Dilemmas of Energy Transitions in the Global South
As climate change becomes widely accepted as a climate crisis, calls for faster and more extensive energy transitions are growing, and rightly so. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has called for a need to go “Further, Faster, Together” for Climate Action.1 As the discourse of crisis, urgency and emergency becomes dominant, however, we risk losing sight of political and ethical consequences of energy transitions for people’s everyday lives, especially in the global South. Many actions involved in urgently ramping up energy transitions, for example, adopting more solar photovoltaics (PV), electric vehicles and batteries, or reducing cumulative energy demand, create unintended consequences for marginal communities like energy poverty, curtailment of democracy, injustices, waste and local environmental destruction. Some of these impacts are now becoming apparent, for example, the mining of conflict minerals to feed the growing demand for raw materials to make solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. This book argues that while urgency is crucial for energy transitions in a climate-changed world, we need to be wary of haste. We must be cautious of conf lating goals and processes of sustainable development and enquire what urgency means for due process. Justice needs thought, participation and deliberation. Questions regarding where, when, why, how and for whom particular pathways of energy transitions are adopted, and what impacts these pathways have on others, are crucial for practical success as well as ethical acceptability of those transitions. Taking the space and time in which these transitions take place into account is critical in thinking through these dilemmas. This introduction draws together the chapters in this book into a narrative of how space and time matter to energy transitions to navigate the dilemma between urgency and justice. One particular aim of this book is to bring new concepts and ideas from the global South into the discussion on energy transitions to help navigate this dilemma, to flag relevant but often overlooked issues and to provide new pathways for the future. In this introduction we show how we do so: by first examining the concepts of “urgency” and “justice” and the tensions between them, and then showing how our individual book chapters address those tensions.
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