Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural
Politics of Energy Transition

(cid:129)
Benjamin Brown and Samuel J. Spiegel

Abstrait
In the wake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, promises to phase out coal-ﬁred
power have suggested cause for optimism around energy transition globally. Cependant,
coal remains entangled with contentious development agendas in many parts of the
monde, while fossil fuel industries continue to ﬂourish. This article discusses these entan-
glements through a climate justice lens that engages the cultural politics surrounding coal
and energy transition. We highlight how recent struggles around phasing out coal have
stimulated renewed critical debates around colonialism, empire, and capitalism more
broadly, recognizing climate change as an intersectional issue encompassing racial,
genre, and economic justice. With social movements locked in struggles to resist the
development or expansion of coal mines, power plants, and associated infrastructure,
we unpack tensions that emerge as transnational alliances connect disparate communi-
ties across the world. Our conclusion signals the need for greater critical engagement with
how intersecting inequalities are coded into the cultural politics of coal, and how this
shapes efforts to pursue a just transition.

Following the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, coal has been under
unprecedented scrutiny. Under the auspices of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (CCNUCC), world leaders committed to limit-
ing temperature rises to “well below 2°C” above preindustrial levels (UNFCC,
2015), and global efforts have been under way to accelerate a low-carbon tran-
sition, driving an energy revolution that has seen renewables overtake coal as
the world’s largest source of installed power capacity (Clark 2016). Eliminating
coal from the world’s energy mix has been identiﬁed as a priority in global efforts
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and negotiations at the UNFCCC’s twenty-
third Conference of the Parties (COP 23) in Bonn in 2017 appeared to signal
its impending demise, with a grouping of more than twenty countries and
subnational actors declaring their commitment to deliver “a rapid phase-out
of traditional coal power” (Powering Past Coal Alliance 2017). While inviting
skepticism—the alliance members produce just a fraction of the world’s coal-
ﬁred power between them1—the announcement was a signiﬁcant milestone: un

1. Major coal consumers, such as China, India, Germany and the United States, were absent;
most members were already in the process of retiring old coal plants, and collectively account
for just three percent of coal use worldwide (BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2017).

Politique environnementale mondiale 19:2, May 2019, est ce que je:10.1162/glep_a_00501
© 2019 par le Massachusetts Institute of Technology

149

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150 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

