Energy Education: A Cosmopolitan Challenge to Ensure Justice in the Transition

Abstract

Nowadays, it is crucial to emphasize how energy education may be included among the energy justice challenges. It is only by spreading energy education among the future generations that the future society can gain the skills needed to identify and address the energy world injustices. For this purpose, an Energy Education Recovery Plan is needed across countries in order to spread the awareness and the importance of the energy justice principles.

1 Introduction—Energy Education: A Cosmopolitan Justice Challenge

Despite the issue that in energy justice literature there has never been so much space for energy education, it is important to highlight how energy education may be included among the energy justice challenges. In countries that are scarce in natural resources, the evolution of energy education may have been slower. Educational and academic advancements have taken a long time to arrive. So, in both developed and developing countries, energy education is not widespread as it should be, especially in academia.

The implementation of energy education as an energy justice problem addresses the major issue that education and knowledge are the foundation for the development of any society and any transition, particularly to a low-carbon economy.¹ We are all global citizens, and in order to comprehend the significance of our individual acts, we must investigate the origins and consequences of such actions in energy systems. Energy education must, in fact, be distributed evenly across all territories and impacted areas of a country, with no distinctions or biases. As a result, energy justice education is an application of the principle of cosmopolitan justice.

As a result, beginning with energy education, future generations will be equipped with the necessary tools to recognize and address energy world inequities. But, what exactly do we mean by energy justice education? Facing and addressing energy injustices in our society entail addressing issues such as global economic inequalities, labor-force disparities, socioeconomic injustices, climate and environmental injustices, and decolonization.²

2 Policy Recommendations for an Energy Education Recovery Plan

It is important for scholars to realize that energy justice takes place in two ways: first, a new law is introduced to ensure justice happens; and second when we go to the national legal courts to advance justice on a certain issue. Researchers from all the disciplines need to realize what they are seeking and how new advancements might happen, i.e., which of the two ways mentioned above will be needed or maybe they both will.³ Therefore, energy justice development intended as the fight of the energy injustices may happen mainly through the identification of legal solution aimed at reducing or deleting the injustices from the energy world.

As the French lawyer Saleilles once said, the evolution of law takes place “by purely blind and empirical means, depending on the circumstances—or in a conscious, thoughtful and objective manner”.⁴ He himself identified law as that rigorous technique capable of fulfilling multiple purposes for the development of a society. In fact, if a first purpose of law is to examine legal phenomena, their causes and effects, a second is certainly to study the fate of those laws in concrete reality, the social reality in which those rules are born, live and die.

All of the events that have occurred since the 2015 Paris Agreement, such as the health crisis, the Russian-Ukraine war, and the subsequent increase in energy prices, are separate social and legal phenomena that must be examined in their progression using the energy justice metric. The energy sector is now at the heart of the world’s economies, on which humanity’s future and well-being rely, and it requires a significant and growing commitment from scholars and practitioners. As a matter of fact, the challenge of the energy education serves as a guide and compass for contemplating, comprehending, and implementing the energy transition. Through energy education, politicians, regulators, universities, and individuals need to spread the culture of the just transition.

Only by comprehending the difficulties and dynamics of this industry, future generations will be able to embrace its relevance and provide a wind of new ideas to the globe. Countries will be able to equip researchers, jurists, legislators, and policymakers with the required knowledge tools to create a community’s political, legal, and social future by implementing energy education, particularly in law curricula. For this purpose, countries should implement a proper energy education recovery plan. Some of them have already moved forward it through a National Energy Education Development Project (in the USA for example)⁵ with the aim of promoting a broad understanding of the energy world, its causes and effects as well as the importance to address it in terms of justice.

3 Conclusion—Energy Justice and the Science of Law

In conclusion, as pointed out by the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, William Nordhaus, what is urgently needed, in the face of the global warming emergency, is not so much a response in terms of technical-scientific elaboration, but rather the adoption of legal solutions that are as close as possible to the empirical evidence on the trend in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.⁶ And this shift nowadays is needed in the energy sector as never before. New legal solutions and binding targets are inevitable for a sector which is undergoing (and expected to undergo) a period of profound change, driven on the one hand by sustainable policies and on the other by a technological acceleration.

However, in terms of the climate, energy and environmental sector, law has not given society yet an established foundation or framework from which bringing justice to the next generation. As clearly outlined in the international literature, legal practitioners have also made minor improvements and advancements to the area when called to issue specific legal opinions. They have barely tried to establish concepts, theories, or methods in energy law beforehand.⁷

If concepts, theories, and methods have always inspired the foundation of a discipline by providing the directives and general aims, in the same way this should have happened to the energy law one in order to use those to contest, discuss, and to be used as a starting point for a new energy law knowledge.

It is only by now that with the rise of energy justice and of the energy justice principles, the science of law can finalize its aim of bringing justice to the next generation by weighing the unity of peoples through the unity of laws.⁸ This conception must give to energy law a universal and cosmopolitan purpose. A cosmopolitan law of freedom aimed at the coexistence between individuals. A law born from the awareness of the cosmopolitan essence of our human, cultural and social evolution.⁹