Social media and energy justice: A global evidence

Abstract

Over the past decades, several advances have been made in the climate field because of human activities, economic situation, and shift in the recognition that the people suffer most from the adverse effects of climate change. According to COP27, it is now commonly acknowledged that the poorest countries—those that pollute the least—are those that experience the worst effects of climate change. This recognition raises the issue of justice in environmental matters: today we speak of environmental justice, which would consist of applying justice principles to energy policy, energy production and systems, energy consumption, and climate change. The objective of this study is to examine the cross-sectional impact of social media penetration, particularly Facebook, on energy justice in a panel of 70 countries. We build three sub-indicators of energy justice: distributive justice, procedural justice, and restorative justice. We use OLS, Oster (2019), Lewbel 2SLS (2012) and Kiviet (2020) instrumental variable techniques and the results show that Facebook penetration improves energy justice across countries. Precisely, Facebook penetration boosts distributive, procedural and restorative justice. Therefore, social media should be included to enhance low-carbon transitions awareness among the masses. Further, social media should be promoted to emphasize on social services equitability, climate-vulnerable economies to help civil awareness and energy resilience.