Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy Research & Social Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/erss Perspectives “Let justice roll down like waters”: Reconnecting energy justice to its roots in the civil rights movement Ray Galvin a,b, ⁎ a Institute for Future Energy Needs and Behavior, E.ON Energy Research Center/School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, Mathieustr 10, 52074 Aachen, Germany b Behaviour and Building Performance Group, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, 1 Scroope Terrace, CB2 1PX, Cambridge, UK ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Energy justice Civil rights movement Back theology Environmental justice Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Extinction Rebellion ABSTRACT The meaning and connotations of the word “justice” as used in environmental justice and much climate justice literature were formed in the US civil rights movement. Its basic narrative is of a brutally oppressed people who took the initiative, defined their own needs, demanded freedom, co-opted the help of higher powers, and pla- gued their oppressors bravely and increasingly disruptively until the oppressors gave in. These connotations and meaning tend to cling to the word “justice” when used in social-political reform movements of many kinds. Interestingly, today's energy justice literature shows a much wider spectrum of meaning of “justice”. Much of this literature pursues an intellectual quest for the meaning of justice as an abstract imperative, which scholars investigate philosophically and apply to energy-related projects and transitions, to inform policymakers and others of the rights and wrongs of these, albeit often in relation to vulnerable or oppressed peoples. In this essay I trace the roots of the word “justice” in the civil rights movement and its usage in the environmental and climate justice movements, and explore whether energy justice studies could benefit from a greater awareness of this. I also relate this justice narrative to the more basic question, raised by previous authors, of what it means to have moral values and make moral claims. 1. Introduction In a recent edition of this journal I framed the issue of energy justice within the broader question of what it means to make a moral claim [1]. Following post-Wittgenstein scholars [2–4], I argued that people's moral or ethical beliefs and commitments are primarily formed via what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [5,6] called “language games”: concrete, everyday situations where people learn to interact with others, where words such as “good”, “bad”, “right”, “wrong”, “fair”, “unfair”, “just” and “unjust” get attached to various types of inter- personal and social situations and behaviour. A human being thereby develops a moral side to her personality which is intrinsic to the meaning of her life. I contrasted this with the tendency of much energy justice literature to speak of moral claims as if they derive from a kind of metaphysical, objectively existing realm of moral law (be it western, eastern, Rawlsian, Post-Enlightenment, Buddhist or otherwise), that is meant to engage people intellectually and draw them to assent to its demands. I argued that this tends to disconnect moral claims from the actual lived situations in which people experience rights and wrongs, and makes it difficult to engage policymakers and others in a felt commitment to the principles espoused by energy justice advocates. In this paper I explore a different but closely related feature of moral claims of justice, to do with the meaning and development of the word “justice” in modern social political discourse, particularly in relation to environmental protection, climate change and energy. When scholars use the expressions “environmental justice”, “climate justice” and “energy justice”, what are the connotations of the word “justice”? What moral feelings, urges, memories, commitments, meanings and energies does the word invoke and tap into? What is the human content of the word “justice” in these expressions? Is the word “justice” an “empty signifier” [7] which users can fill with whatever meaning they find useful, or does it carry meanings, connotations and even passions that cling to it no matter how we might otherwise define it? It is important to note that the word “justice” as used in modern, social-political discourse has a history. The main historical event that gave it the connotations it carries in radical, bottom-up transforma- tional social-political movements in the English-speaking western world today was the US civil rights movement. Here a sorely oppressed, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101385 Received 14 July 2019; Received in revised form 29 October 2019; Accepted 24 November 2019 ⁎ Correspondence address: Institute for Future Energy Needs and Behavior, E.ON Energy Research Center/School of Business and Economics, RWTH Aachen University, Mathieustr 10, 52074 Aachen, Germany. E-mail address: ray.galvin@gmx.de. Energy Research & Social Science 62 (2020) 101385 2214-6296/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T