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Mikaela Loach is a climate justice activist and author advocating for an intersectional approach to the climate crisis. She emphasises the intrinsic links between environmentalism, anti-racism, and refugee rights.

For issue #146 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from her book, It's Not that Radical (2025). Here she examines how fossil fuel corporations have repeatedly committed severe human rights and environmental abuses to protect profits, proving that our energy future must be publicly controlled and guided by a Just Transition to renewable energy that protects both workers and communities.

Evidence reviewed by Amnesty International showed that Shell repeatedly encouraged the Nigerian military to deal with the community protests against its operations despite the horrific consequences that might follow. Whilst working in Colombia, BP made payments – in the millions – to the Ministry of Defence, Colombian Army and others in order to ‘protect’ its oil facilities. Questions have been raised about the extent to which BP benefited from the human-rights abuses perpetrated by paramilitary groups along the pipeline. In 2011, Chevron was found guilty in an Ecuadorian court and fined eight billion dollars for pollution that amounted to an ecological disaster and seriously harmed the human rights of the Indigenous inhabitants in a small and sensitive part of the rainforest. Friends of The Earth France and Survie published an entire report titled ‘A Nightmare Named Total’ in 2020, which revealed the ongoing human-rights violations linked to Total’s activities in Uganda and Tanzania, through projects including the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, which were impacting about 100,000 people. All of these companies have also compromised workers’ rights and opposed unions time and time again. That’s only a few examples from a few companies. Just google ‘human-rights abuses’ along with the name of any fossil-fuel company and you’ll find many, many more instances of violence.

If we want an energy system that protects both people and the planet, then we need to get as far away from these companies as possible and put our energy systems into public hands. We don’t need private companies to control our energy. We shouldn’t want them to. It should never be that the control over the provision and supply of something which is essential for the survival of people is put in the hands of a company driven by profit. It isn’t hard to see that provision won’t be given based on what’s best for the people, but rather be driven by what is most profitable for the company.

This all being said, it’s important that, rather than advocating for these industries to be shut down overnight, we call for a Just Transition. A Just Transition calls for a transition away from harmful fossil fuels to renewable energy that leaves no one behind; a transition that protects jobs and workers; a transition that can lead to enhanced workers’ rights. The Climate Justice Alliance defines it as: 

‘A vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste-free. The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.’ 

It is entirely possible that we have a transition to renewable energy that is still based upon the same extractivist ideals that the fossil-fuel industry has been using since its inception. Whilst we wouldn’t be making the climate crisis worse in this future, it is still not climate justice. It is not the future we want. But it is the future we will get if we leave this transition to the fossil-fuel companies. 

It’s so important that we hold Just Transition principles close to us when we are advocating for climate justice. Often, a tactic used by the fossil-fuel industry or governments working against a liveable future is to say that climate campaigners are against workers or jobs. They say that we are advocating for shutting down the industry overnight, putting thousands of jobs and ‘energy security’ at risk. More recently, politician Kwasi Kwarteng, when Minister for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the UK, weaponised the war in Ukraine to push this propaganda. After being challenged by activists on this, he tweeted:

‘Shout and scream all you like, I’m not going to put Britain’s energy security at risk by shutting off domestic oil and gas production. We need oil and gas for decades to come. Either we source more of what we need from the North Sea, or import more from abroad.’

We have to make it clear that these statements are a misrepresentation of the truth – they’re just oil and gas industry propaganda. We are calling for a Just Transition, not shutting down all fossil fuels overnight. The fossil-fuel industry is not on the side of their workers or the people. They consistently enact mass layoffs, create dangerous working environments and work to bust unions.

We have to keep workers’ rights central to all of our climate organising. We have to listen to the very real worries that workers have in the face of these huge changes. We have to work with unions and workers together against our common enemy: the fossil-fuel industry, bosses and the capitalist system.

Kwarteng and the fossil-fuel industry not only weaponise workers and jobs, they also bring up the phrase ‘energy security’ a lot. They suggest that, by phasing out fossil fuels, we are putting that so-called ‘security’ at risk. In actual fact, fossil fuels are an energy source which is extremely wasteful, expensive and unreliable, whereas publicly owned renewable energy can increase energy autonomy and democracy, provide reliable energy supply (energy security) and reduce energy costs. It takes energy provision out of the private hands that only exist for profit and puts it into the hands of the people. It is an essential demand of climate justice. We are seeing these projects spring up all over the world. In Bethesda in North Wales, Energy Local have worked with one hundred households to create an Energy Local Club with their local hydro plant. This has allowed these residents – in an area with significant fuel poverty – to access cheaper energy directly from the local hydro plant, bypassing the big companies and the increased prices on the market. This project has made a real difference to these households.

Excerpted with permission from It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World by Mikaela Loach, published by Haymarket Books.

The Internationalist Archive