The Limits of Green Energy Under Capitalism

Written by David Klein and first published at TruthOut

Renewable energy is expanding rapidly all around the world. The energy capacity of newly installed solar projects in 2017, for instance, exceeded the combined increases from coal, gas and nuclear plants. During the past eight years alone, global investment in renewables was $2.2 trillion, and optimism has soared along with investments. 

“Rapidly spreading solar technology could change everything,” announced a piece in the Financial Times, which also explained that, “there is growing evidence that some fundamental changes are coming that will over time put a question mark over investments in old energy systems.”

But can renewable energy grow fast enough in the market economy to pinch off the use of fossil fuels and help fend off climate catastrophe? Unfortunately, it’s not likely. Even as the percentage of global energy generation from renewables increases, so too does global energy consumption, which means that fossil fuel emissions are also increasing.

The world’s energy-related carbon emissions rose by 1.7 percent in 2017 and energy consumption grew by 2.2 percent, the fastest rate since 2013. For the past decade, primary energy consumption increased worldwide at an average rate of 1.7 percent per year. Power generation rose last year by 2.8 percent with renewable energy providing 49 percent of that increase and most of the rest (44 percent) coming from coal. 

Globally, oil consumption grew by 1.8 percent, natural gas by 3 percent and coal consumption increased by 1 percent. The key point is that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are increasing even as renewable energy use is growing.

To visualize the relationship between the growing percentage of green energy and increasing total global energy production, imagine a “dynamic energy consumption pie chart.” A growing portion of the pie represents green energy sources, so that piece of the pie is getting wider, but the radius of the pie chart also increases with time to account for the increase of global energy consumption. 

The pie is getting bigger and bigger while the fossil fuel slice is growing longer (which is bad) but thinner (which is good). Which process wins out? As long as fossil fuel use is not decreasing, it doesn’t matter for the climate.

People often get confused when fossil fuels and renewable energy are discussed together, but the climate only cares about the former. The latter has no effect. Solar panels, wind turbines and the like neither help nor harm the climate. The only thing that matters, in terms of climate disruption, are greenhouse gas emissions.

It is not enough for the percentage of green energy to increase each year — unless it reaches 100 percent of global energy production very quickly. Even if the rate of greenhouse gas emissions decreases, but doesn’t decrease fast enough, we face disaster. What is required is that global greenhouse gas emissions decrease rapidly to zero by midcentury in order for the biosphere to stand a chance of survival. 

Unfortunately, even a rapidly increasing percentage of green energy production is unlikely to achieve that under capitalist market forces.

What About the Carbon Bubble?

Falling prices for renewable energy have led academics, activists and investors to warn of a “carbon bubble” of overvalued fossil fuel assets in the global economy, which could lead to a major capitalist crisis. 

A recent economic study, published in Nature Climate Change predicted that a sudden decrease in the value of fossil fuels — triggered by low renewable energy prices — would cause the carbon bubble to burst, and under the assumption of continuing trends, such an event will likely occur before 2035.

Economic crises notwithstanding, could the bursting of the carbon bubble at least prevent or significantly delay environmental collapse? Unfortunately, no. Lead author Jean-François Mercure warned, as reported by the Guardian, “that the transition was happening too slowly to stave off the worst effects of climate change. 

Although the trajectory towards a low-carbon economy would continue, to keep within [2 degrees Celsius] above pre-industrial levels — the limit set under the Paris agreement — would require much stronger government action and new policies.”

Capitalism or Survival

Capitalism requires perpetual economic growth in order to avoid economic crises such as the Great Depression. More specifically, in order to stave off mass unemployment and economic misery, capitalism requires increasing commodity production, escalating resource extraction, increasing trash and toxic dumping, and ever increasing energy production. 

Capitalism, by its very nature, must expand unendingly and it has already surpassed the limits of sustainable growth in the sense that global consumption now exceeds the planet’s bio-capacity to regenerate the resources consumed. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 1.6 Earths would be required to meet the demands humanity makes on nature each year. 

Capitalism is not only incapable of responding adequately to the environmental crisis, it is the very cause of the crisis and can only make matters worse.

As Richard Smith points out in Green Capitalism: The God that Failed, the scale of change needed to achieve a sustainable civilization is staggering. The rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions together with resource conservation requires that we radically reduce or close down large numbers of power plants, mines, factories, mills, processing and other industries around the world. 

