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Accepted Paper:
Holding energy to account: climate change litigation in an age of global interconnection
Noah Walker-Crawford
(London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
Climate change highlights the relation between energy production and increasing environmental uncertainty. I follow a legal claim against a German energy company over its contribution to climate hazard in Peru which broadens public discussions about responsibility in times of climate change.
Paper long abstract:
Climate change highlights the relation between energy production and increasing environmental uncertainty around the world. In a precedent-setting legal claim, the Peruvian farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya sued the German energy company RWE over its contribution to climate hazard in the Andes. The company has produced coal-fired energy for over a century and is one of Europe’s largest historical emitters. The lawsuit draws on climate science to trace a causal link of legal accountability between RWE’s operations in Europe and climate change impacts in Peru. This opens a broader discussion about energy production and responsibility in times of climate change. The legal claim conceptualises climate change in terms of translocal socio-material entanglements across the planet. This concretises the relation between energy production in Europe and socio-environmental vulnerability elsewhere. This paper draws on ethnographic research following the claim in the Peruvian Andes, at German courts and UN climate summits. Bringing a Peruvian farmer onto the global stage of climate politics, the claim brings other knowledges and ways of being to bear on international discussions about climate change.