In the 1990s, the trade unionist and environmentalist Tony Mazzocchi made a humble plea: if the state is willing to care for “dirt” — by investing in a superfund for the cleanup of pollutants — why not a “superfund for workers”? We should treat workers just as well as dirt, he reasoned.

Taking inspiration from the GI Bill, Mazzocchi proposed that plans to shut down polluting industries should also involve a robust transition program for workers, including income support, free education, and other real material provisions. Since he made these arguments in the 1990s, the term “just transition” has come into vogue, becoming a buzzword in academia and within NGOs that insist the energy transition must include justice not only for workers but also a wider variety of marginalized groups. Meanwhile, many workers in the fossil fuel industry have either never heard of the “just transition” or, if they have heard of it, don’t believe in it. Who can blame them when all they see is mass unemployment and economic devastation when coal mines or power plants are shut down?

But there’s a deeper problem with the whole notion of a “just transition” — it assumes the transition is happening, and it only needs to be more just. But when it comes to the climate crisis, it candidly doesn’t matter if the transition away from fossil fuels is just or not. It simply needs to happen and, unfortunately, it’s not happening. For most of the last several decades the percentage of the global energy mix devoted to fossil fuels has remained stubbornly fixed at around 80 percent.