A transition to a world without fossil fuels is necessary to mitigate the worst of climate change. Whereas ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’ are two words heavily employed in the climate conversation, it is the concept of transition that offers us the opportunity to coordinate and add meaning to each task involved. Rather than breaking down the process into steps, such as emissions reductions on one hand, technological improvement on another, and jobs guarantees along the way, it is key to think of transition as a comprehensive and transversal political project, inclusive of various sectors and courses of action. Because transition is political, it is fundamentally about power. But the debates and policy directions regarding transition are being actively depoliticised, reduced to investment packages and socioeconomic adjustments that try to normalise the absurd and contradictory notion that it is possible to change almost everything to stop global warming while leaving power structures intact, if not stronger than they are today. This is the ideology behind efforts to ‘green’ our energy system by doing no more than lowering emissions or, worse yet, abating emissions with compensating mechanisms that, in reality, provide permits for continued emission of  greenhouse gases (GHGs), instead of radical emissions cuts.

The production and consumption of energy is responsible for 75% of all GHG emissions. This explains why the energy and fossil-fuel components have been so central to transition. However, their centrality has often eclipsed all other sources of emissions and, even more to the point, the many other problems that make up the ecological crisis. Reducing the crisis of our relationship with nature, first to climate, and then to energy sources only, serves powerful interests. Most immediately, it helps to deflect attention from other heavy emitters such as large-scale industrial agriculture and animal exploitation, or the concrete industry, which produces 8% of global emissions, more than three times the amount from aviation.¹IEA, Aviation, IEA, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation (accessed on October 15, 2024)

This carbon tunnel vision also hinders decarbonisation itself. What we find is a mix of partial and false solutions that, bundled together, create profit opportunities and provide incentives for business-as-usual – only this time, painted green. This is exemplified by the fact that, although expansion of renewable energy is now a reality, with a 50% growth in capacity in 2023 according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), so is the enduring power of fossil fuels and our inability to actually coordinate a fair global phase-out of oil, gas and coal. In reality, fossil-fuel operations are perpetuated by the industry’s promises of achieving lower emissions through new technologies whose capacities are largely overstated.

By focusing solely on carbon, energy transition plans can be deemed successful even if they hurt energy democracy and energy sovereignty around the world. They can be promoted as real progress even if, in practice, no transition has taken place, due to the happy co-existence of renewables and fossil fuels. One example is the case of green hydrogen investments. The original rationale was that green hydrogen would help to store energy from wind and solar, as well as serving as a strategic fuel in sectors harder to electrify, such as heavy freight, but the reality is quite different. Green hydrogen is welcomed by governments, markets and industries, firstly as a means to make oil ‘greener’ by substituting the fossil-based hydrogen used in refineries, and secondly as an opportunity to integrate renewables in the energy commodity trade.²IEA (2024), Global Hydrogen Review 2024, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2024, Page 274. 

This offers countries in the Global North a chance to import renewables in the form of green hydrogen (or even green ammonia) from Latin America and Africa, in order to meet targets for decarbonised energy consumption, with no regard for the discrepancy in energy use between richer and poorer nations. Production becomes commodity-based, as is standard in centre-periphery economic relations, while local communities and ecosystems are left with the negative impacts of these mega-projects, often powered by private capital alliances with the state, and turned into green sacrifice zones. This horizon is so desirable for countries in Europe, for example, that delays from technological deficits in green-hydrogen transportation are tolerated, in the hope that the technical issues will sort themselves out in the future, while the oil and chemical industries benefit from green hydrogen decarbonisation today. Similar situations, where the logic of energy commodities is combined with a hint of faith in illusory techno-fixes, leading to the creation of sacrifice zones, are discussed in this dossier and exposed as false solutions.

These false solutions are not errors, but pillars of the current paradigm of decarbonisation. From them we can see the unsoundness of the whole structure. While we should strive toward lower and zero carbon emissions in many sectors, we also need to consider other greenhouse gases and the industries that perpetuate them, such as agribusiness and industrial animal exploitation. This effort requires properly placing the energy transition alongside other sectoral transitions that are essential to the mitigation of climate change. This means a transition in agrarian food systems to favour a food sovereignty approach, integrated with climate priorities and the availability of healthy crops produced in economically just structures. It also means tackling the transportation problem seriously, by moving cities and entire regions into a model of sustainable mobility based on public systems of transportation and walkable environments, without falling into the trap of individual electric vehicles, which lower emissions but keep automobile corporations in control of how we move and the strategic minerals we extract. This, of course, requires moving away from the current paradigm of extractivism, where landscapes and ecosystems are altered to serve predatory supply chains, full of waste and labour exploitation, towards methods of territorial sovereignty that consider what kind of extraction is necessary, for what purpose, and the just socio-environmental conditions for those operations. 

For the energy transition to be just, and to go beyond diversification and false solutions, our approach to energy has to be transversal. Nature’s metabolism is not sectoral and cannot be isolated and fragmented according to investment projects and commodity specifications. The ecological crisis affecting us today is due to worsen if we continue to reduce our tasks to carbon units so easily appropriated, distorted and traded in the markets. Already, this level of tunnel vision has been prejudicial to the point of allowing governments and corporations to normalise war and its effects of human and ecosystemic death, including by omitting military greenhouse gas emissions from annual totals, while promising to ‘build back better’ with renewables and green infrastructure. It is a perverse logic that sells green solutions to the catastrophes on which capitalism builds its foundations.

