Setting energy justice apart from the crowd: lessons from environmental and climate justice

The continuation and exacerbation of many environmental failures illustrate that environmental and climate justice’s influence on decision-making is not being systematically effective, giving rise to a renewed emphasis on finding new, more focused, justice models. This includes the energy justice concept, which has received ready and growing success. Yet for energy justice, a key question keeps arising: what does it add that environmental and climate justice cannot? To answer this question this perspective outlines the origins, successes and failures of the environmental and climate justice concepts, with a view to both distinguishing the energy justice field, and providing cautionary tales for it. It then outlines three points of departure, which it argues increases the opportunity of success for the energy justice concept: (1) “bounding out”, (2) non-anti-establishment pasts and (3) methodological strength. This paper exists to stimulate debate.