Abstract Energy injustice persists due to the difficulty of meeting competing interests in a rapidly evolving system. Transformative energy technologies need to fit into existing structures while also improving upon those systems. To aid in complex decisions, this paper provides a simple checklist of four necessary and often missed concepts for energy justice. Energy choices should be Supported, Environmental, Affordable, and Tolerable to provide everyone a SEAT at the energy table, in other words to promote energy justice. For the purposes of this framework, supported indicates that supply chains and infrastructure to meaningfully participate are available, environmental considerations cover climate change and health-affecting pollutants as well as disposal affecting soil and water, affordability rather straight-forwardly requires equal economic access to the energy transition, and tolerable requires personal and political buy-in. This structure is intended to aid anyone that makes decisions, i.e. not only highly specialized academics. Many technologies that address one or two of these concepts are touted as solutions to injustice, but without additional structure, they may have disbenefits in other areas. By using a simple structure to illuminate this consistent difficulty, future research and policy will be better able to promote true justice instead of tangentially addressing it in ways that fail to capture the complexities of the system. The tension between benefits and unintended consequences is explored for several energy technologies at varying stages of implementation, including electric vehicles, cooking, time-of-use pricing, and air conditioning. Existing policy mechanisms that have tried to address only some barriers have not necessarily resulted in an equitable transition. This indicates that equity needs to be considered explicitly, and that all four chair legs need to be evaluated. This method highlights the principles most easily considered in non-specialist decisions and maps them to concepts that are easy to grasp.