Mixed bag
The unequal and systematic distribution of environmental risks and harms across social groups, such that marginalized communities bear a disproportionate burden of exposure to ecological degradation, pollution, climate impacts, and resource depletion relative to their contribution to causing those harms.
What are skewed vulnerabilities?
Expanding the rule of one nation over others by force; previously relating to empire or royalty.
What is imperialism?
This refers to “an economic ideology based on wage-labor that prioritizes growth in monetary profits for the owners of assets as the underlying focus, incentive, and purpose of major human social endeavors.” — Kyle Whyte
What is capitalism?
Social conflicts born from the unfair distribution of environmental benefits and costs, such as access to natural resources and the unjust burdens of pollution.
The principle that puts equity and human rights at the core of decision-making and action on climate change. It fundamentally recognizes that climate change has disproportionate impacts on low-income communities and communities of color around the world, the people and places least responsible for the problem.
What is climate justice?
The hidden social and environmental harms that are encoded within and made invisible by commodities, products, and energy systems — such that the suffering, displacement, pollution, and ecological destruction involved in extraction, production, and disposal are physically present in goods but rendered socially absent to consumers and decision-makers.
What are embodied energy injustices?
This "refers to a form of domination in which at least one society seeks to exploit some set of benefits believed to be found in the territory of one or more other societies, from farm land to precious minerals to labor.” — Kyle Whyte
What is colonialism?
The process through which goods, services, or entities—particularly natural ones—are transformed into objects that can be bought and sold on the market.
What is commodification?
This refers to how wealthier and more powerful Global North nations have disproportionate access to both natural resources and sink capacity for waste in Global South nations.
What is ecologically unequal exchange?
Not having access to modern energy sources, or not being able to pay for energy-related expenses.
What is energy poverty?
Companies that are incorporating environmental factors into their decision-making is an example of this.
What is ecological modernization?
A distinct form of colonialism in which foreign colonizers come to a land, claim it as their own, and establish permanent residence with the intention of replacing the existing Indigenous population rather than simply extracting resources or governing from afar.
What is settler colonialism?
Dispossessing people from their land, ways of life and economics, and relocating and repositioning them as wage laborers in relation to capital, is an example of...
What is primitive accumulation?
The ability of a powerful actor (a corporation, state, or industry) to externalize the costs of environmental harm — such as pollution, resource depletion, or climate damage — onto less powerful populations, future generations, or ecosystems, while retaining the economic benefits for themselves.
What is cost-shifting success?
This refers to “a global energy system that fairly disseminates both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that has representative and impartial energy decision-making” (Sovacool, 2016)
What is energy justice?
This concept refers to when the lived knowledge of frontline or marginalized communities about environmental harm is systematically disbelieved, ignored, or rendered unintelligible within dominant scientific or policy frameworks — compounding material harm with the further injury of not being heard or understood.
What is epistemic injustice?
The practice of using economic, political, or cultural influence to control or exploit a country or region, particularly former colonies, rather than through direct military force or political sovereignty.
What is neo-colonialism?
The flow of energy and material through the economy; inputs and outputs; informed by ecological economics.
What is social metabolism?
The rich countries who exploit the global commons (e.g., resource plundering and use of environmental space to deposit wastes) owe this to the poor countries, who are not using their legitimate share of the global commons.
What is ecological debt?
A climate finance term having to do with liability and compensation from wealthy countries for the impacts of climate change on developing countries.
What is loss and damage?
The collective, institutionalized process by which societies acknowledge a threatening reality (such as climate change) on some level, yet systematically act as though it were not true — through cultural norms, political structures, media frameworks, and everyday social interactions that make not knowing or not responding the path of least resistance.
What is socially organized denial?
Social movements that arise from environmental conflicts when impoverished people struggle against powerful state or private interests that threaten their livelihood, health, sovereignty, and culture; challenging the notion that poverty causes environmental degradation.
What is environmentalism of the poor?
This refers to how solar panels are viewed as finished products whose only relevant quality is their clean electricity output, obscuring all the social relations, labor, extraction, and environmental impacts embedded in their production.
What is commodity fetish?
Places and populations that will be affected by the sourcing, transportation, installation, and operation of solutions for powering the renewable energy transition.
What are green sacrifice zones?
A framework for ensuring that the shift away from fossil fuels and toward a low-carbon economy happens in a fair, equitable, and inclusive way that protects workers, communities, and vulnerable populations from bearing disproportionate costs.
What is Just Transition?