Shopfloor Ecosocialism: Pumping the Brakes on Fossil Fuels

Written by Nicole A. Murray and first published at Partisan

How organized labor can shift us away from dominant car culture and turn the tides of climate crisis at the point of production.

Organized labor is currently faced with the most consequential question of its life: are oil and gas commodities that workers have a right to burn for their own material benefit; or should they be left in the ground?

As an ecosocialist, the answer is clear: no more burning fossil fuels. Organized labor is in the unique position to both disrupt the deep systems that perpetuate dependence on fossil fuels and the products that run on them, while also ensuring production pivots towards the greater public good over individual personal luxury.

One system ripe for disruption is car dependence. Car-centric living requires millions of gallons of fossil fuels be burned into the air, every day, just so people can participate in society. It is a structural problem that requires a large-scale, organized solution that is clear-eyed on both the source and the results of car dependency. 

The existing pattern of development in the US in our urban, suburban and peri-urban spaces reflects an intentional plan by petro-capitalists and the state to center life around the automobile. The Federal Housing Administration subsidized low-density suburban development from the 1930s through the post-war years. Ex-urban homeownership, largely enjoyed exclusively by white families, boosted demand for automobiles, consumer durables, and energy consumption, thereby absorbing overproduction from some of the biggest industries of the time: the oil and automotive industries.¹ 

Indeed, the self-reinforcing and self-reproducing system of sprawl, cars, and gas make this system difficult to disrupt on a systemic level when the petro-capitalists are still many regions’ top employers and tax payers.

Today, car-centric systems seem fair and normal. Yet Americans collectively owe $1.37 trillion in auto loan debt — 10 times that of medical debt — to collectively burn about 350 millions gallons of finished motor gasoline into the air per day,² dwarfing China in terms of both per capita and total gasoline use.³ Unlike in other sectors such as energy production, global emissions in road transportation are projected to grow, and grow fast.

Make no mistake: it’s the system of automobility as a whole that is unsustainable, not individual use and consumption. Even advances in efficiency, including electrification (electric vehicles) will be wiped out by more widespread adoption especially as auto manufacturers open up markets in the global south.

Historically, there have been organized efforts to build towards structural solutions that start at the point of production from inside the auto industry itself. While those efforts were not explicitly in the name of ecosocialism as we understand it today, our country’s rich labor history as it unfolded in auto plants should not be glossed over.

Automotive manufacturing employed one out of six Americans in the height of Motor City,⁴ and about 5% of all workers globally today. Communist and socialist-led organizing in auto plants played a crucial role in organizing industrial shops. Beyond the shop floor, affordable cars were even crucial in the labor struggles of Southern smallholders and tenant farmers: those who were able to purchase vehicles were no longer beholden to a single plantation commissary and could purchase supplies at much lower prices in the nearby urban centers.⁵ 

But take a moment to think about those who were unable to purchase vehicles. They didn’t necessarily benefit from their peers’ new automotive freedom. The core relationship between capitalist and worker is not challenged via consumer products (and more cars won’t get us out of the cycle of too many cars). And spare a thought for Detroit today. Without worker control fully realized, and with capital fleeing out of cities and to the global south during neoliberalization, US auto production has been on the decline since the ’90s.⁶

Organized labor can change the paradigm through direct, organized, and militant action by demanding both a shift in production towards more buses, trains, rail and bicycles, and also work and social lives that are decoupled from individualized, resource and fuel-intensive consumer products.

First, manufacturers and auto workers must push for shifting production to socially responsible goods, ideally through direct control of the means of production. There is precedent for this approach: The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a 1960s radical group of Black anti-war and anti-imperialist Marxist auto workers had no interest in making cars to turn the Big Three automakers a profit: “DRUM wanted workers to have all the pie and to produce goods only for social needs.”⁷ 

While their vision was never realized, they had an unprecedented foresight into the destructive role the auto and gas industries would have in colonization and fascism , nevermind climate change.

The manufacture of buses, trains, light rail, and even bicycles provides jobs across all skill sets; these public goods move many more people using far fewer resources and energy, without burdening individuals with the debts and risks that come with personal cars.

