New research helps provide some clarity. A study led by Noel Healy from Salem State University in Massachusetts analyzes the hidden but interconnected injustices that can occur throughout the world’s fossil fuel supply chains.

The research project spanned three sites: a power plant in Salem, Massachusetts, recently decommissioned and converted from coal-fired to natural gas; the Cerrejón open-pit coal mine in La Guajira, Colombia, which was the primary coal supplier to the Salem plant for over a decade; and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) sites in Pennsylvania, which now supply natural gas to the power plant in Salem.

A Coal Mine’s Impacts

Healy and his colleagues Jennie Stephens from Northeastern University and Stephanie Malin from Colorado State University reveal what they call “interlinked chains of injustices,” or how local energy decision-making in one region generates social and environmental injustices in other, distant ones.

Reliance on coal mining in La Guajira to turn on the lights in Massachusetts supported a mine that over more than three decades has forcibly displaced several nearby indigenous communities and tried to suppress, with bloody results, union activity. The mine’s operations have been linked to widespread pollution from coal dust and the destruction of fishing and hunting grounds, leaving La Guajira plagued by food insecurity.

“Some villages were bulldozed, communities forcibly removed, like the Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco,” said Healy, who has conducted research surrounding the Cerrejón mine. “Others were displaced via the ‘slow violence’ of contaminated farmland and drinking water.”

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