Masters of Degrowth: Week 13.1 Energy Justice

Class Notes 

To achieve energy justice we need to consider distributional (equal distribution of impacts), procedural (inclusive process that are democratic and include local entities), and recognition justice  (ensure safety and integrity of each position regarding energy transitions).

A global energy system should provide all individuals globally safe, affordable and sustainable energy. Decision making should be more representative and impartial as it normally is.

There is need to be concrete definitions of what sustainable is, how to ensure availability of energy and for what, how to achieve energy justice within planetary boundaries.

When looking at the global trends, most of the renewable technology implemented and use is solar and wind  (> 90% of installed power in 2019), and 50% in developing and developed countries. The growing amount of power installed is comming together with an increase in opposition. There are two main attitudes: one is a selfish attitude against assuming the environmental costs of our energy needs locally, mainly in countries in the north, versus the attention to energy justice, which wants to implement bottom up, fair, democratic projects that are in line with degrowth.

A case in Oaxaca (Mexico), there have been a series of studies to evaluate the potential for wind energy, surprisingly without engaging the people living in those areas. Those projects are proposed by large international corporations (mainly Spanish), with the intention to provide energy for large urban and enterprise (75%) and not the local communities (26%). This is not an isolated case, as the EJ shows:

What are the common features on projects that create conflicts?:

1. They are large scale
2. They require large expanstions of land or the sea, that they aquire
3. They are centralized in their management and normally owned by large corporations
4. The users are far reaching, only a very small proportion of the energy will be use by the locals

Despite the lower carbon footprint of renewable energy with respect fossil fuels, they require much more land and it makes it very hard to keep up with current energy use. 

Towards a critical approach to energy justice

Defendendants of weak sustainability in energy justice assumes that for the common good, without considering large reduction on demand, using monetary approaches to evaluate negative impacts of energy projects. Normally this is in line with green growth paradigms and green sacrifice zones (common in environmental economics and the economics of climate change)

In the other side of the spectrum, strong sustainability challenges the vision that the same energy abudance as with fossil fuels can be achieve with renewables, and we need to challenge the framework and Cost Benefits analysis normally performed, to substituted by more hollistic environmnetal justice methods, which consider the social and the political dimensions of different types of energy transitions (common in political ecology, ecologial economics, degrowth and postgrowth).

Justice require more communal tenure of land, considering exhisting indigenous and rights over the territiory. It is also important to not only consider economic benefits or costs, but also the impacts for the culture and the landscape on which these projects took place.

The decision should engage, not only the multiple layers of the formal political spectrum and the technocrats, but also most social groups from the neighbourhoods, activist groups, economic actors, cultural and others groups that could be the most hollistic picture of the desirability of the project.

La energia de los pueblos (documentary)

We are not sufficiently aware of which sources of energy do we normally use, what it takes to have access to it, and the environmnetal implications of it, whether is nuclear, oil, coal, gas or even renewable energy sources, there is not sufficient energy literacy despite being a critical ingredient to make life possible.

The energy crises is just one which goes together with the climatic, material, economic... and others that has as it source a social and economic system that prioritizes growth over everything, and that is not delivering the end of poverty, or material wellbeing that can last over time. Capitalism is now trying to scape its own crisis by engaging into the transition towards renewable energy after decades of lobbying to postpone as far as possible the necessary decommisioning of fossil fuels and nuclear.

Globally, an authentic tsunami of macro projects is spreading affecting local communities, remaining natural spaces and not including the communities who will suffer the costs of the projects but will not even benefit from the energy potential installed in their livelihoods. Legal or not, a debate is necessary to make the transition to the renewable energies not also agile, but also just.

The fundation roxa luxemburg, gathered all the existing experiences on energy communities that show that alternatives pathways of renewable energy is not only possible but desirable and just. As rumors grow of projects taking place that imply minery, fracking and other damagings projects, the communities lauch a campaign to inform proactively the local communities.

These communties claim that energy is not a commodity, something that can be produced and sold with any limits. They consider energy to be parts of the commons, of the solidarity economy where energy is available to cover basic needs of all within planetary limits and not for superfluous consumption.

An interesting project during the documentary is the creation of a solar power based recycling and water treatment facility, in order to ensure water availability by cleaning residual water or gathering from the rain. This result is affordable, safe and public implementation of water supply, particuarly relevant in case of long droughts (min 25-35).