Second, organized labor across all industries can reduce our country’s massive fuel use not through austerity or taxes, but by fighting for more flexible work schedules that reduce the need for so much driving to begin with. The National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), a trade association representing gas station convenience stores and filling stations, says they have repeatedly found people drive less when gas prices are high enough to become a financial hardship.⁸ 

Anyone who has ever had to dig through their couch for coins to pay for a few more drops of gas can attest to these findings. High gas prices mean less driving, thus less greenhouse gasses and particulate matter, but at the cost of contraining social and economic activity, especially by the poor: they mostly just stay home.

NACS also found that people drive more not when prices are low, but when they have more work, family, and social responsibilities. Reversing the atomization and alienation of modern life has been a core goal of communist organizers and thinkers for a century. Winning more freedom from individual responsibilities gives workers and their families the freedom to forgo those responsibilities only a personal car can conveniently shepherd: commuting alone many miles to work, picking up/dropping off dependents on their varied schedules, moving personal goods, and otherwise running themselves ragged in traffic.

These benefits are universal, even in areas where public transportation does not (yet) exist, and especially for those people — about 20% of Americans and 80% of people worldwide — who do not drive a car for structural, legal, personal, financial, or medical reasons.

The core goal of communist organizing is that we can and must control our own futures. For ecosocialists, that future is decarbonized, decoupled from burning excess energy just to arrive at work, school, or care. Gasoline has a precarious journey into our cars. Its source material, crude oil, spills out of—and into—the jungles of Ecuador, the shores of the Gulf, the deltas of Africa’s rivers, and the tundras of Alaska and Russia. And when it’s mercifully unspilled, when it’s not poisoning rivers and destroying fisheries people depend on for food and water, when it’s not killing babies in the womb, when it safely and soundly makes its way to its final destination — a gas station in Anytown, USA — we pay the privilege of $3-$4 a gallon to burn it into the air on our way to sell our wages.

Transportation has been the largest consumer of petroleum products in the USA for at least 100 years.⁹ It’s about time organized labor says enough.

Nicole is a member of New York City Democratic Socialists of America Ecosocialist Working Group.

Notes

1. Mattioli, Giulio et al, “The political economy of car dependence: A systems of provision approach,” Energy Research & Social Science, no. 66 (2020), doi:10.1016/j.erss.2020.101486
2. “How much gasoline does the United States consume?”, U.S. Energy Information Administration, September 07, 2021, https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10
3. Wang, Shirley and Mengpin Ge, “Everything You Need to Know About the Fastest-Growing Source of Global Emissions: Transport,” World Resources Institute, October 16, 2019. https://www.wri.org/insights/everything-you-need-know-about-fastest-growing-source-global-emissions-transport
4. Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. South End Press, 1998. 30.
5. Kelley, Robin. Hammer & Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. UNC Press, 1990. 37.
6. “U.S. domestic auto production from 1994 to 2020,” Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/184171/us-passenger-car-production-since-1994/
7. Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 44.
8. “The Relationship Between Gas Prices and Demand”, NACS, March 20, 2020, https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/Mar/20/3-The-Relationship-Between-Gas-Prices-Demand_Fuels
9. “In the United States, most petroleum is consumed in transportation,” U.S. Energy Information Administration, August 02, 2019 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40752

Jobs, Justice, and a Livable Earth!

Written by CJ Lapointe and first published at Socialist Resurgence

The overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists agree, highlighted in the UN IPCC reports, that global warming/climate change is an urgent threat to the environment, which needs emergency action to cut greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the decade. 

However, the failure of the 2021 UN climate summit, COP26, to take real leadership in addressing the crisis shows capitalism’s inability to put the planet and human life before profit. In fact, countries like the U.S. and China are ramping up the use of fossil fuels, as competition between the two imperialist nations for markets and resources drives extractive industries for coal, petroleum, and rare minerals.

Competition over markets by competing imperialist powers puts an undue burden on the global South, which faces the worst effects of climate change. Instead of reparations in the billions of dollars, countries in Africa, for example, will face deeper environmental racism through exploitation of their labor and resources, and the destruction of air, land, and water.

