Abstract

Who owns the wind and sunlight? As the climate justice movement spreads, ownership and development models for renewable energy are emerging as new issues. The struggle for energy transition extends beyond coal phase-out, nuclear phase-out, and the expansion of renewable energy to encompass the transition pathway. This article analyzes the issues of carbon neutrality and energy transition policy from the perspective of the commons and rentier capitalism to capture the problems implicit in the transition path. To achieve this, we broaden the interpretation of energy commons, which initially focused on community energy and public commons partnerships, to include the dispossession and subsumption of the commons by capital and integrates it from the perspective of ‘the politics of the commons’. Furthermore, by acknowledging that one source of unearned income stems from the dispossession and subsumption of the commons, we examine rentier capitalism as a historical condition for energy transition. Based on this, we examine the problem of rentierism through the dispossession and subsumption of the commons implicit in energy transition policies such as renewable energy profit sharing, carbon emissions trading, power industry restructuring, and small-scale distributed power generation. For a just transition, we must find a way to utilize the ‘gifts of nature’ as the commons while preventing their use as a source of unearned income.