Radical energy justice: a Green Deal for Romanian coal miners?

This article proposes the energy justice framework can benefit from a radical reframing to expose broader structural injustices in the transitions towards a net-zero energy system. There are two objectives of this paper: First, is to outline how energy justice can provide a radical critique of injustices of the energy system–a more activist centered approach; and second, to use energy justice to identify who is responsible for unjust policies within the energy system. The second point is important to understand what is meant by a ‘just transition.’ Who decides how others are compensated for the transition and the loss of their jobs? The theoretical limitation of energy justice is the normative framing which does not identify the structural causes of injustice and avoids identifying the source causing the structural injustice. This article develops and applies radical energy justice to the case of the Jiu Valley in Romania, a coal-mining region, and an early site for the European Union’s Green Deal Just Transition Mechanism.