growing acknowledgment among elite actors that reliance on coal-ﬁred power is
no longer compatible with agreed climate goals. Signiﬁcantly, China has also
taken steps to limit coal use, investing heavily in renewables and halting
construction of coal-ﬁred power plants in ﬁfteen regions. Even in the United
States—where “Trump Digs Coal” featured as a slogan in the 2016 presidential
campaign—the industry is in overall decline, with a raft of coal company bank-
ruptcies and proposed measures to revive the industry proceeding on uncertain
political ground ( Walters 2018). There are also signs that private ﬁnance is turn-
ing away from coal, with major banks, insurers, and pension funds all terminat-
ing ties with the industry in response to the burgeoning fossil fuel divestment
mouvement, which now claims to have shifted more than US$ 7 trillion out of coal, oil, and gas worldwide.2 However, coal industries continue to ﬂourish in many countries, persisting as a ﬂashpoint of distinctively contentious cultural politics around fossil fuels. The unprecedented economic and political power of the fossil fuel industry and the historically close links between many states and companies involved in the exploration, extraction, and burning of hydrocarbons have complicated efforts to depart from incumbent, carbon-based energy regimes (Geels 2014; Healy et al. 2019). En effet, prospects for a globally coordinated coal phase-out seem bleak; the ascent to power of pro-coal governments—in the United States, Japan, Australia, Poland, and elsewhere—has ushered in an era of weak and fragmented global governance, raising doubts about the nonbinding nature of the Paris Agreement at a moment when the very idea of multilateralism appears to be under attack. It is this context that will deﬁne, in hindsight, whether “the Paris Agreement constitutes a political success” (Dimitrov 2016). With unprec- edented urgency, un 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (GIEC) report updated scientiﬁc warnings and called for “rapid, far-reaching and un- precedented changes in all aspects of society.” To limit temperature increases to 1.5°C, it noted that the use of coal needed to have “a steep reduction in all pathways and would be reduced to close to 0% (0–2%) of electricity” (GIEC, 2018). Yet the response from major coal-producing countries has been derisive; responding to the warning, Australia’s deputy prime minister immediately replied that Australia—the world’s largest coal exporter—would simply not change policies because of “some sort of report.”3 This rhetoric turned the mat- ter of science into an abstraction, portraying the report as remote and distant from citizens’ everyday concerns, and championed the view that business should “absolutely” continue as usual. In this article, we interrogate the cultural politics surrounding efforts to phase out coal, rethinking challenges around this process from a critical climate justice perspective, and point especially to perils of abstraction in political language. Australia’s deputy prime minister created an 2. A full list of divestment commitments is collated on the campaign website: https://gofossilfree. org/divestment/commitments/. 3. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/09/australian-government-backs-coal- deﬁance-ipcc-climate-warning. l Téléchargé à partir du site Web : / / direct . m je t . je / / e d u g e p a r t i c e – pdlf / / / / 1 9 2 1 4 9 1 8 1 8 3 6 9 g e p _ a _ 0 0 5 0 1 pd . / l f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 Septembre 2 0 2 3 Benjamin Brown and Samuel J. Spiegel (cid:129) 151 abstraction out of coal (au-dessus de) in one sense—as an energy issue. More widely, climate change has often been presented in international dialogue as a techno- managerial problem, creating abstractions out of “carbon markets” as part of emission “budgets” and national “inventories”; coal within global climate gov- ernance may be abstracted as carbon in a seemingly coherent world of science, material change, and policy. Yet coal, as carbon or energy, is easily divorced from culturally contested meanings in relation to lived, sociomaterial and context-speciﬁc struggles and historically constituted structures of power within which it is embedded (Chomsky and Strifﬂer 2014; Erickson 2018; Malm 2013; Mitchell 2011). Outside the corridors of power, cynicism prevails over the re- solve of policy makers to confront the incumbent power of corporate polluters and address local injustices of coal (Brown and Spiegel 2017). Abstractions generate simple logics; but technocratic and market-based approaches are being challenged from below by social movements demanding greater acknowledg- ment of how the contours of climate change are shaped by racialized, gendered, colonial histories and patterns of exploitation under capitalism. The erasure of these complex dynamics has hidden the politically charged nature of energy re- gimes, concerning who holds control over energy resources and infrastructures and how this molds social and political life in a broader sense. As author and activist Naomi Klein (2015) notes, if taken seriously, climate change cannot be conﬁned to one technical or political domain; it “changes everything.” The tendency to downplay this possibility and treat climate change as a “postpolitical” issue has prompted vociferous criticism from those seeking to highlight the ways in which energy is interwoven with funda- mental questions pertaining to power, inequality, and justice that permeate throughout society and how the current energy transition might present an op- portunity to reformulate dominant power relations (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Swyngedouw 2010; Urry 2014). This has in turn provoked ideas on “energy democracy” and a “just transition,” carving out space to challenge prevailing policy narratives and foreground social struggles pushing for an end to coal. At such a moment, it is therefore pertinent to consider coal’s fate in global po- litical affairs, along with how cultural and material factors intersect to shape the new energy landscape: how might social mobilizations translate into the reali- zation of a just transition without replicating the inequalities and deﬁciencies manifested in the incumbent carbon-based energy regime? What roles could critical scholarship play in reframing agendas? And how might such work be undertaken to identify potential pitfalls and dilemmas in the process, without muting demands for more emancipatory political transformations? In this article, we advance two principal critiques. D'abord, we emphasize the need for more recognition of the complex entanglements of coal within a wider political economy and the symbolic effects it produces in particular places. While discursive representation of coal as abstract carbon fails to acknowledge how coal inhabits diverse social and material worlds (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014), our critical lens points especially to insights from energy l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / direct . m je t . je / / e d u g e p a r t i c e – pdlf / / / / 1 9 2 1 4 9 1 8 1 8 3 6 9 g e p _ a _ 0 0 5 0 1 pd . / l f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 Septembre 2 0 2 3 152 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition humanities literature, a growing ﬁeld for challenging abstractions recurrent in environmental governance discourse. Lesley Head’s work makes the incisive case for seeing energy transition from a cultural perspective, in her case weaving to- gether intricacies of grief, other painful emotions, and hope—in coexistence— when making sense of human–nature relations (Head 2016). Also engaging the cultural politics of climate change, Bulkeley et al. (2016) unpack carbon transi- tions as working through various strategic devices, the mobilization of desires, and ways of articulating dissent. A cultural politics lens extends on previous writings about coal in GEP—Downie (2017) looked at the heterogeneity of business actors involved in (resisting and complying with policies around) coal in the United States; just as heterogeneity may be understood within industry segments, political governing cultures and cultures of resistance are marked by profound variations, the former allied to industry forces in heterogeneous state– industry liaisons. Deuxième, and interrelatedly, we argue that there is a corre- sponding need to situate energy transitions within a broader context of political upheaval, opening up space to rethink dominant approaches through a critical climate justice lens. This provides a unique opportunity to replace the prevailing extractivist, growth-oriented development paradigm with alternatives attuned with demands articulated by social movements, geared toward democratization, decolonization, and a reappraisal of cultural values more broadly. Such a move puts attention to the varied gendered, racialized, and class-based injustices that intersect from extractive frontiers more widely in the chain of processes linked to transition from coal. To keep fossil fuels in the ground, radical new steps are needed, such as the proposal to create a new fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty (Simms and Newell 2018); with this, an ethic of resistance is needed around coal that addresses multiple intersecting social, cultural, and ecological injus- tices alongside mainstream framings of “energy transitions” at local and global scales. We begin by tracing the structures of a global coal complex, enrolling an assemblage of ﬁnancial, infrastructural, and political actors that facilitate the interconnected mining, transportation, and burning of coal as fossil energy. The next section considers the cultural and discursive framings of coal, contrasting prevailing hegemonic representations that have underpinned the coal industry with divergent narratives of climate justice advocates. We then proceed to exam- ine these varied meanings of—and cultural politics surrounding—coal within climate justice movements; reviewing the experiences of both wealthier and poorer countries that have encountered resistance to major coal projects in re- cent years, we highlight how mobilization strategies have increasingly sought to combine disruptive actions initiated on ecological grounds with broader social and economic critique, alert to how mining is entangled with colonial and mas- culinist discourses and practices. Integrating these arguments, our conclusion reﬂects on the prospective political challenges of a coal phase-out, emphasizing how a just transition must attend to material inequalities and cultural predispo- sitions alongside climate considerations if it is to succeed. l Téléchargé à partir du site Web : / / direct . m je t . je / / e d u g e p a r t i c e – pdlf / / / / 1 9 2 1 4 9 1 8 1 8 3 6 9 g e p _ a _ 0 0 5 0 1 pd . / l f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 Septembre 2 0 2 3 Benjamin Brown and Samuel J. Spiegel (cid:129) 153 COP 23 and the Coal Complex Although world coal production fell by 6.2 percent in 2016—the largest drop on record—legal and policy frameworks designed to facilitate coal production continue to ﬂourish in many parts of the world, with coal power continuing to generate over 40 percent of the world’s electricity (International Energy Agency 2016). Prior to the Paris climate accord, G20 countries alone were responsible for spending US$ 88 billion a year subsidizing fossil fuel exploration (Bast et al.
2014), and the pattern of subsidies for coal—despite much criticism—has not
abated. The gulf between symbolic promises and tangible political action
remains vast, and despite the veneer of consensus around the overall need to
curtail coal use, closer inspection reveals “conceptual holes and political ambiv-
alences” (Hajer 1995, 1). Despite the rhetoric circulating at COP 23, signs have
only become clearer that some governments’ subsidies and support measures
for coal industries are set to continue or even increase—including controversial
plans to exploit lignite coal reserves in Germany, which hosted the summit and
sought to position itself as a climate leader as far back as the 1980s.4 Various
governments, most prominently the Trump administration but also Poland,
India, Australia, and Spain, all oppose regulatory instruments to curb coal use and
recent deals struck by the Chinese Development Bank and Singapore’s three big-
gest banks, DBS, OCBC, and UOB—together amounting to billions of dollars—
to ﬁnance coal development in South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia (Fogarty
2018). In the absence of meaningful efforts to eliminate subsidies, tax breaks,
and other ﬁnancial beneﬁts, plans for coal industries to expand continue apace,
most notably in South and Southeast Asia, and public protests have tapped into
broader concerns around nepotism, fraud, and corruption (Kotikalapudi 2016;
Lahiri-Dutt 2016). In India, which has been rocked by a major coal scandal con-
cerning the allocation of coal permits to public and private corporations, coal-
mining subsidies totaled US$ 2.3 billion in 2016 alone, US$ 900 million more
than that received by renewables in the same period. Entre-temps, the Inter-
national Finance Corporation (IFC; the private investment arm of the World
Bank) continues to fund a coal boom in several Asian nations, with forty-one
new coal projects having acquiring funding despite a public commitment to stop
ﬁnancing such projects in 2013 (Global Subsidy Initiative 2017; Inclusive De-
velopment 2016). Dans 2017, the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice ﬁled a
complaint to the ombudsman regulating the IFC objecting to its funding for
nineteen coal plants in the country.5

