Advancing energy justice: The triumvirate of tenets

TLDR

Justice encompasses equal worth and fair distribution, with debates spanning Aristotle to Rawls, and recent environmental justice scholarship highlights its relevance to pollution and equity. The paper proposes a new research agenda urging scholars to address justice concerns across the energy system amid resource depletion and fuel poverty. The authors frame this agenda by drawing on contemporary environmental justice literature to guide investigations of justice in energy production and consumption.

Abstract

This paper proposes a new research agenda in It challenges researchers to address justice-based concerns within energy systems, from production to consumption. 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). Theoretical debates on justice have developed since the time of Aristotle. Indeed, a key distinction in Book V of Nicomachean Ethics between distributive and corrective justice endures today as social and legal justice. Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Rawls have all sought to debate what justice is and should be. The discussion on justice below begins with a more contemporary, relevant and under-studied set of literature that sheds light on environmental pollution and justice, namely environmental justice (Dryzek et al, Schlosberg, 2013; Walker, 2012). In an age of resource depletion and fuel poverty, researchers need to pay greater attention to justice concerns in energy policy.