Daniel Tanuro, agronomist and eco-socialist author writes in his assessment of COP26, “The issue of loss and damage is even more explosive by far. Take the example of Somalia. It has contributed to 0.00026% of historical climate change … but is suffering repeated droughts, clearly attributable to warming. In 2020, 2.9 million people were severely food insecure. International aid is highly insufficient. Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda are experiencing the same drama.”

Tanuro continues, “Who will pay? And who will pay for future disasters? The NGO Christian Aid estimates that, with unchanged policies, climate change will cause the GDP of the poorest countries to fall by 19.6 per cent by 2050 and 63.9 per cent as an annual average by 2100. 

If we limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C, these figures would be -13.1 percent and -33.1 percent respectively. The bill for losses and damages will quickly rise to several thousand billion. The principle of financing by rich countries is enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but imperialist governments plainly refuse to respect it. Period.”

People living in one third of the counties in the United States experienced climate change-driven billion-dollar catastrophes with high death tolls such as arctic temperatures in Texas, Hurricane Ida, and California wildfires.  Most of them are working families with a disproportionate number from Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other oppressed communities. 

One of the most recent climate-related tragedies occurred in the U.S. in December as tornadoes ripped through Kentucky and Illinois. A heartbreaking scene played out when six died at an Amazon facility and eight died at a candle-making factory in each of the respective states. Workers’ text messages reveal that the companies refused to allow their workers to leave for safety.

John Leslie, a retired union carpenter and writer for SR News reported, “According to the National Climate Assessment, ‘Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and new and stronger evidence confirms that some of these increases are related to human activities.’ 

The number and intensity of severe storms, which often spawn tornadoes, has increased. Tornadoes in December are a rarity, and one of the tornadoes on Friday reportedly broke a 100-year-old record for the length of time a tornado stays on the ground. Scientists also report that what is commonly referred to as “tornado alley” is shifting eastward from the Kansas-Oklahoma region and into the Mississippi Valley as the planet warms further.”

Working people in the U.S. and around the world have a central role to play in addressing, mitigating, and ending climate disasters. All too often workers’ needs are sidelined by corporate policy from governments everywhere. Unions can play an important role in mobilizing workers to fight climate change with a just transition from fossil fuel to 100 percent renewable energy. 

New AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler said in a speech at a meeting on a “Just transition” during COP26, “We don’t want to repeat the bad policy choices of the past that left communities stranded. Free trade, deregulation, outsourcing, precarious work, the rise of the gig economy—you name it—working people have been short-changed. It can’t be like that in the fight against climate change—the stakes are too high. 

The urgency of this moment demands we learn from that past. No, we haven’t seen a Just Transition before, but we can envision it! Each person, every place included! High road, good, union jobs for everyone! Environmental protection. Progress for racial justice. Gender equity. A Just Transition to a sustainable, equitable future means solidarity.” 

Workers in the labor movement need to hold Schuler and all unions accountable for waging the struggle locally and even internationally. Every union should be passing resolutions that connect not only their contract fights with climate initiatives but also the daily work of the union. Trade unions must connect with the broader social movements already actively fighting climate change.

Maintaining a livable earth should be a key issue for all organized labor, as working people in our communities are already suffering the consequences of climate change. Workers in fossil fuel, military, manufacturing, and related industries should not be subjected to hardship or elimination of their jobs while companies who have made record profits destroying the environment simply make new investments.

A just transition to a renewable energy economy requires the equity that comes when unions play a leading role in helping lead the way in that transformation. There is an opportunity in the current crisis to generate millions of well-paying union jobs in developing, manufacturing, and installing renewable energy technology, and generating clean energy. This includes hiring of laborers and the trades to help retrofit housing and buildings to mitigate heat waves, floods, fires, and disruptions to public health. 

We need new nurses, doctors, and health aids to cope with climate-induced public health crises. It also includes foresters, farmers and civil engineering forces to restore wetlands, forests, and agricultural carbon sinks and the development of a mass transit infrastructure that includes drivers, track workers, and all other associated jobs. 