In the field of hydroelectric power, micro hydroelectric plants are implemented for only a small portion of the river to generate sufficient energy for the locals. The price system is defined in the assembly, where normally those who decided to have more appliances pay more that those who have the bare minimum.

Many of these communities are threatened by the army and goverment, which are impossing them how to live and that leads to the emigration of locals to some areas not "controlled" by the state.

All in all, they are showing a different way to manage the commons, such as energy,water and land. Instead of replacing a capitalistic economy with renewable energy systems in every corner of Earth, they are proposing an alternative way of organizing that is more democratic, fair and empowering that ensures affordable, sustainable and just energy.

Advancing energy justice: the triumvirate of tenets

Justice is a combination of ensuring and recognising the basic equal worth of all human beings together with a commitment to the "distribution of good and bad things" (Campbell, 2010).

Environmental  justice emerged in 1970s America as a response to the unequal distribution of environmental ills defining justice as : "fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, colour, national origin or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies" (Bullard, 2000: 7)

In contrast, energy justice (the focus throughout here) carries the same basic philosophy, however, it aims to provide all individuals, across all areas, with safe, affordable and sustainable  energy. 

The first tenet of energy justice is distributional justice.  Energy justice is an inherently spatial concept that includes both the physically unequal allocation of environmental benefits and ills and the uneven distribution of their associated responsibilities (Walker, 2009)

Procedural justice, secondly, manifests as a call for equitable procedures that engage all stakeholders in a non-discriminatory way (Walker, 2009; Bullard, 2005). . It states that all groups should be able to participate in decision making, and that their decisions should be taken seriously throughout. It also requires participation, impartiality and full information disclosure by government and industry (Davies, 2006) and appropriate and sympathetic engagement mechanisms.

 Recognition  justice is more than tolerance, and states that individuals must be fairly represented, that they must be free from physical threats and that they must be offered complete and equal political rights (Schlosberg, 2003).

The challenge of energy justice is to apply this three-pronged approach not only to  energy policy but to the entirety of the  energy system.  Energy policy often deals with only one section of the energy system to the detriment of its overall effectiveness. In support of new ventures such as "earth system governance", more pronounced systems-thinking is needed.

Pellow, D (2017). Introduction. In. What is critical environmental justice?. Wiley.

Critical Environmental justice studies are a fraework build on four pillars:

• Recognition: that social inequality and oppression in all forms intersect, and that actors in the more than human world are subjects of oppression and frequently agents of social change. While the experience of these groups are different, the logic of domination and othering done by the more powerful provides a common thread.
• Scale: "thinking glbally and acting locally also demands that people more fully comprenhend the relationship between the local and the global, or to consider scale " (Julie Sze). Scale includes both spatial and temporal dimensions, understanding the impacts across the world and generations.
• State: That challenges the role of the state, a relatively short lived phenomenon, that has not deliver justice to most of the marginalized minorities, and has use coercive methods, many times to favor the powerful entities. Critical environmental justices claims that the focus of grassroots movements should not be only on making the State more democratic and just, but rather creating autonomous spaces for decision making that are bottom up.
• Indispensability: it is important to counter the ideologies of race supremacism, colonialism... making these marginalized groups indispensable to our collective futures and decision making. That is not an assimilation of the group into white narratives and systems, rather the creation of the sapces where all visions and concerns are included democratically." To change everything, we need everyone".

Those are not aimed to be declared and the only approach to environmental justice, rather to enrich from traditional environmental justice literature and add components of others scholars as one of the many ways in which this field can move on.

Who promotes sustainability? Five theses on the relationships between the
degrowth and the environmental justice movements

This paper  explores the possibility of an alliance between post-growth and ecological distribution conflicts (EDCs). It argues that among the various branches of post-growth and EDCs, degrowth and environmental justice (EJ) movements have the best potential to interconnect.