To situate the present global moment for curtailing coal, we suggest that in a
similar vein to Michael Watts’ (2005) work on the “oil complex,” it is useful to think
of a contemporary coal complex as a global assemblage of ﬁnance, infrastructure,

4. Successive governments have committed to Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition), avec
the aim developing community or municipally controlled renewable energy, and shifting
reliance off nuclear power and fossil fuels (Hake et al. 2015).

5. Bretton Woods Project, 2017. Landmark climate-change complaint against IFC lodged in

Philippines, last accessed March 20, 2019.

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154 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

and expertise that together constitutes the political economy of coal and
determines the speed and scale of its extraction, transportation, and eventual
combustion. This complex involves contentious forms of capitalist culture
that underwrite the perpetual cycle of mining and burning coal—and requires
“identifying the organisation and character of the political economy in terms
of a dominant pattern and driver of capital accumulation,” and how this is “under-
pinned by … sets of institutional arrangements, state structures and policy para-
digms, and the normalisation of the pattern of accumulation through ideologies
and cultural practices” (Rosewarne 2016, 215). Tracing these relations and pro-
cesses can help demystify the myriad political and economic networks through
which coal travels before arriving at its ﬁnal destination for consumption. While
Watts (2005, 9.6) focuses his attention on the international political economy of
oil (par exemple., the activities of OPEC) and its tendency to precipitate violent cycles of
“conﬂict, militarization and revolutionary upheaval,” we recognize coal’s own
distinct (if related) history in provoking a broad realignment of social forces.
In countries ranging from Britain to Bolivia and South Africa, mining has given
rise to one of the most militant ﬂanks of the labor movement, with strikes and
sabotage by miners eliciting concessions from governments under what Mitchell
(2011) describes as carbon democracy. According to him, the emergence of this
union power helps explain the pivot to oil by Anglo-American elites in the latter
half of the twentieth century, who mobilized signiﬁcant levels of capital and ex-
pertise to facilitate and legitimate imperial access to reserves across the Middle
East, where they could exercise greater control over the energy supply. De la même manière,
Barak (2015) has traced the paradoxical ways in which coal exports from Britain
enabled a culture of subordination and political inequality to ﬂourish in the
Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century—stabilizing and reinforcing author-
itarian tendencies in the region, even as coal was providing the conditions for
democratization in a domestic setting. These historical processes resonate with
the contemporary political moment, where divisions are emerging between dif-
ferent “fractions of capital”—major oil companies retain considerable power and
inﬂuence, positioning themselves as cleaner alternatives to coal and pushing
natural gas as a “bridging fuel,”6 while the coal industry itself has suffered from
a spate of bankruptcies and, for much of Europe and North America, entered a
period of terminal decline.

Nevertheless, international tensions around coal rhetoric at COP 23 reﬂect
a variety of political cultures and trajectories that in some cases diverge sharply
from the European and North American experiences. Coal has remained seduc-
tive for many nations whose political leaders have found it hard to resist the
allure of a readily available fuel in their push for rapid industrialization.
Lahiri-Dutt (2016), in her work on Indian collieries and their role in producing
the “coal nation,” has shown how coal was instrumental to asserting a new

6. Cependant, this approach neglects the lock-in effect and path dependency guaranteed by new

high-carbon infrastructure (Unruh 2000).