It means drastically cutting back or closing down not only fossil fuel companies, but the industries that depend on them, including automobile, aircraft, airline, shipping, petrochemical, construction, agribusiness, lumber, pulp and paper, and wood product companies, industrial fishing operations, factory farming, junk food production, private water companies, packaging and plastic, disposable products of all sorts, and above all, the war industries. The Pentagon is the single largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy.

The loss of jobs from the de-industrialization required to save ourselves would not be just a few coal mining and oil drilling jobs but millions of jobs in the industrialized world. Mainstream environmentalists argue that the jobs versus the environment dichotomy is a false one, but they are wrong. Within a capitalist framework that is exactly the choice. What we would need to do within this framework to save the biosphere, including ourselves, would result in total economic collapse.

It is not enough just to oppose capitalism. We also need to create something better: An alternative system of human relations along the lines of eco-socialism is not only desirable, it is imperative. Included in such a vision are free health care, free education, free mass transportation, and since most jobs under capitalism are pointless or destructive, we need a drastically reduced workweek.

Polluting industries will not voluntarily shut down. To accomplish what is needed requires socializing virtually all large-scale industries. The only way to rationally reorganize the economy sustainably is to collectively and democratically plan most of the world’s industrial economies.

While all kinds of useless, wasteful and polluting industries must be eliminated, we cannot contract the entire economy. We need to expand some industries, including renewable energy, public health care, public transit, long-lasting energy efficient housing, durable mass transportation vehicles, long-lasting appliances and electronics, repair shops, public schools, public services, environmental remediation, reforestation and organic farming.

It is essential that environmental activists begin to focus on ending the economic system of capitalism itself. The survival of life on this planet depends on it.

The enemy is not the climate; it’s capitalism

Written by Michael Gasser and first published at Santa Cruz Ecological Justice

In a new article in the New Republic, 350.org founder Bill McKibben, probably the world’s most influential climate activist, argues that World War III has begun and that the enemy is climate change.

He goes on to say that we are losing the war, that we should learn from the experience of World War II, that by retooling industry as we did then we can win the war. In making this case, he is largely adopting the position that has been promoted since 2014 by The Climate Mobilization (TCM). A few days after McKibben’s article appeared, TCM’s co-founder Ezra Silk published an extensive “Victory Plan”, which outlines the steps needed to “restore a safe and stable climate”, “reverse ecological overshoot”, and “halt the 6th mass extinction”.

Before going on to say what I think is wrong with McKibben’s and TCM’s position, I want to make it clear that there is much that is certainly right about it. Above all, they recognize the seriousness of the crisis, the fact that many people who are aware of climate change under-estimate the seriousness, and the need for drastic action to solve the crisis.

The problem is that what they are arguing for is not nearly drastic enough. This is because their “war” is against nature, and as such it ultimately relies on technological fixes, rather than challenges to the political and economic system. McKibben rests much of his case on the well-known work of Stanford University engineer Mark Z. Jacobson and his colleagues, who have argued that renewable technologies could replace those based on fossil fuels in the United States within decades. While Jacobson has his critics, his work is undeniably important. What his work shows — and he himself agrees — is that the main obstacles to solving the crisis are not technological but rather political and economic. The question is who controls the technology.

If this is so, then we must look for the enemy elsewhere. In what must be the best-known of all books written on the climate crisis and its causes, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, author Naomi Klein spells it out pretty clearly. The enemy (of the climate and hence of us) is capitalism. Although Klein does not go into much detail about what she actually means by “capitalism”, a number of ecosocialist writers have filled this gap. For an excellent overview, suitable for those who know little about the science of climate change and/or little about capitalism, see David Klein and Stephanie McMillan’s  Capitalism and Climate Change: the Science and Politics of Global Warming. A common theme in this work and others, especially Richard Smith’s Green Capitalism: the God that Failed and Daniel Tanuro’s Green Capitalism: Why It Can’t Work, is that capitalism, by its very nature, is completely incompatible with a just and sustainable future. If capitalism has a “solution” for the climate crisis, one can only imagine a dystopian world where elites survive in isolated islands of livability, protected from the masses of climate refugees on the outside.

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McKibben and TCM look to the mobilization that took place in the US during World War II as a model for how the US should now respond to climate change. Much as the US declared war on fascism then, they say it should declare war on climate change today. Silk believes that “America is capable of leading the world in this mobilization”.

As McKibben discusses (though in somewhat different terms), there was a division in the US ruling class in the years before the US entered the war, with some preferring to stay out of the European and East Asian conflicts, and others, including President Roosevelt, eager to be involved. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the excuse he needed to pursue war on both fronts. McKibben also discusses the remarkable process by which US industry was retooled to support the war effort.

