24. Dispossession, Justice, and a Sustainable Energy Future

The World Health Organization’s ‘energy ladder’ illustrates the forms of energy found across the globe today, ranging from scavenged animal dung to electricity as fueled primarily by coal, hydropower, and nuclear energy. In this chapter, we argue that this ladder positions catastrophic risks at every rung, including ecological destruction and human warfare. Ulrich Beck theorized how catastrophic risks are engineered into modern western infrastructures, and then denied or falsely made manageable, as we witnessed with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico British Petroleum oil spill and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis. Such catastrophic crises symbolically eclipse the equally significant—yet less spectacular—injustices and environmental degradation wrought routinely across carbon and nuclear supply chains. The concept of [liberal] ‘dispossession’ is adopted from critical social theory to name the conditions of sustained energy injustice found in western civilizations as its powerful energy complexes knowingly deny the scope and severity of externalized costs, thereby discouraging public awareness of needed change for a sustainable future.