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Benjamin Brown and Samuel J. Spiegel

(cid:129) 155

postcolonial identity, with new modes of state sovereignty capable of managing
its natural resources and overseeing gains in living standards for its population.
Simultaneously, this has tended to accelerate the phenomenon of “accumula-
tion by dispossession,” an ongoing process by which former commons are
incorporated into circuits of capital accumulation, and is typical of large-scale
mining operations where experiences of enclosure and displacement often
mirror colonial patterns of exploitation (Bebbington et al. 2008; Gudynas
2013; Harvey 2003). Despoliation of the environment and violent conﬂicts at
sites of extraction have thus been dismissed as unavoidable “trade-offs,” subor-
dinated to the imperative to generate employment, increase state revenue, et
broaden access to “cheap, reliable” energy. This can be observed in both “Pink
Tide” governments of Latin America, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, and neo-
liberal administrations in Mozambique and Bangladesh (Büscher 2015;
Chomsky and Strifﬂer 2014; Kotikalapudi 2016). Even China—increasingly
praised for its leadership on climate change, and despite president Xi Jinping’s
ambition to create an “ecological civilisation”—witnessed a reversal from previ-
ous years’ modest decline in coal consumption, driven by a government-led
infrastructure boom (South China Morning Post 2017). Although coal is now be-
ing replaced with renewable energy, the pace of transition is plagued by political
inertia and the residual support it retains, bolstered by narratives of develop-
ment, growth, and technological progress.

Discursive Power in the Global Climate Regime
Critical scholarship in the ﬁeld of political ecology emphasizes how “social
natures” are both the product of biophysical processes and simultaneously
attached to cultural formations of symbolic meaning, encouraging us to ask
who is endowed with the power to deﬁne “resources,” for what purpose, et
in whose interests (Bakker and Bridge 2006; Castree and Braun 2001; Richardson
and Weszkalnys 2014). Social mobilizations against coal set the stage for com-
peting visions of the future, attesting to the inseparability of energy from the
social systems in which it is embedded and enmeshed with ideological construc-
tions pertaining to its utility and value. The extent to which policy dilemmas are
“rendered technical” (Li 2007) therefore downplays the role of power, struggle,
and contestation in processes of resource extraction, infrastructure development,
and technological change. These conﬂicts play out not only at the level of phys-
ical confrontation but also in terms of discursive hegemony, considering the
ways in which voices connected to dominant institutions shape the norms and
values that diffuse throughout society to rationalize or legitimate particular prac-
tices (Howarth 2010). It is therefore instructive to consider the narratives framing
how various explanations and solutions to environmental problems are con-
ceived and circulated in different arenas, foregrounding social processes and
power relations to understand how “discourse coalitions” unite around particu-
lar storylines (Hajer 1995). Studying decision-making processes in international

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156 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

climate policy, Roberts and Parks (2009, 128) consider the relationship dynam-
ics between different epistemic communities involved, with diverging world-
views, principles, and causal explanations embraced. They describe the
“negotiated justice” that occurs when insiders—those working for governments
or intergovernmental institutions and possessing “structural power”—adopt or
import the ideas, connaissance, and approaches of “outsiders” from academia,
NGOs, grassroots groups, or think tanks. Such dynamics are perhaps evident
in the formation of the Powering Past Coal Alliance in Bonn during COP 23.
Cependant, while the commitment to a coal phase-out has been welcomed, it
remains wedded to market logics, hailing “clean growth” as “an opportunity
worth trillions of dollars” (Powering Past Coal Alliance 2017). As with the Paris
Agreement itself, where political pressure weakened the resulting text to elimi-
nate references to fossil fuel subsidies, carbon taxes, or the need to rein in vested
corporate interests, and limited mention of historic responsibilities, intergener-
ational justice, droits de l'homme, and gender equity in the preamble (LeQuesne
2016; Okerere and Coventry 2016), the Powering Past Coal declaration is most
notable for what is left absent, retaining a narrow economistic focus at the
expense of explicit recognition over its social and political ramiﬁcations.

The terms of the debate have been repeatedly restricted in global arenas; dans-
deed, in the case of US president Trump’s rhetoric about leaving the Paris climate
accord, it appears the chief interest has been precisely about the manipulation of the
terms of the debate—more so that the actual generation of coal jobs themselves.
Promises of clean coal have (largely) replaced outright climate denial in public
coal industry discourse,7 with proponents advocating increased efﬁciency, carbon
offsets and trading, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a substitute for its
replacement. Cependant, this presents the Jevons paradox: increased efﬁciencies in
resource use do not automatically (or even often) lead to an overall reduction in its
consommation, and much vaunted CCS schemes have largely failed to materialize,
with researched funding axed in the United Kingdom and ﬂagship projects else-
where struggling to overcome technological and ﬁnancial constraints (européen
Academy Science Advisory Council 2018, Annex 7). As such contradictions are ex-
posed, the “win-win” scenarios promulgated under the discourse of ecological
modernization (cf. Hajer 1995) appear increasingly difﬁcult to sustain.