The fight to win the type of jobs program described above is only possible through a mass movement led by Indigenous people, workers, youth, farmers, and activists who have fought pipeline expansion, fracking, coal-fired plants, mining, and so on. More and more working people are participating in the movement, recognizing climate change as a real emergency and a threat to our quality of life, our livelihoods, and even our existence. 

At the same time, the climate movement must oppose any disregard for millions of workers in the fossil fuel, military, or related industries, and that training, income replacement, and other resources necessary to prepare for the transition to a sustainable economy must be established. 

Unions in particular can play a leading role by calling for the type of education and emergency public works programs needed to remake the country’s infrastructure such as housing, shortening the workday, mass transit and health care, both to lessen the catastrophic effects of climate change and to help withstand its effects.

We need rank-and-file workers to push union leadership like Liz Schuler, Flight Attendants-CWA union President Sara Nelson, newly elected Teamster President Sean O’Brien, and more to call an emergency congress of labor that partners with allies in the environmental movement, international unions, and especially Indigenous communities—which have played a leading role in fighting the destructive advance of climate change. 

That meeting could lay the basis for a real mass fightback for a sustainable renewable energy economy that can benefit all working people.

How do we get there? Some thoughts on ecosocialist tactics & strategy

 

Written by Diana O’Dwyer and a version of it was first published at Rupture

Whatever your views on blowing up pipelines, Andreas Malm[1] has sparked a vital debate on the left of the environmental movement about tactics and strategy. The strategic problem he addresses is how should we organise to avert catastrophic climate change and which tactics will be most effective in achieving that? 

According to Malm, overthrowing capitalism in time to halt climate change is impossible[2] and he therefore advocates building an environmental movement capable of putting so much pressure on capitalist states that they are forced to act, even against their own class interests. It’s not spelled out fully in his work but he seems to think socialism can develop later out of this process.[3]

The immediate concern right now, however, is to deal with climate change before it destroys any basis for a decent quality of life, under socialism or any other system. 

This type of argument, that there isn’t enough time to build socialism and so we must focus on more pressing issues first, has dogged left politics for centuries. Ireland’s version - that ‘labour must wait’ - prioritised national independence over socialist change. Given the endless variety of ills thrown up by capitalism, many immediately deserving causes will inevitably challenge for precedence. If national independence isn’t pressing enough then surely the survival of our species is?

The problem with this argument is two-fold. 

On the one hand, it assumes that averting climate collapse and continuing with capitalism is possible. But if capitalism and protecting the environment, including the climate system and biodiversity, are fundamentally incompatible[4], then breaking with capitalism and replacing it with eco-socialism are at the core of the strategic problem of averting climate disaster and dealing equitably with the damage already done. 

On the other, it assumes that immediate goals (averting climate change/national liberation/gender or racial equality) and the ultimate goal of eco-socialism are in conflict - that the tactics necessary to achieve our immediate goals are incompatible with the ultimate goal of eco-socialism. Or, alternatively, that we might get lucky but it’s impossible to work out any of this in advance so we might as well just muddle on through, focus on the immediate and fight fires where they arise. 

It was precisely this focus on immediate goals, with the expectation that socialism would evolve by itself, somewhere along the line, that led Lenin and Trotsky to polemicise on the distinction between tactics and strategy against the reformists in the Second International. 

In The Lessons of October, Trotsky argued that winning particular struggles should be part of a strategy to win the war, rather than amounting to one-off or even Pyrrhic victories:

“By tactics in politics, we understand, using the analogy of military science, the art of conducting isolated operations. By strategy, we understand the art of conquest, i.e. the seizure of power…

...Strategy, of course, does not do away with tactics. The questions of the trade union movement, of parliamentary activity, and so on, do not disappear, but they now become invested with a new meaning as subordinate methods of a combined struggle for power. Tactics are subordinated to strategy.”[5] 

Likewise, Lenin based his modus operandi on what Hungarian Marxist, György Lukács, called the ‘actuality of revolution’, meaning that the ‘study of each individual daily problem...at the same time became a fundamental problem of the revolution’.[6] This is not to suggest that we pretend a socialist revolution is just around the corner but that in developing tactics and strategy, we should continually be asking ourselves, how does this or that action contribute towards a fundamental rupture with capitalism and an ecosocialist transformation of society? 

