Circularity, entropy, ecological conflicts and LFFU

ABSTRACT

The economy is not circular, it is increasingly entropic. Energy from the photosynthesis of the distant past, fossil fuels, is burned and dissipated. Even without further economic growth the industrial economy would need new supplies of energy and materials extracted from the “commodity frontiers”, producing also more waste (including excessive amounts of greenhouse gases). Therefore, new ecological distribution conflicts (EDC) arise all the time. Such EDCs are often “valuation contests” displaying incommensurable plural values. Examples from the Atlas of Environmental Justice are given of coal, oil and gas-related conflicts in several countries combining local and global complaints. Claims for climate justice and recognition of an ecological debt have been put forward by environmentalists from the South since 1991, together with a strategy of leaving fossil fuels underground (LFFU) through bottom-up movements. This could make a substantial contribution to the decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodity frontiers
• unburnable fuels
• “Blockadia”
• ecological debt
• ecological distribution conflicts
• EJAtlas
• iconography

Acknowledgements

ERC Advanced Grant GA 695446 and the Balzan Prize 2020. The EnvJustice team at ICTA UAB, in particular Brototi Roy, Dalena Tran, Grettel Navas, Lucrecia Wagner, Ksenija Hanaček and Naw Thiri May Aye.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the document ‘Explore the Circularity Gap Report 2021’, https://circularity-gap.world/2020 retrieved on 25 March 2021.

2 Residents of a small Alaskan village voted in 2016 to relocate their community from a barrier island that has been steadily disappearing because of erosion and flooding attributed to climate change: https://ejatlas.org/conflict/climate-change-displacement-of-native-alaskans-usa

3 There are a few hundred such LFFU cases in the EJAtlas and more in reality (Temper et al. 2013, 2020; Roy 2021). For a previous approximation, our 2017 EJAtlas Blockadia featured map with 70 cases https://ejatlas.org/featured/blockadia, reviewed in https://phys.org/news/2017-11-blockadia-reveals-global-scale-anti-fossil.html. Also Martínez-Alier et al. (2018).

4 Sources:. https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/19737/A-Victory-Cast-in-Stone. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/chamalapura-thermal-power-plant-karnataka-india (Swapan Kumar Patra).

5 https://ejatlas.org/.../cabo-delgado-communites-impacted … Also the short article by Patrick Bond and J. Martinez-Alier (2021), Was the Cabo Delgado massacre a curtain call for Mozambique’s methane capitalism? https://countercurrents.org/author/joan-martinez-alier/

6 Ilham Rawoot. Gas-rich Mozambique may be headed for a disaster. The extractive gas industry in Mozambique has done more damage than good for Mozambicans. Febr. 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/24/gas-rich-mozambique-may-be-headed-for-a-disaster?fbclid=IwAR1XQTHRfCtvL4ctFisadoxoHoZyaUYrqnV8EQxgfMrVwDdElqDG8SnX4oI

7 Lead poisoning by Jiangsu Chunxing, Pizhou, China (https://ejatlas.org/conflict/lead-poisoning-by-jiangsu-chunxing-pizhou-china).

8 La Oroya, Peru (https://ejatlas.org/conflict/la-oroya-peru).

9 Cf. the University of Amsterdam project with Joyeeta Gupta et al http://www.leavefossilfuelsunderground.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Brochure-LFFU.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondazione Internazionale Premio Balzan [2020]; European Research Council [Advanced Grant GA 695446].