The task at hand requires rejecting the tunnel vision imposed on us and opening ourselves up to complexity as we build towards the conditions for multiple transitions. We must understand the material challenges and contradictions that arise when trying to fix problems whose root causes are traced to the deepest foundations of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and the various systems of oppression that threaten our livelihoods and lives.

Among the contradictions facing us is the interaction between time and the fact that the conditions for transition are historical and contingent on current power dynamics. In one sense, we are racing against time to phase out fossil fuels, build renewable energy infrastructure, and adapt cities, coastal areas and entire countries before we reach (and then surpass) 1.5ºC in global warming. At the same time, this cannot be achieved through practices that perpetuate the same inequalities that have accompanied us until now. Principles of global energy democracy are an essential defence against new waves of colonial approaches, understood as green colonialism, that threaten the just transition. The just transition must entail a political project capable of dealing with the power discrepancies and antagonisms, otherwise the element of justice will be lost, and the few places able to boast of their low-carbon status will have built it on deepened extractivism, overexploitation of labour and unequal supply chains, indebtedness, and perpetuated patterns of loss and damage in the Global South. 

Considering that a one-size-fits-all transition impedes justice considerations, and that transition cannot be reduced only to energy, nor even to climate, but must weave the various strategic ecosocial horizons together to avoid catastrophic outcomes, this dossier builds on the debate of the energy transition to cover multiple just transitions. The discussions covered by our authors tackle the geopolitics of transition, the politics of reparation from the Global North to the Global South, the differences in speed, the need to build immediate capacity everywhere, and the challenges of building powerful organisations and campaigns to advance transition projects.

Regarding global divides, this dossier warns of the danger of letting the demand for rich countries to phase out fossil fuels faster outweigh the imperative for underdeveloped and poorer countries to catch up through transition. As Alameda’s research programme has developed a strong focus on sovereignty, previous dossiers have made the case that the climate issue is completely connected to sovereign interests. Nations and territories in the Global South must acknowledge that letting Global North countries take the lead on transition, especially the energy transition, just on the basis of their historical liability for emissions, is a trap in itself. After all, the faster a country transitions, the more prepared it will be for the economic and environmental challenges brought forth by climate change in the next decades. To believe that a fast Global North transition allows the Global South more time to do so in the future, after having its own turn with conventional fossil-fuel pathways of development, is to promote development and sovereignty with an expiry date. By then, the climate will have worsened for all, but the conditions for mitigation and adaptation in the Global South will be even more adverse, with the Global North having benefited from cheap extraction and technology without any reduction in its energy footprint or adjustment for energy sufficiency.

Thus, our dossier begins with discussions by Rodrigo Nunes and Breno Bringel on the nature of organising transitions within a just and internationalist paradigm, highlighting questions of power and capitalist capture of the transition, which is intended to perpetuate fossil fuels alongside profitable investments in renewables. Together, these articles help to frame the political project of multiple just transitions as both a tool and a horizon; that is, transition as both the means and the inspiration towards another possible world. Then we turn to the contributions of Katrin Geyer, Amir Lebdioui and Lala Penãranda who, from different standpoints and areas of focus, argue for immediate courses of action that could help to build conditions for bigger breakthroughs in the future, even as we acknowledge the challenges of creating policies, treaties and deals based on justice and real solutions, and even as green capitalism continues to thrive in the meantime. While Geyer and Lebdioui offer analyses of current disparities in how we measure climate contributions, from overlooking military emissions to the deeply unequal infrastructure of climate financing, Penãranda speaks of the alliances behind Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, and how workers can organise internationally to fight for their own needs and the planet’s in unison.  

In the second half of the dossier, we have case studies by Olena Lyubchenko, Bruce Baigrie and Julio Holanda, on Ukraine, South Africa and Brazil, respectively. These three countries offer windows into the dangers of neoliberal energy politics, which help us look for alternatives based on strong public institutions, community participation, and regard for fair systems of energy distribution. Finally, we end our journey with two important exercises in political imagination. Paris Marx offers a critique of the eco-dystopian thinking that blends green colonialism with mega-infrastructure ventures, while Erahsto Felício and Neto Onirê Sankara argue for territorial utopias fostered by a people’s radical environmentalism.
Together, these articles navigate the differences of time and place that determine the conditions for multiple just transitions, ranging from policy adjustments to questions of power and revolution. They tackle the energy sector of the transition by applying a transversal and holistic vision, where energy is not separate from other emissions-heavy sectors, and climate change is understood as part of a larger ecological crisis that must be considered in every proposed measure, to avoid positing solutions that simply shift problems elsewhere or into the future. The energy transition is urgent, but it will ultimately fail if executed unevenly and by separating the problem of emissions from those of biodiversity, pollution, soil degradation, ocean acidification, and all other symptoms of the sickened metabolism of nature. No big solar park or wind turbine infrastructure can withstand the growing unpredictability of climate events and their destructive power, just as it is unreasonable to imagine a full transition in only one country, as though the climate might obey international borders. By weaving the matter of the energy transition into the great complexity of problems we face, we hope also to raise the tides of opportunity and contribute to the alternatives brought forth by those striving for multiple just transitions and building power around them.

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This article is part of the Energy Transition dossier to be launched in March 2025.

FOOTNOTES

• 1
  IEA, Aviation, IEA, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation (accessed on October 15, 2024)
• 2
  IEA (2024), Global Hydrogen Review 2024, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2024, Page 274.