1. Both degrowth and EJ movements are materialist but also more than just materialist in scope
1. The quality, quantity and distribution of environmental burdens and benefits are obviously among the prime movers of these movements
2.  Both EJ and degrowth advocate nothing less than a cultural revolution,  aiming to a redefinition of the ‘good life’ towards forms of voluntary simplicity, the return to the ‘essential’, and the possibilities for non-material quests, e.g. having more time for relational, political, caring, artistic or intellectual pursuits. In the same line, Latouche (2007) emphasized the need to ‘decolonize the imaginary’
3. while most mobilizations may start in the (material) base of economic relations of (re)production, they rapidly level up to incorporate the (cultural) superstructure as well
2. Both seek a politico-metabolic reconfiguration of our economies
1. both movements seek to modify the social metabolism, and hence the politico-institutional structure that govern it, in order to reach a higher levels of ecological sustainability.
2.  the degrowth project is fundamentally a democratizing process, namely a collective choice for a better living, and not an imperative imposed by an external authority. In other words, we see degrowth and EJ movements as both political and ecological projects at their core.
3. Both degrowth and EJ seek consequential as well as deontological justice
1. both movements can be seen as rephrasing the question of sustainability, by now rendered bereft of its political content, in order to ask what is to be sustained, how and for whom
2.  the concept of ‘just sustainabilities’ simultaneously addresses environmental quality and human equality
3. degrowth advocates both the degrowth of injustice and degrowth for justice. It recognizes that injustice is one of the main drivers of growth, both as a discursive/political tool and as a material process
4. it brings debates on ecological debt and climate justice to the fore of degrowth and advocates a large-scale resource and wealth redistribution
5.  that justice is not only associated with the distribution of given outcomes (such as various indicators of social, economic or ecological well-being), but rather includes the questions of recognition, difference, and participation. 
6. “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies”
7.  both EJ and degrowth extends the consequential understanding of justice (i.e. means over ends) to incorporate the processes and dynamics that organize (in)justice
8. Moreover, both embrace justice not only in environmental burdens and benefits, but more broadly in historical, economic (wealth, income), political (rights, participation) and social (identities, recognition) terms. 
4. They are complementary: while EJ has not developed a unified and broader theoretical roadmap, degrowth has largely failed to connect with a wider social movement
1. EDCs represent one of the most powerful socio-political forces in the Global South today
2. Many grassroots EJ movements remain local or regional in their conceptual scope – which can be both a strength and a weakness. Concepts like food sovereignty (from Via Campesina) or, more recently, energy democracy or energy sovereignty, have the potential to become universal.
3. the degrowth critique applies to the global middle and upper classes regardless of their geographical location. As for the ‘global poor’, a post-growth scenario would not only leave them some biophysical space to determine their own futures, but also address the issue of the ecological debt that the ‘global rich’ owe to the rest of the planet.
4. Concepts that are part of the degrowth vocabulary, like autonomy, simplicity or care, are mobilized in EJ struggles, and vice versa, activist notions such as ecological debt, biopiracy or popular epidemiology are now used by degrowth researchers (Martínez-Alier et al., 2012, 2014).
5. Both degrowth and EJ stress the contradiction between capitalist accumulation vs. conditions of social reproduction
1. the focus of EJ and degrowth is often less on the conditions of production and more on the conditions of existence and reproduction of society. Therefore, the key system to be defended and/or promoted becomes less a sustainable “mode of economic production”, but a sustainable “mode of socio-ecological reproduction”, broader in scope.
2. “the capitalisation and marketisation of natural and social conditions constantly generates new needs, new problems for workers that cannot be adequately addressed by struggles within the wage-labour relation, but rather call for worker-community-centred management of communal conditions as conditions of human development" ( Burkett 2006)
3.  the degrowth critique offers fresh foundations for new forms of eco-socialism or eco-anarchism, and the EJ movements can provide a popular basis composed of communities of workers, artisans, peasants, indigenous people and members of the middle class
4. t smallholder peasants are especially vulnerable to land expropriations and other socio-ecological changes introduced by the world market economy, and that they are therefore particularly inclined to mobilize for restoring ecological-economic stability
5. lar, have gained heightened attention also within degrowth, as emphasis is put on the reproductive economy of care (D'Alisa et al., 2014), understood not only as caring between humans, but also between humans and the non-human environment
6. To recap, women, peasants, artisans, workers and indigenous people may recognize that post-growth and EJ, together, match some of their core interests and/or values.

 Degrowth and EJ contest the same fundamental processes –in short, the nature and impacts of our economies' relentless expansion— in a complementary and synergetic way. Without a degrowth strategy, EJ movements will never fully succeed and vice versa.

The alliance between degrowth and EJ is not only possible but necessary.