The ultimate result, of course, was the victory of the US and its allies.

But let’s not forget another outcome of the war effort: the ascendancy of the US to its unchallenged position as the dominant power in the world. Far from weakening the reigning political and economic system, Roosevelt strengthened it immeasurably. This was certainly no accident. Another outcome of the war was the greatly increased power of the US military, both within the US and the world.

If it is the political and economic system that is the problem, then we should not be seeking inspiration in a top-down campaign that served to strengthen that system, leaving it in a position to further devastate the environment and giving us the crisis we face today. Nor should we expect the leaders of the movement that is called for now to be wealthy politicians like FDR and his corporate allies. One only has to look at the outcomes of the annual UN Conference of the Parties meetings to see how hopelessly ineffectual the world’s economic and political leaders have been in addressing the climate crisis.

As Naomi Klein and others have shown, the ecological crisis coincides with other forms of oppression that are integral to capitalism, and those that are the most oppressed by this system are also those most likely to suffer the effects of climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. If World War III has already begun, then it is a war being fought mainly by these people, those in the Unist’ot’en camp in British Columbia defending their land against pipelines and natural gas; those in northern Greece struggling to keep gold mines out of their territory; those in Andhra Pradesh, India, battling the companies trying to create coal-fired power plants on their land; those in South Chicago who have fought to keep pet coke storage facilities out of their neighborhood.  It is these people and their allies elsewhere that should inspire us in the “war” that lies ahead, not politicians and “enlightened” capitalists.

History offers us many examples of people rising up against unjust systems — institutionalized racism, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism itself — sometimes in armed struggle, sometimes non-violently. History also teaches us that change does not necessarily happen in a linear fashion; crises can create the conditions for very rapid change. In other words, there is actually hope for the sort of revolution that is needed, a revolution that at a minimum will result in democratic control of the economy and a massive redistribution of income on a world-wide scale.

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Silk is to be commended for his detailed and extremely useful discussion of the steps that would need to be taken under a full-scale climate mobilization. More than perhaps any other document, his Victory Plan shows the extent of what must be done. But Silk does not tell us how all of this could actually be accomplished within the existing political system. This is beyond the scope of his project: “speculation about the limits of ‘political acceptability’ in the neoliberal era should be left to historians, sociologists, and politicians”.

The choice in the end is simple. Can we win this fight

1. within the system — by changing the Democratic Party, by hoping to elect “leaders” who will guide us through another mobilization, by expecting “America” to save the world again, by relying on corporate-controlled technology
2. or only by changing the system — by participating in existing struggles for social justice, by building class consciousness as well as climate consciousness, by enlisting technology in the service of justice, by creating a world-wide network of grassroots movements and a planned global response that radically transforms existing governments, by ultimately taking on capitalism itself, the system that is behind it all?

US Green Party Moves Towards Declaring itself Eco-socialist

Written by Jonathan Nack and first published at Indybay

In a major development, the Green Party took a key step towards declaring itself Eco-socialist. The party’s National Committee voted Sunday night to approve a proposed amendment to the party’s platform entitled “Ecological Economics.” The proposed platform position declares that the Green Party is anti-capitalist and in favor of a decentralized vision socialism.

The proposal to amend the 2016 platform will go to the Green Party National Convention for a final vote. The convention will be held in Houston, Texas, August 4-7, a week after the Democratic Party’s National Convention. Almost 78 percent of the National Committee voted in favor of sending the proposal to the convention (76 voted “yes,” 22 voted “no,” with 9 voting to “abstain,” on Proposal 835).

The proposal would have the Greens go on the record, for the first time, that they want to go beyond reforms intended to make capitalism greener, in favor of a democratic and decentralized conception of green socialism. The proposal, “addresses the economic inequalities, social inequalities, and productivism of both capitalism and state socialism and emphasizes grassroots democracy in the workplace. This workplace grassroots democracy has been largely absent from the Green platform, and many believe it is the way forward for a truly ecological economy and a new system...The Green Party seeks to build an alternative economic system based on ecology and decentralization of power, an alternative that rejects both the capitalist system that maintains private ownership over almost all production as well as the state-socialist system that assumes control over industries without democratic, local decision making. We believe the old models of capitalism (private ownership of production) and state socialism (state ownership of production) are not ecologically sound, socially just, or democratic and that both contain built-in structures that advance injustices...Production is best for people and planet when democratically owned and operated by those who do the work and those most affected by production decisions.” http://gp.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=835