In the UNFCCC, major disputes have revolved around the most appropri-
ate strategies for curbing carbon emissions, with the perceived technical merits
or pitfalls of state or market-led variants causing much consternation between
negotiators. Yet arguably, coal’s reduction to abstract “carbon” in the global cli-
mate regime has itself been deeply problematic. As Anita Girvan (2017, 1039)
observes, “there is no way to rid science of its cultural bearings, nor is there a way
of decoupling stories from the material worlds they create,” and the epistemic

7. Although industry lobbying and misinformation campaigns persist, spreading pro-coal dis-
course through corporate funding of private foundations, research institutes and ‘astroturﬁng’
campaigns designed to distort debate with ventriloquised ‘grassroots’ voices (Bsumek et al.
2014).

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Benjamin Brown and Samuel J. Spiegel

(cid:129) 157

dominance of technoscientiﬁc expertise in climate negotiations has tended to ex-
clude other “ways of knowing,” with an attendant decline in public participation
and accountability (see also Jasanoff 2015). Following the insights of Foucault,
critical scholars have sought to highlight how “resource extraction is part of a
regime of rule involving technologies, rationalities and institutions, made intel-
ligible by regimes of truth that organise understanding and experience” (Rose,
cited in Baviskar 2003, 5051). It is well established that the groups most exposed
to the shocks and stresses caused by climate change—marginalized and poor
communities comprising precarious and informal laborers, peasant farmers, Dans-
digenous peoples, forest dwellers, residents of informal settlements, and women
of all ages—are the most underrepresented in decision-making arenas, and this
has a subsequent bearing on the framing and content of discussion. Par exemple,
Terry (2009) highlights how climate change remains trapped within a stereotyp-
ically “masculine” discourse centered on new technologies, large-scale economic
instruments, and complex computer modeling, while tending to neglect how
gender roles inﬂuence different people’s vulnerability to its impacts. The prepon-
derance of neoliberal “green growth” narratives around energy transitions dis-
misses mounting evidence that policy measures introduced for the ostensible
purpose of carbon reduction have already begun to replicate and compound
patterns of exclusion and inequality (Bumpus and Liverman 2008; Büscher
and Fletcher 2015; Fairhead et al. 2012). As Erickson (2018, 3) cautions, “the
Anthropocene [discourse] and colonial environmentalism both mobilize crisis
to obfuscate social differences. … They both reassert a racialized jurisdiction
through the threat of environmental destruction.” The abstractions and equiva-
lences required to operationalize neoliberal climate “solutions,” such as carbon
trading and offset schemes, have been critiqued for what Lohmann (2008) termes
the production of ignorance: erasing historical and cultural contexts and replac-
ing local knowledge, experience, and preferences with universal metrics of value
determined by the market (see also Bracking 2015; Corbera and Brown 2010).
En effet, such programs are only made possible through what Tania Li (2014), dans
her work on land investments and property regimes, has labeled as inscription
devices: “ways of seeing, counting, classifying and rendering some things visible
while occluding others” (594). Such expositions of governmental and capitalist
pouvoir, underpinned by theories derived from the European Enlightenment,
harken back to Gayatri Spivak’s (1999) notion of sanctioned ignorance. This re-
fers to the foreclosure of counterhegemonic intellectual traditions and selective
ﬁltering of knowledge in ways that allow for the replication of colonial struc-
photos, effectively silencing dissenting viewpoints that fall outside the purview
de (Eurocentric) hegemonic thought.

Protests against coal have erupted in the past decade and now span across
the world, targeting speciﬁc infrastructures (mines, ports, railroads, and power
plants) as well as ﬁnancial institutions lending to the fossil fuel industry. These
showcase a variety of tactics and tensions—adversarial strategies, typiﬁed by
disruptive actions and tending to circumvent traditional models of political

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158 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

participation, if not eliding them altogether—that have coalesced into a broad if
disparate movement referred to by Naomi Klein (2015) as Blockadia (see also
Brown and Spiegel 2017; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). Nevertheless, these mobi-
lizations cannot be conceived of solely through the lens of climate change since
they are animated by multiple grievances. This presents fresh dilemmas. Comme
Kaijser and Kronsell (2014, 422) ask, “Which identities are promoted and serve
as grounds for political action? And which identities become invisible in such
projects?” Inevitably, certain identities are brought to the fore and mobilized
strategically, highlighting the challenges facing climate justice advocates who
aspire to build a broad and inclusive movement.

While climate change interacts with, and exacerbates, other stressors affect-
ing the lives of poor communities, it might not be prioritized as the most press-
ing or signiﬁcant of their problems (Thomas and Twyman 2005). As Sheila
Jasanoff (2010, 237) comments, “climate is spatially unbounded. It is every-
where and nowhere, hence not easily accessible to imaginations rooted in spe-
ciﬁc places.” In recent scholarship, climate change has been conceptualized as a
type of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), highlighting otherwise imperceptible
forms of harm that occur when violence is decoupled from its original causes
as a consequence of gaps in time and space. At an international level, much at-
tention is directed at structural inequalities of “ecologically unequal exchange”
or “ecological debt” between regions and countries, occurring when energy and
resources ﬂow from the Global South to already afﬂuent nations in the Global
North and rich nations displace or “offshore” their own emissions to poorer
des pays (Roberts and Parks 2009). Yet such abstractions are difﬁcult to trans-
late and insert as issues of relevance to particular place-based struggles, et
anticoal protests play out differently according to the particular status afforded to
coal in regional and national histories. Tensions concerning voice, pouvoir, et
representation—whose messages get heard and what goals are prioritized—always
remain present and harken to the fragility of alliance-building processes. In the
case of Colombia, the world’s ﬁfth largest coal exporter, noticeably different
emphases and tactics are now at play in making economic arguments against
coal, arguments that coal-mining developments replicate colonial violence,
and arguments pinpointed on particular (devastating) health and social impacts
at local scales (Chomsky and Strifﬂer 2014; Healy et al. 2019). De la même manière, le
DeCOALonize Kenya campaign8 has sought to draw continuity between anti-
colonial struggles and current efforts to resist proposals for new coal-ﬁred plants
in the country, drawing attention to the replication of colonial logics and pat-
terns of uneven development currently unfolding in national energy policy.

