Energy Justice Demands Decolonizing Climate Metrics: India's Low-Carbon Wellbeing Exposes Global Consumption Inequity
Original framing: “From climate targets to energy justice” — The Hindu
Adivasi communities in central India's coal belt practice energy cosmologies where forest, water, and fire are kin not resources; the Gond 'Devgudi' sacred groves regulate microclimates while providing biomass energy sovereignty. The article's 'energy justice' framework cannot capture how mining violates ontological contracts between humans and non-humans that have sustained low-carbon wellbeing for millennia. Restoring these epistemologies would shift policy from distribution metrics to territorial sovereignty.
The Hindu's reframing correctly identifies consumption inequality as climate policy's blind spot but remains trapped in the same technocratic paradigm that produced the crisis.
By centering adivasi energy cosmologies, colonial extraction histories, and plurinational wellbeing metrics like Buen Vivir, we see that energy justice requires not better accounting but epistemic decolonization of development itself. The trickster irony lies in India's elite claiming climate leadership while replicating extractive logics on adivasi lands — the Hasdeo Aranya coal approvals and solar park land grabs expose 'energy justice' as negotiating theater. Only sufficiency-based planning with hard caps on luxury emissions, grounded in community sovereignty and climate debt reparations, can transform the structural conditions the article diagnoses.