Andrea Mérida Cuéllar, the National Co-Chair of Green Party, told IndyBay, “The themes of the left that we saw develop in the early parts of the 20th century are timely again because of the economic, social and environmental upheaval wrought by late-stage capitalism. Even though these themes have been co-opted by the political center, it's clear that the working class in this country is ready for revolution. As the true left discusses reform vs. revolution, the Green Party is now uniquely positioned to finally be the electoral tactic of grassroots movements…we are now ready to finally become the party of the 99 percent and be worthy of the attention of an anti-oppressive and leftist worker cadre.”

Latest Leak Confirms TTIP a 'Serious Threat to Democracy as We Know It'

Protesters demonstrate in Brussels against the TTIP earlier this year. (Photo: AFP/Getty)

Written by Deirdre Fulton and first published at Common Dreams

EU member states and the European Parliament will be "sidelined" in favor of big business and U.S. interests should the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) go through, according to a leaked document revealed Friday.

The leak, of the corporate-friendly trade deal's draft chapter on "regulatory cooperation" between the EU and U.S., was made public by The Independent and Brussels-based campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO).

It exposes "a labyrinth of procedures that could tie up any EU proposals that go against U.S. interests," as The Independent put it, as well as "the extent to which major corporations and industry groups will be able to influence the development of regulatory cooperation."

As Kenneth Haar, researcher for CEO, explained:

Lengthy procedures, including vetting by business for possible economic impacts, are thus envisaged for new regulations. Such measures have already been used informally to weaken EU ambition on financial sector supervision in the years leading up to the 2008 collapse, to offer a free pass to US companies on personal data protection, and to delay or water down EU proposals on animal testing and aviation emissions.

This leaked document from the negotiations confirms fears that the Commission will be obliged to consult with US authorities before adopting new legislative proposals while EU Member States and the European Parliament are sidelined. The leak also offers a glimpse at the proposed bureaucratic labyrinth of impact assessments, dialogues, consultations and reviews that could tie up any proposals that go against US business interests.

In short, he said, "this document shows how TTIP's regulatory cooperation will facilitate big business influence—and U.S. influence—on lawmaking before a proposal is even presented to parliaments."

Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, told The Independent: "The leak absolutely confirms our fears about TTIP. It's all about giving big business more power over a very wide range of laws and regulations."

As such, Haar added, the TTIP represents "a serious threat to democracy as we know it."

The proposed trade deal, being negotiated in secret, faces growing opposition across the European continent.

Just last month, a report from Global Justice Now and the Netherlands-headquartered Transnational Institute showed how the TTIP would undermine national sovereignty by hampering governments' ability to enact effective and fair tax systems to finance vital public services. Also last month, heavily redacted documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that European officials had assured ExxonMobil that the pending U.S.-EU trade agreement would force the removal of regulatory "obstacles" worldwide, thus opening up even more countries to exploitation by the fossil fuel empire.

After the latest round of talks last month, trade officials pledged to accelerate negotiations in the hopes of releasing a full draft text by this summer, and reaching the final stage of talks by October.

However, speaking in Moscow on Friday, former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission Romano Prodi said he sees "no prospect" for the deal to be finalized before the U.S. presidential election in November.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny made similar remarks on Thursday, telling journalists in Brussels:

"It now appears as if the TTIP arrangements will not be completed before the American presidential election," and adding that this would probably create "a sense of vacuum."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Review of Capitalism & Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming

By David Klein, illustrated and edited by Stephanie McMillan

This review is by Michael Gasser, who I and a few other London Green Left people met in London last August. It was first published at Solidarity US.

An ebook available for download at Gumroad, a site where people can sell their work directly to their audience: https://gumroad.com/l/climatechange#. You choose your own price.

MOST BOOKS ON ecosocialism, while they may be of interest to those who already know something about socialism, especially those who already are socialists, are not particularly useful for those who want to be aware of both what climate change is and what capitalism is.

Naomi Klein’s best-selling book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate, filled part of this gap, but as several reviewers have noted (1), by “capitalism” Naomi Klein seems to mean the variant of it that is usually called “neoliberalism,” the austerity and privatization enforced around the world by international financial institutions since the 1980s. As valuable as her book is, it is not, and does not pretend to be, a Marxist take on the crisis.

