The energy landscape is changing dramatically. Communities are being impacted in different ways. Positive impacts include reductions in air pollution and new tax revenues from renewables. Negative impacts include lost jobs and foregone tax revenues after closure of large fossil fuels generation facilities and coal mines. The contours of this transition have been further altered by recent events such as the global oil market crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. While economic and social issues can be addressed through thoughtful policy design, the pace of change, and the extent to which communities have a say in what comes next, matter. Though the technical issues of transitions are well-researched, the socio-economic aspects of the energy transition remain both emergent and essential to an equitable transition to a low-carbon energy system. This article provides an overview of the history and current status of just transitions.

The target site of the antifungal compound LY214352 [8-chloro-4-(2-chloro-4-fluorophenoxy) quinoline] has been identified through a dual biochemical and molecular-genetics approach. In the molecular-genetics approach, a cosmid library was prepared from an Aspergillus nidulans mutant that was resistant to LY214352 because of a dominant mutation in a single gene. A single cosmid (6A6-6) that could transform an LY214352-sensitive strain of A. nidulans to LY214352-resistance was isolated from the library by sib-selection. Restriction fragments from cosmid 6A6-6 containing the functional resistance gene were identified by transformation, and sequenced. The LY214352-resistance gene coded for a protein of 520 amino acids that had a 34% identity and a 57% similarity in a 333 amino-acid overlap to E. coli dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHO-DH). The results of a series of biochemical mechanism-of-action studies initiated simultaneously with molecular-genetic experiments also suggested that DHO-DH was the target of LY214352. Assays measuring the inhibition of DHO-DH activity by LY214352 in a wild-type strain (I50=40 ng/ml) and a highly resistant mutant (I50>100 microgram/ml) conclusively demonstrated that DHO-DH is the target site of LY214352 in A. nidulans. Several mutations in the DHO-DH (pyrE) gene that resulted in resistance to LY214352 were identified.

This essay operates at the intersection of the energy humanities and environmental justice studies to survey extractive fictions, a term I use to describe literature and other cultural forms that render visible the socioecological impacts of extractive capitalism and problematize extraction as a cultural practice. The essay first theorizes extraction and examines cultural representations of coal and gas fields in northern Appalachia, including Ann Pancake’s novel Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007) and Jennifer Haigh’s novel Heat and Light (2015). Each, by rendering visible instances of environmental degradation and economic decline associated with energy development, challenges the deep-seated role of extraction as a cornerstone of regional cultural identity and the mythos of fossil fuel development as a path to economic and social progress. In doing so, they lay bare the epistemological failures of extractive capitalism, a mode of accumulation based on the large-scale withdrawal and processing of natural resources. The final section of the essay turns to the AMD&ART Park in Vintondale, Pennsylvania, and artist-activist John Sabraw’s toxic-art initiative in southern Ohio, both of which address these failures through the articulation of postextraction futurism, a critical method that combines environmental science and historically situated aesthetics to remediate ecological and social injustices associated with extraction. Both projects emerge from collaborations among artists, academics, scientists, and local communities to reverse the impacts of extraction through innovative water reclamation techniques and art exhibits that memorialize the region’s coal heritage. These initiatives complement extractive fictions to envision an inclusive, livable Appalachia unencumbered by the dictates of extractive capitalism.

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As a comment on India after the publication of Midnight’s Children , Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh offers a broad-based critique of modern India within the context of economic policy shifts that followed the country’s independence from British rule in 1947. The gradual implementation of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s and 1990s accompanied India’s emergence as a major player in the global capitalist economy but also led to drastic increases in income inequality, unemployment, and the proliferation of a vast informal sector of exploitable human capital. Rushdie’s novel identifies India’s entrepreneurial and capitalist classes, specifically in Mumbai/Bombay, as complicit in the exacerbation of the class disparity that has led, in many cases, to increased cultural tensions between Hindus and Muslims as well as the growing ubiquity of government corruption and organized crime. The novel offers additional insight into the exploitative logic of Hindu nationalist politics through its parodic depiction of the Shiv Sena party, which derives much of its political clout through its patriarchal, mafia-esque relationship with urban slum dwellers. The Moor’s Last Sigh delineates new and complex forms of oppression and exploitation in postcolonial India that often occur simultaneously along class and cultural lines.