Toward a Cultural Politics of Coal
At such a conjuncture, approaching coal through the lens of cultural politics—
the recognition dimension of environmental justice—can help to illuminate the

8. https://decoalonise.africa/decoalonizekenya/.

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challenges of consensus building around a coal phase-out and identify key
social considerations to take into account during the process of transition. It be-
comes necessary to embed resource struggles within a larger symbolic economy,
recognizing that resources perform multiple “roles” and are interpreted differ-
ently depending on location (Baviskar 2003). The logics and social character
of mobilizations and protests are variable and contingent—they might pre-
suppose particular power relations and cultural narratives around energy, labor,
or care for the environment (derivative of local and national histories); être
rooted in material experiences of hardship; or articulate “universal” values that
transcend any immediate locality. Et, just as resistance to coal is animated by
various concerns, the residual support for coal is contingent on the diverse
popular imaginaries that equate coal variously with working-class solidarity,
masculinity, economic security, and the strength and prosperity of the nation
(Bell and York 2010; Bodenhamer 2016; Girvan 2017; Herrero and Lemkow
2015; Lahiri-Dutt 2016; Perreault and Valdivia 2010). This literature—drawing
from experiences across the world—is important in highlighting the core
assumptions and beliefs that people employ to make sense of their social
environment, in turn raising questions concerning how knowledge claims
achieve hegemonic status. Recognizing the heterogeneity of cultural responses
is vital to understanding how differing articulations of coal and climate change
might inﬂuence the contours of the energy transition now under way. After
tous, “emblems mobilise bias in and out of environmental politics” (Hajer
1996, 247) and remain a critical tool for alliance building around particular
agendas.

Understanding the complex cultural politics encoded in carbonscapes is
critical to challenging the normalcy and perceived utility of coal that persists
in some contexts and to identifying the ways in which interlocking inequalities
structure social behavior at sites of extraction, power generation, and arenas of
political decision-making. Arguably, the frictions generated in such spaces help
to spur critical dialogue and introspection. Although the frame of climate justice
has been used to denote justice in a narrow legalistic sense or merely to rectify
economic inequalities between nation-states, as in the UNFCCC process, plus
radically—and in the sense used here, understood as part of a broader social
movement—it is employed as praxis, to generate solidarities across scale around
common grievances. In this sense, it is an “unsettled” term, constantly being
(concernant)negotiated in response to the threat of co-optation, but ultimately still deriv-
ative of three co-constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity
(Chatterton et al. 2013). Acquiring land for mining or energy infrastructure often
produces new divisions along the lines of gender, class, and ethnicity as a recon-
ﬁguration of property regimes, shifting labor practices, and the inﬂux of capital
combine to reorder social life. En effet, the formation of extractive enclaves—
spaces of enclosure emerging as extractive industries expanded into resource
peripheries—can be witnessed in a variety of different contexts, as a growing
body of scholarship makes clear.

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Kirshner and Power (2015) detail how the promise of increased revenues
from coal in Mozambique’s Tete province has set in motion a new political
economy geared toward transnational investment, with incentives and tax
breaks to attract foreign capital. Yet this coal boom creates winners and losers,
“as some groups beneﬁt from and are integrated into global circuits of produc-
tion whilst others suffer displacement and dispossession” (69). De la même manière,
Lahiri-Dutt et al. (2012) show how, in the Indian state of Jharkhand, coal pro-
duction is encouraged for its revenue-generating potential and interwoven with
discourses of nationbuilding and “development” despite a long association with
forced land sales and dispossession of autochthonous, forest-dwelling Adivasi
communautés; resistance to mining has centered on the violent mining-induced
displacement and inadequate compensation. In Bangladesh, the proposed
Phulbari coal mine has ignited ﬁerce protests despite state violence and crimi-
nalization. In this instance, livelihood and ecological threats were further am-
pliﬁed by the mobilization of broad sectors of society around transparency and
anticorruption concerns, spurred by a series of opaque energy deals with private
companies (Kotikalapudi 2016). For the Indigenous inhabitants of Kalimantan
or Sulawesi in Indonesia, participation in environmental movements is tied up
with the demand for land rights and can be partly regarded as a method of
positioning employed to legitimate speciﬁc resource claims, drawing on “histor-
ically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, emerging
through particular patterns of engagement and struggle” (Li 2000, 151). Frac-
tures emerge along the lines not only of ethnicity but also of gender. While coal
extraction in Kalimantan offers the prospect of income for men in the region,
Lahiri-Dutt (2012, 458) highlights how “masculinities are inscribed onto the
bodies of miners and into the mines themselves,” leaving women to search
for more precarious (seasonal and informal) forms of employment. With its dis-
cursive emphasis on science and technology, the UNFCCC is largely silent on
these complex social realities, presenting further challenges for activists seeking
to communicate clear and accessible climate justice narratives.