With Capitalism & Climate Change ecosocialist David Klein, with considerable help from revolutionary cartoonist Stephanie McMillan, gives us the best available primer, from a radical perspective, on what the ecological crisis is about and what is causing it. Far from challenging Naomi Klein’s similarly titled book, however, David Klein frequently relies on Naomi Klein, and in some ways, the two books complement each other.

Because they appeared within months of one another and because of their similar titles, it is natural to want to compare them. (For simplification, in what follows when I write simply “Klein,” I’ll mean David Klein).

Capitalism & Climate Change is divided into two sections, the first covering the nature of the climate crisis itself, the second capitalism’s role in creating the crisis, its inability to get us out of it, and what we can do about it.

What Science Tells Us

Klein starts Part 1,“What does climate science tell us?” with a look at the climate change denial movement, how it is funded, and how it challenges mainstream climate science. While some of this section will be familiar from Naomi Klein — who also begins with this topic — what will be new is the discussion of the lengths the deniers and their financial backers have gone to to intimidate mainstream climate scientists, up to and including anonymous threats against individual scientists.

In more ways than one, the climate change deniers, or more significantly their financial backers, mean business!

The remainder of the first section is an overview of the science behind the climate crisis. As a mathematical physicist who is director of the Climate Sciences Program at California State University at Northridge, Klein not only has a deep understanding of the science, he knows how to explain the science to a layperson.

If you want really clear explanations of how greenhouse gases cause global warming, of the carbon cycle and how it’s being disrupted, of ocean acidification, you’ll find them here. If you don’t know what chemical weathering and methane hydrates are (I didn’t), you’ll learn about them here too.

If you want to know how dire things will get under different possible global temperature rises, Klein has all the bad news for you. He ends this section on a hopeful note, however, looking at what the technical options are for a world relatively free of greenhouse gas emissions.

Again there is some overlap with Naomi Klein, for example, in the discussion of the research of Jacobson and Delucchi on the possibilities for complete conversion to renewable energy.(2)

Jacobson and Delucchi’s much-cited work examines in great detail how all the world’s energy needs could technically be met by a combination of wind, water, and solar power. Although their research has been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the variability problem for sunlight and wind and the consequent need for extensive backup systems,(3) it does make a strong case that renewables could cover a significant proportion of the electric power, transportation, heating, and cooling required for the world’s population.

But Klein goes further than Naomi Klein here, examining agriculture, air travel, buildings, and pollution associated with renewables. He concludes that “humanity has within its grasp all of the technical means to create a thriving and sustainable future in harmony with nature.”

As others have concluded, not only Naomi Klein but also Jacobson and Delucchi, what is holding us back is not the science or engineering required. The problem is political/social/economic.

Capitalism Can’t Solve It

A starting point for any examination of the role of capitalism in the climate crisis (or any of the other ecological and social crises it is implicated in) must be a basic agreement on what we mean by capitalism. Sadly but not surprisingly, there is so little discussion of capitalism within mainstream North American discourse that most people are left with only a vague understanding of what we’re talking about.

For many people, “capitalism” may be something more or less eternal, associated in some fundamental way with human nature, with greed, with freedom, with achievement. Of course we’re not supposed to question capitalism, and this is why it’s off the table.

In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, Klein defines capitalism, discusses its direct effects on the environment, and explains its inevitable drive towards growth. It’s only 38 pages, but we are again rewarded by Klein’s ability to make abstract concepts understandable to those with little or no background.

In this part of the book, McMillan clearly plays a bigger role; she has plenty of experience explaining, as well as fighting, capitalism. In fact some of the cartoons in this section come from her excellent introduction to capitalism, Capitalism Must Die!(4)

Klein and McMillan define capitalism as follows:

“Capitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately owned.

The owners, or capitalists, appropriate the surplus product created by the workers. This appropriation leads to the accumulation of more capital, the amassing of wealth, further investment, and thus the expansion of capitalism. Commodities are produced for the purpose of generating profit and promoting accumulation. Within the capitalist system, individuals pursue their self interests against competition and impersonal forces of the market.”

Some of the more useful sections of this part of the book look at consequences of capitalism that are conspicuously missing from Naomi Klein’s book, in particular the military industrial complex and population growth. Klein explains how imperialist wars are an inevitable consequence of capitalism and a major source of massive greenhouse gas emissions in addition to their more obvious destructive consequences for the countries that are invaded.

He also shows how population growth is not just a result of the improvements in medical care that came with the industrial revolution but also a veritable requirement of capitalism, given the need for reserves of consumers and cheap labor.

