How to Save the Energy Transition: What Coal Scholars Can See Coming, and What to Do About It

The energy transition requires rapid, coordinated retirement of essentially all fossil fuel infrastructure with careful attention to impacts on workers and affected communities. Experience with the decline of the US coal industry offers a wide range of lessons about the phase-out of energy systems, including the inadequacy of a market-mediated transition given predictable increases in risk tolerance by successive private owners, emergent failure points of longstanding environmental and labor laws, and the structural, though not inevitable, advantages of increased levels of public management under conditions of systemic decline. Transition scholarship focused on the oil and gas sectors should better incorporate these lessons from coal.