An academic has highlighted that the energy policy is really about people and it is not just a material to be governed, as it is a political relationship with the people who extract it.
Dr Trish Kahle, an assistant professor at Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) said: “ How energy is governed in a country is the key to understanding its political system and agenda” while launching her first book 'Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century.'
Recently published by Columbia University Press Dr Kahle’s book highlights that energy and its governance have a profound impact on society as the foundation of political economy.
Dr Kahle’s book delves into the human side of energy, offering a new perspective on the history of coal miners in America and the imprints they have left on the country's laws and political imagination. Yet her research is not confined to American history alone, it also addresses broader global trends affecting governance and injustice worldwide.
“Labour injustice and environmental destruction associated with extractive mining has a long life, and can undercut a government’s aspirational claims to democracy, and people’s ability to participate in it, even if they receive financial benefits,” noted the academic.
The connection between American energy and labour governance to global systems of inequality means that the book’s insightful treatment of the role of coal miners in shaping foundational energy justice principles offers a new understanding of energy citizenship critical to today’s discussions about a sustainable energy transition.
“A shift to renewables isn’t enough to achieve energy justice on a global scale. You have to build a better energy system in order to achieve environmental justice,” she highlighted.
Dr Kahle further discussed themes of labour justice, sustainable futures, and the process of decolonising energy humanities in the Gulf region at the book launch event hosted by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS). Director of CIRS, Zahra Babar, moderated the event in conversation with the co-leaders of the CIRS Energy Humanities Research Initiative, Dr Kahle, Dr Firat Oruc, and Dr Victoria Googasian.
In her book Dr Kahle examines the struggles of coal miners and the rights they fought to secure, from the Progressive Era in the 1880s through President Reagan’s election in 1980. She also emphasises the core contradictions between the mines as an engine of democratic politics, and a source of violence, oppression, and environmental destruction. The result is a strong case to rethink energy production in terms of its human costs and benefits, rather than solely thinking of the environmental costs and benefits. Whether the energy raw materials are used at home or abroad, considerations for energy laborers need to be at the heart of energy policy.
“The message from this particular history has lots of resonance with today’s push to decarbonise energy systems,” advised Dr Kahle, who while writing the book has also concurrently read accounts of industries driving the renewables industry such as cobalt mines in the Congo, and lithium mines in Latin America.
“I’m seeing this same story playing out again, but there is still time to make a difference. We have to realise that renewables are not inherently more just simply because they are not fossil fuels. Decarbonisation is not energy justice if you are perpetuating the same forms of extractivism and global inequality,” she added.
Dr Trish Kahle
