Equity, climate justice and fossil fuel extraction: principles for a managed phase out

ABSTRACT

Equity issues have long been debated within international climate politics, focused on fairly distributing reductions in territorial emissions and fossil fuel consumption. There is a growing recognition among scholars and policymakers that curbing fossil fuel supply (as well as demand) can be a valuable part of the climate policy toolbox; this raises the question of where and how the tool should be applied. This paper explores how to equitably manage the social dimensions of a rapid transition away from fossil fuel extraction. Fossil fuel extraction leads to benefits for some people (such as extraction workers) and harms for others (such as pollution-affected communities). A transition must respect and uphold the rights of both groups, while also staying within climate limits, as climate impacts will fall most heavily on the world’s poor. This paper begins by reviewing how extraction affects economies and communities and the different transitional challenges they face. Based on that review, it then examines three common equity approaches – economic efficiency, meeting development needs, and effort-sharing. Drawing lessons from the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, the paper proposes five principles as a basis for equitably curbing fossil fuel extraction within climate limits:

(1) Phase out global extraction at pace consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C;

(2) Enable a just transition for workers and communities;

(3) Curb extraction consistent with environmental justice;

(4) Reduce extraction fastest where doing so will have the least social costs;

(5) Share transition costs fairly, according to ability to bear those costs.

Key policy insights:

• Fossil fuel extraction is unlikely to be a viable path to development because the Paris Agreement goals require most fossil fuel use to be ended within a generation;

• Extraction should be phased out fastest in diversified, wealthier economies that can better absorb the transitional impacts;

• Governments of extracting countries should enact ambitious industrial policy to diversify their economies, alongside economic and employment policies to enable a just transition;

• The costs of a just transition should be borne by those most able to bear it: poorer countries can reasonably demand financial support.

KEYWORDS:

• Equity
• justice
• fossil fuels
• extraction
• just transition
• economic diversification

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for comments from Michael Lazarus, Nathan Lemphers, Georgia Piggott, David Turnbull and three anonymous reviewers. This article grew out of extensive discussions with researchers and practitioners, especially within civil society, over the period 2016–2019. Workshops and seminars were held in Oxford, Lofoten, Johannesburg, Marrakesh and Bonn. The authors are also grateful to the more than 50 people who participated in these discussions or commented on texts. Space does not permit listing them all; however the authors were particularly influenced by Nnimmo Bassey, Dipti Bhatnagar, Jeremy Brecher, Simon Caney, Navroz Dubash, Lili Fuhr, James Morrissey, Anabella Rosemberg, Samantha Smith, Matthew Stilwell, Harro Van Asselt and Ivonne Yanez.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Based on current oil, gas and coal emissions (Le Quéré et al., 2018), and assuming geographically equal emissions factors, OECD currently extracts fossil fuels equivalent to 9.2 GtCO₂/yr and non-OECD 25.3 GtCO₂/yr. If OECD were to phase out on a straight line within five years and non-OECD within 25 years, the resulting emissions would be 340 GtCO₂, even before considering other sources such as cement and land use change.

2 The IPCC (2018, p. 96) warns that ‘CDR deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C’.

3 The equity concerns that may arise in a post-carbon economy, such as from lithium or cobalt mines (Horvath & Romero Medina, 2019; Amnesty International, 2016b) or bioenergy plantations (Colbran, 2011; Gonzalez, 2016), are beyond our scope. Nor have we explored ways in which the conceptual framing of ‘energy’ and ‘transition’ may lend themselves to perpetuation of injustices, in particular by emphasizing narrowly defined techno-economic matters to the exclusion of the social and political (Lohmann & Hildyard, 2014).

4 Assuming mining’s share of lignite employment remains at 75% (employment statistics no longer disaggregate mining from power plants).

5 Mining accounts for a much larger share of employment in the mining regions, such as Lusatia in Germany or Shanxi in China. However, given that national governments should be expected to help enable the transitions in those regions, the national comparison remains apt.

6 Average mining and quarrying wages in 2015: US $795/month in China; $4,985/month in Germany (ILO, 2017).

7 One reason the Yasuní-ITT initiative failed was that some donors feared setting a precedent for other oil exporters (Marx, 2012; Scholz, 2014). To answer this, the proposed replicability of the proposal was restricted to biologically and culturally sensitive tropical forests (Larrea, 2009). This restriction would obviously limit the approach’s value as a general solution to fossil fuels and climate change; meanwhile, several writers pointed out that Ecuador’s duty to respect rights should not be contingent on its international relations (Acosta et al., 2009; Lang, 2013).

8 These conceptual problems do not generally arise in relation to corporations’ moral responsibility for extraction, which may play an important role in assigning legal liability (Ganguly et al., 2018; Setzer & Byrnes, 2019; Muffett & Feit, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by KR Foundation.