For more on eco-Marxist analyses of capitalism, click here [in Dutch].)
A “fix” temporarily mitigates a crisis, but – crucially – doesn’t resolve the underlying tensions that produced it. This might give us reason to pause over Green New Deal type projects. On the one hand, they might address some of our current and impending economic woes, and – importantly, given the preceding article – it is the most viable because popular strategic option going forward. On the other hand, green capitalism – being capitalist – might repeat past injuries, most notably land grabs, the large-scale industrialization of rural (and marine) areas, and debt-funded infrastructural projects in poorer countries (see also p. 2497).
Social justice might be the raison d’être of the Green New Deal, but to some extent, it’s playing with fire.
McCarthy, James. 2015. "A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy". Environment and Planning A. 47 (12): 2485-2502. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308518X15602491
Spatial justice and the land politics of renewables: Dispossessing vulnerable communities through solar energy mega-projects
To illustrate McCarthy’s point:
“the Charanka solar park project [in Gujarat, India] is another example of the dispossession of people from their livelihoods in the name of progressive development.” (97)
Authors Komali Yenneti (Chinese Academy of Sciences) et al. describe how common lands were privatized, depriving locals of their agricultural and pastoral use of these lands; how authorities side-stepped existing legal protections of land-use; and how developers tricked vulnerable populations into giving up privately owned land. As the scale of renewable energy projects increases, more of these things are likely to happen:
acquiring large tracts of land is difficult for large development projects, state governments, usually through parastatals and local authorities, acquire land from low-value users (peasants and pas toralists) and redistribute it upwards to classes considered to be more capable (and therefore deserving) to ‘improve it’. (97)
The authors analyse this in terms of “spatial justice”, threatened by “accumulation by dispossession”. See p. 91 for clarification of these terms, if you’re interested.
Yenneti K., Day R., Golubchikov O., and Golubchikov O. 2016. "Spatial justice and the land politics of renewables: Dispossessing vulnerable communities through solar energy mega-projects". Geoforum. 76: 90-99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.09.004
What is the ‘Just Transition’?
We now have seen several sides of ‘energy justice’: as a logical place to advocate or fight for change, as a popular place to advocate for change, but also a treacherous place, where the forces of economic interest might follow paths unintended by the advocates of green economics. Let’s close therefore with a deliberation on how to understand energy justice as a concept and tool.
Heffron and McCauly argue that any such concept should include reference to:
shared benefits and burdens of climate change;
human rights; and
involvement in decision-making and policy implementation (74).
For unite these three aspects, they propose their concept of “just transition”. Being legal scholars, in addition they emphasize, unsurprisingly, the need for a “more formalized way of thinking”, which clarifies “(1) what justice is needed and/or expected; and (2) how this will be enforced and/or applied” (76) – i.e., the “legal context”.
This brief “critical review” does more telling than showing, but if you’re curious, the authors have another article waiting for you*.
Given the recent wave of legal (class) action against governments and companies for climate negligence, in any case, a more legally informed scholarship of energy justice might not be a bad idea.
Heffron, Raphael J., and Darren McCauley. 2018. "What is the 'Just Transition'?" Geoforum. 88: 74-77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.11.016
* Heffron, R.J., McCauley, D., 2017. The concept of energy justice across the disciplines. Energy Policy 105, 658–667.
Enjoy your rightfully earned nice weekend!