Rhetorical fantasies surrounding “beautiful, clean coal,” as it was de-
scribed in US president Trump’s ﬁrst State of the Union address9, have also been
mobilized by government and industry voices to dissuade the general public
over the need for a phase-out. Par exemple, the proposed Galilee Basin coal pro-
ject in Queensland, Australia, has been presented as a “clean coal” development
by authorities on the basis that it is less carbon-intensive than the coal available
at its eventual export market in India, while aligning with the national gov-
ernment’s professed desire to position Australia as an “energy superpower”
(Rosewarne 2016). Although dominant media narratives have tended to frame
the conﬂict as a binary opposition of environmental protection versus jobs and
economic growth, more critical accounts have sought to address the extractivist

9. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/4/donald-trump-push-for-beautiful-clean-

coal-reignit/.

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logics operative in this scenario, drawing attention to how mining continues to
replicate (settler-)colonial interests and world orders. Aboriginal struggles for
respect and recognition—in this case, regarding the absence of consent from
the Wangan and Jagalingou people to mine on their ancestral territories—are
often missing from the public conversation. This cultural erasure is indicative
of a deeper problem in terms of the presumed universality that plagues much
environmental discourse: “what becomes solidiﬁed as white is not simply skin
color, but the values of this universal subject—values of objectivity, of equality,
of normalcy. Difference is understandable only in so much as it is different from
the normalized ideal of whiteness” (Erickson 2018, 5). Counternarratives ﬁnd
resonance in artistic and cultural expressions, such as Garrwa painter Jacky
Green’s vivid depiction of mining in Aboriginal territories,10 that serve as a pow-
erful indictment of the indifference displayed toward subaltern histories.

Cultural representations have also featured prominently throughout de-
bates on mining in the Appalachian coalﬁelds, albeit in a very different light.
Although the coal industry’s regional signiﬁcance as an employer has declined
with mechanization, it retains public support due to selective memorialization
and promotion of coal heritage, with moral worth attached to the coal-mining
“way of life” (Lewin 2017). Economic and cultural identity is intimately tied to
coal, a perception bolstered through the activities of industry-funded “grass-
roots” groups like Friends of Coal (Bell and York 2010; Bodenhamer 2016).
Although the impacts on the environment and public health are well documented,
hegemonic masculinity has also deterred men from participation in environ-
mental activism and contributed to a backlash against environmental justice
groups as coal is aligned with conservative values (Bell and Braun 2010). By con-
trast, Herrero and Lemkow (2015) document how “environmentally blind” dis-
courses gained headway following protests to preserve the Spanish coal industry
dans 2012, with a particular appeal to elements of the political Left. At a political
moment when antiausterity street movements like the Indignados had galva-
nized public debate, coal advocates mobilized social imaginaries that idealized
hypermasculine, working-class miners as emblems of struggle and resistance.
Efforts to phase out coal therefore require a compelling image of the future that
speaks to diverse economic, politique, and cultural concerns alongside high-
lighting adverse ecological impacts. Addressing public anxieties around employ-
ment and supporting workers into new industries have constituted a critical
part of this strategy.

Energy Transition in Turbulent Times

A coal phase-out constitutes only one aspect of the sociotechnical transition
now under way, and for communities whose lives are entangled with the

10.

Voir, Par exemple, work exhibited at the Cross Art Project: http://crossart.com.au/97-2014-
exhibitions-projects/256-jacky-green-ﬂow-of-voices.

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162 (cid:129) Coal, Justice climatique, and the Cultural Politics of Energy Transition

hydrocarbon economy, a crucial concern is what will follow in its wake. As cli-
mate policies are introduced and the specter of potential job loss looms over
polluting industries, the concept of a “just transition” has gained traction. Il
takes as its premise the principle that workers in the fossil fuel industry should
not bear the economic brunt of a low-carbon transition, which would neces-
sarily entail the downscaling and eventual replacement of their sectors by low-
carbon industries. The idea was ﬁrst proposed by trade unions and grassroots
groups before its eventual adoption by world governments who pledged, sous
the Paris Agreement, to “take into account the imperatives of a just transition of
the workforce” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
2015). The establishment of a Just Transition Centre by the International Trade
Union Confederation has been signiﬁcant in this regard, recognizing how such a
transition requires sensitive planning and the allocation of resources to ensure
workers do not lose out or can beneﬁt from retraining. Concerns over the loss of
skilled jobs in manufacturing, and the prospect of mass unemployment and so-
cial dislocation (as occurred in Britain following the pit closures of the 1980s),
have historically been used as a device to pit workers against environmentalists
and advance narrow sectional interests, although in recent years, great efforts
have been made to build new solidarities that combine demands for economic,
sociale, and environmental justice (Brown and Spiegel 2017; Schlembach 2011). UN
2018 deal negotiated by the Spanish government to close down the country’s coal
mines has been hailed by unions as a “model agreement,” promising A 250 mil-
lion toward a transition package that will include early retirement schemes for
ex-miners, environmental restoration work in pit communities, and reskilling
schemes to equip workers for emerging green industries (Neslen 2018).