We’re also introduced here to Jevons’ paradox. In the mid-19th century, British economist William Stanley Jevons discovered that increases in the efficiency of coal-powered steam engines led to an increase rather than a decrease in consumption of coal, as had been expected. As efficiency increased, use of the engines expanded (and capitalism itself expanded as a consequence), requiring even more coal.

Jevons’ paradox applies equally well to a range of modern resources. For example, improvements in the efficiency of passenger aircraft, requiring less fuel per passenger mile, have made air travel less expensive, resulting in an increase in air travel and the consumption of jet fuel. Jevons’ paradox gives the lie to arguments that the technological advances that come with capitalism are part of the ecological solution; in fact they are part of the problem.

In Chapter 11, Klein takes on green capitalism. Some of this, especially the critique of some of the mainstream environmental NGOs and of carbon trading, will be familiar from Naomi Klein’s book and from the work of ecosocialist economist Richard Smith, whose work is cited.(5)

Klein rejects both carbon trading schemes, such as cap-and-trade and carbon offsets, and flat carbon taxes, arguing that debates within the capitalist class over which is more effective may boil down to tensions between finance capital (favoring carbon trading) and industrial capital (favoring carbon taxes).

In either case, “corporations will not allow governments to curtail profits,” and when profits are threatened by a particular policy, as happened with Australia’s carbon tax, that policy is repealed.

Less familiar are the arguments against “green consumerism” and the “solutions” offered by the European social democracies of Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Green consumerism, sometimes known elsewhere as “lifestyle activism,” is based on the flawed notion that consumers are actually in charge of the market, that an enlightened public can simply choose to “buy green” or buy less.

This view fails to recognize the role of marketing and its power to affect consumers’ behavior: it’s the corporations that are in charge, not the consumers. Furthermore, increasing privatization of basic social services means that people often have no choice concerning how or whether to spend their money.

Green consumerism ends up being at best, little more than a feel-good strategy for the privileged, at worst, a misguided response to greenwashing; McMillan’s wonderful cartoons make this point very well.

Considerable attention has been focused on European countries as examples of how sustainability is compatible with capitalism. Although the trends towards locally-controlled renewable electric power in Germany and Denmark are positive, both are major consumers of biofuels, which may have devastating ecological effects in the countries where they are produced.

Capital’s Addiction and the Cure

In Chapter 12, Klein shows how the capitalist system is so addicted to fossil fuels that nothing short of a revolution can wean it away from their use.

The last two chapters offer a brief discussion of how we should go about ending capitalism and what should replace it. Again this section covers material in an accessible way for the uninitiated.

Klein admits that we are not in a period characterized by organized working class resistance to capitalism, but offers a three-step prescription for what to do under the circumstances, borrowed from Capitalism Must Die!: affirm (raise consciousness), consolidate (organize forces), struggle.

The contrast with Naomi Klein’s version of what has to happen is striking: while Blockadia-type campaigns would certainly play a part in the revolutionary strategy supported by Klein and McMillan, here we are urged to “build strategic alliances,” to be “prepared ideologically and organizationally,” to avoid the “trap of reformism,” and to eventually “halt the production of capital.”

In the final chapter, Klein is rightly cautious about laying out the details of the society we are striving for, first, because it must be up to those struggling to create this society to determine how it will work, and second, because too much is unpredictable — future revolutionaries will need to take into account the material conditions in which the new world is constructed.

However, he does leave us with a few guidelines. While many industries will have to be drastically curtailed or shut down, others, including those that are essential for the health and well-being of society, will actually need to be expanded, and a process of sustainable industrialization will need to be undertaken in the regions of the world that have borne the brunt of colonialism.

Within the climate justice movement, there is clearly the increasing recognition that the system is the problem. Ecosocialism offers a framework for understanding why this is so and (to a lesser extent) what we can do about it.

When activists I know want to learn about this perspective, Capitalism & Climate Change is what I’ll recommend they read. It’s not only a wonderful book to keep handy when you’re trying to win over your liberal friends and relatives but also an excellent resource for those who are already convinced that capitalism is the problem and revolution is the answer.

The only thing I wished for with Capitalism & Climate Change was more of it. Although Klein, aided by McMillan, does a masterful job of explaining infrared radiation, albedo, tipping points, surplus value, the overproduction crisis and creative destruction, only so much can be accomplished in 160 pages. I’m already looking forward to an expanded second edition.