These are not easy questions to answer! 

One thing we can know for certain is that we shouldn’t use tactics that run directly counter to our strategic goals. Examples include going into coalition with pro-capitalist establishment parties; relying solely on safe conventional tactics that fail to challenge or disrupt the system; poorly conceived actions that alienate working class people whose support we need to win (such as XR-UK’s blocking of a tube train in London in 2019 which only succeeded in enraging commuters taking public transport (!) to work); or pandering to NIMBYist groups opposed to environmentalist measures like bike or bus lanes for the sake of votes. 

Such tactics might achieve immediate gains like governmental power or influence, publicity, or elected positions but are counterproductive in the longer term because they undermine our ability to build independent anti-capitalist organisation, mass support across the global working class in all its multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-national diversity, and ecosocialist consciousness - three fundamental building blocks of a transformationalist ecosocialist strategy. 

Independent, anti-capitalist organisation 

Independent organisation of workers, environmental activists and those exploited, subordinated and oppressed by capitalism in their daily lives is vital if we are to build autonomous strength and counter-power to the rule of fossil capital. This means building movements that are financially and politically independent of the capitalist class and the political parties and states that represent its interests.

It means rooting those movements in our collective “people power” as workers who keep the economy and society going through our paid and unpaid labour, rather than depending on donations from the wealthy, governments or corporations. It means “outsider” tactics like marches, demonstrations, direct actions and strikes, not “insider” lobbying that depends on elite connections. 

It’s only through maintaining our independence that we can avoid mistakes like Friends of the Earth and Stop Climate Chaos’ support for the Programme for Government despite the terrible track record of the Green Party in coalition with the right. It should be obvious to anyone that the establishment parties who oversaw the destruction of our environment are not the ones to fix it but when NGOs have no real alternative to insider tactics and in some cases are heavily dependent on government funding, they can be among the last to understand that. 

What is needed is a united front of environmental, social justice, women’s, LGBTQ+, anti-racist and labour movements. In Ireland, it means marching and coalescing with FridaysforFuture, Talamh Beo, Save our Sperrins, Dublin Bus and Bord na Móna workers, Right to Nature campaigners, commuter campaigns, left trade unionists, anti-fascist activists and many others. It means championing the needs of the most marginalised and oppressed as our own - from trans to Travellers’ rights. 

Crucially, it also means that left-wing activists must not be smug and complacent and think we have all the answers - that our role is simply to impart pearls of socialist wisdom to environmental or social justice activists whose heart may be in the right place but who lack the correct theoretical framework to understand the world. This type of attitude is all too common on the left and means left activists can come off as simultaneously patronising towards those they are trying to ally with and ignorant of the issues they’re campaigning on.

Many on the left have had a late conversion to environmentalism but that hasn’t stopped them propounding as though they are equally as expert as longstanding activists. With regard to climate action, the left needs to listen to environmental activists, properly study the science and stop presuming socialism will magically solve all environmental problems.

It will likely take decades or even centuries to reverse the damage capitalism has already done to our climate and to biodiversity. Meaningful steps towards zero emissions must be fought for now, as part of the struggle for an ecosocialist transformation, and cannot be left until afterwards. Labour can’t wait but the environment can’t either! 

Mass support & democratic diversity of tactics 

One thing Malm is correct about is that the time for relying solely on routinised tactics like marches and demonstrations, petitions or email campaigns has passed. The situation is simply too dire and too urgent to limit ourselves to safe conventional forms of protest. We must utilise a diversity of outsider tactics and embrace every genuinely useful tactical weapon at our disposal. 

Increasingly, this will include disruptive actions that directly challenge fossil capitalism, attract publicity and mass support and galvanise the movement by puncturing its aura of invincibility. Rather than top-down tactics like filing planning objections or taking court challenges, we should seek to directly block new fossil fuel infrastructure from the bottom-up as a way of actively engaging more and more people in the radical climate justice movement.

Strikes, blockades, occupations, mass boycotts, dramatic disruptive actions like some of those successfully used by Extinction Rebellion (XR), and potentially even carefully chosen sabotage can all be used.