Au cours des dernières années, social movements have experimented with “new vocabu-
laries, social and spatial practices and repertoires of resistance” (Chatterton et al.
2013, 611), opening space to rethink notions of climate justice and envision the
different possibilities that energy transitions might allow. Reﬂecting on mobili-
zations against the Phulbari coal project in Bangladesh, Kotikalapudi (2016)
suggests that such controversies can create space for social learning and realign-
ment of the goals in a given energy system, acting as a space to “operationalise
democracy.” Particularly in countries where national leadership on climate
change has been found wanting, the impetus for a just transition has been ad-
vanced most powerfully by environmental justice advocates at a grassroots level.
While it would be amiss to speak of a singular climate justice movement or
overly valorize the “local,” close engagement with the texture of speciﬁc regional
and cultural histories—in tandem with a global sensibility—offers critically im-
portant windows into emergent postextractivist energy transitions. The activities
of the Black Mesa Water Coalition (BMWC), a youth-led, intertribal group
formed in 2001 to address issues of water depletion, natural resource exploita-
tion, and public health within Navajo and Hopi communities, are instructive in
this regard. While an agreement was signed in 1974 permitting Peabody Coal
to lease land for mining inside the reserved area of the Navajo (Diné) Nation,

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mining activities have long been a considerable source of controversy and ten-
sion between tribal members. While the original agreement was conditional on
prioritizing jobs for tribal members, it closed in 2005, leaving behind a contam-
inated landscape. Concerns over deteriorating public health, water contamina-
tion, and climate change led to efforts by the BMWC to replace mining with an
altogether different model of development, based on traditional Diné world-
views and values, cultivating alternative industries, such as a solar plants, food
sovereignty projects, and woolcrafts. In this context, the concept of a just tran-
sition resonated with descriptions of Navajo (Diné) ontologies in sensing what
the world is versus what the world should be, opening space to negotiate new
identities and rekindle a sense of autonomy and control (Powell and Curley
2008). It is in this vein that Velicu and Kaika (2017, 313) consider shifting con-
ceptions of justice as a necessary part of struggles to transcend extractivism, away
from “foundational logics” of dialogic consensual politics rooted in normative
and established channels of participation toward a “dissension politics” of dis-
ruptive intervention and cultural rupture, challenging the terms of engagement
in which struggles occur. In this instance, the normative framing of justice as
distribution, reconnaissance, and participation is viewed as limiting, an inadequate
expression for the more radically transformative social relations and ethical
practice that the movement participants seek to embody. In pursuing energy
transition away from coal and rejecting the prevailing global political economy
of extractivism (and its logic of inevitable reliance on fossil fuels), expérimental
praxes engaging different worldviews, valeurs, and ontologies continue to be re-
negotiated and modiﬁed by participants navigating an uncertain path forward
toward an ecological and socially just future, necessarily evoking tensions in the
processus.

Conclusions

In a turbulent era of political turmoil and ecological crisis, coal continues to fuel
controversy and polarization in ever-changing ways. Despite unprecedented sci-
entiﬁc consensus on the need for a global coal phase-out to mitigate climate
changement, many states and corporations have nevertheless sought to disavow
warnings from the IPCC and others, doubling down on plans for expansion.
This is evident in some of the world’s largest economies—under Putin’s leader-
ship, the Russian government has moved to aggressively increase coal produc-
tion and exports, while under the Trump administration, the US government
has taken steps to rescue the coal industry from rapid decline, going so far as
to propose the use of military bases as coal export conduits (Dlouhy 2018).
Such acts speak to an extraordinary political moment in which coal is mobilized
as a semiotic device within populist discourses of economic nationalism and
“post-truth” politics but reveal little about how communities, workers, et
activists caught within the nexus of hydrocarbon capitalism have themselves
responded.

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By unpacking the cultural politics of coal in diverse regional contexts, nous
draw attention to how lived experiences of individuals and communities remain
crucial, often neglected and underappreciated considerations in the framing of
energy transition debates. As the “global” energy transition proceeds at a pace
that is perilously slow, resolute demands for climate justice can be viewed
within this lens—to replace technomanagerial modes of governance with a col-
lective response attuned to the harms perpetrated by contemporary forms colo-
nialism, empire, and capitalism. This warrants an admission that coal cannot be
reduced to an abstract, elemental status as “carbon” in the global climate re-
gime; it is encoded with cultural meanings, shaped by historically constituted
processes of dispossession, accumulation, and exploitation. In his research
surveying the landscape of environmental policy making, Hajer (1995, 131) ob-
serves that “in the face of a dominant policy discourse that sought to understand
new problems in old categories, the task of governmental critics was to change
the very cognitive frames within which problems were perceived.” To this end,
we remain alert to the ways in which hydrocarbon capitalism molds social and
cultural life, inhibiting the far-reaching changes required to prevent further
destabilization of the Earth’s climate. We caution against proposals for energy
transition that rely on abstract market mechanisms and the addition of
new technologies within incumbent energy regimes; such lenses are not just
limiting—they can be obfuscating and dangerously so. Plutôt, there is need
to depart—decisively and radically—from solutions circumscribed by neoliberal
norms and to reinvigorate conversations about what a just transition might
deliver, stimulating broader reﬂections on how the emancipatory promise of
energy can become embedded into the fabric of everyday life.

Benjamin Brown holds a BA in international development with anthropology
and politics from the University of East Anglia and a MSc in environment and
development from the University of Edinburgh. He has previously coauthored
articles in Geoforum and World Development exploring the articulation of global
social movements, and now helps to coordinate the Better Solar research net-
travail, exploring environmental justice concerns in the global solar economy.

Sam Spiegel holds a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge and is
a senior lecturer in international development at the University of Edinburgh,
where he leads projects linking academics, activists, and artists engaged in strug-
gles related to extraction and environmental and social justice issues in different
parts of the world. He is the recipient of a Future Research Leader Award from
the UK Economic and Social Research Council and directs a project funded by
Global Affairs Canada through the Canadian International Resources and
Development Institute, supporting intercultural collaboration on research
addressing socioecological and sociopolitical dimensions of extraction, pouvoir,
sovereignty, and belonging.

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