Here Sandra Jazmin Barragan Contreras (Department of Geography, University of Sheffield) interviews Stefan Bouzarovski (Geography, University of Manchester) about his recently published open access article, “Just Transitions: A Political Ecology Critique”. Their timing could not be better: Stefan’s article was published in Antipode Volume 54, Issue 4 this July—a month that has seen extreme weather in much of Europe and North America, and with it renewed calls for moves toward a survivable, low-carbon future. “Just Transitions: A Political Ecology Critique” should give commentators pause for thought, offering some much needed critical thinking amidst all this heat…

“Green deals” to promote socially inclusive decarbonisation have captured the imagination of public intellectuals and advocates across the political spectrum. Such programmes are often premised upon the concept of “just transitions”, which aims to reconcile environmental and social concerns in the movement towards a low-carbon future. I respond to some of the underlying tensions that underpin dominant discourses in this domain by foregrounding collective, disruptive, and non-capitalist forms of infrastructural transformation in the energy domain. I discuss possibilities for a more egalitarian politics and shared environmental commons in the articulation of residential energy efficiency and housing upgrades with the aid of insights from the political ecology literature, and examples from activist praxis across Europe and North America. More broadly, I highlight how well-known contradictions of labour, environmental sustainability, and economic transformation are complicated by encounters with climate and energy circulations.