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Short abstract:

The concept of energy justice has emerged as a powerful tool for bringing political ideals in the complex study of energy transitions. But it's all very utopian. We're going to explain why.

Long abstract:

The concept of energy justice has emerged as a powerful tool for bringing political ideals into the complex study of energy transitions. With its “seeming universal appeal,” the quest for justice and the counterpart quest of injustice(s) is an offer one cannot refuse. Methodologically, however, the approach suffers from both justificationism and utopianism, a combination that affects equally the descriptive reconstructions of current status and the normative prescriptions of future directions. It neither offers insights into navigating value conflicts nor reflects imminent value change. In this paper, we argue that the energy justice approach needs an infusion of moral pluralism to escape the utopian chase of perceived ideals (or perceived dangers), and advance its approach to dealing with value conflicts and potential value changes. Our argument is two-pronged. On a theoretical level we show that moral pluralism covers some of the problems previously identified with the energy justice approach but often only implicitly; to build our argument in favor of moral pluralism we identify potential ethical dilemmas value conflicts and value changes may pose. On a practical level, we illustrate how moral pluralism can be explicitly applied to scrutinize current developments in the hydrogen transition (the move from fossil-based to ‘clean’ hydrogen), a transition that has recently caught the attention of energy justice scholars, and what insights about value conflicts and value changes such application has to reveal. We conclude with a list of practical action points for consolidating the marriage between energy justice and moral pluralism.