Some actions will be symbolic but others will seek to halt harm to the environment directly. We could organise to block the development of new data centres, LNGs or car parks, and to protect green spaces or walking and cycling infrastructure.

A sleeping giant in our arsenal is workers’ responsibility for the labour process, especially in crucial industries that must be converted to green production like the fossil fuel and motor industries and much of meat and dairy. Strikes for a just transition can be our most powerful and disruptive weapon and can point the way towards an ecosocialist future of workers’ control of the economy. 

Targets for our actions must be chosen carefully. Bearing in mind the need to win mass support, we should avoid tactics that risk alienating working-class people. We should punch up against luxury consumption and Brown Thomas, not down against people who shop in Penneys, as XR unfortunately did in their 2019 Rebellion Week[7], or by outlawing 3-for-1 deals in supermarkets in the name of cutting food waste as the Green Party has suggested.

Thoughtless actions and rhetoric by well-heeled environmentalists have a lot to answer for. By assuming everyone can equally afford to pay for environmental action and casually externalising the costs onto low paid workers for climate change through regressive carbon taxes, they have given “green” issues a bad name for many and negatively associated them with higher taxes and living costs. 

Actions should instead be directed against profit-driven environmental destruction and a clear capitalist enemy. It’s the big polluters who should pay. XR’s ‘blood money tour’ of London’s financial district with the demand that it immediately cease all investment in fossil fuels is a good example. XR Unify spokesperson, Bhavini Patel, explained that 

“Today’s protest is highlighting that racial, social and climate justice are all intertwined...Profit extraction has meant that there has been racial inequality, social inequality and climate collapse. It’s interlinked, and if we want justice we need to be demanding justice for all three things, so that we are equal as people.”[8] 

Similar actions were taken on a smaller scale by XR Ireland with a march through the IFSC in 2019[9] but this was arguably overshadowed by the Penneys protest. This illustrates the importance of carefully selecting targets, especially with the mainstream media waiting to pounce on mistakes. 

A different error, more common on the left, is to automatically support grassroots, local campaigns even when their aims run counter to developing the ecosocialist consciousness needed for a just transition to zero emissions. Examples include failing to oppose, or even giving tacit support, to reactionary local campaigns against new public transport or cycling infrastructure.

The left must be clearer and more principled about which side it’s on - that of working-class public transport users, children who need safe spaces to walk, run and play, cyclists, and the climate. Our answer to such campaigns shouldn’t be to pander to the desire of motorists to drive wherever they want regardless of the social or environmental cost but to campaign for ecosocialist solutions like free, frequent and fast public transport[10], democratic planning of towns and cities to reduce the need to drive and universal access to low-emissions personal mobility devices like bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters. 

Building diverse independent movements of all those exploited and oppressed by capitalism, and in particular winning the support of workers in key industries like transport and agriculture will be key to avoiding tactical errors like these. We need to think about ways to bring the labour and environmental movements together. Industrial action is looming at Dublin Bus - can we get environmental activists and workers generally to support the bus drivers’ fight against privatisation and attacks on their working conditions and can we get the bus drivers to demand free, green and frequent public transport? The experience of FridaysforFuture and ecosocialist activists in Germany in supporting strikes by public transport workers gives us plenty to learn from.[11]

To enable an effective diversity of tactics to be democratically decided, democratic structures need to be developed. Even small actions taken by individual groups can have a big effect, positive or negative, on the movement as a whole and so should be democratically discussed and debated. This has been resisted by some in the environmental movement but is crucial if we are to arrive at the most effective tactics - which don’t just disrupt and attract attention but build mass support and strengthen our movements into the future. 

Envisioning an ecosocialist future 

The environmental movement is strong on apocalyptic predictions of climate collapse but optimistic visions of an alternative future? Less so! One thing we can learn from the history of revolutionary movements is that an inspiring vision of a better life is indispensable to galvanising popular support. The French Revolution promised liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Russian Revolution, Peace, Land and Bread. 

The climate justice movement has made strides in this direction through developing the ideas of a Green New Deal (GND) and Just Transition. Unfortunately, both terms are increasingly being colonised by the pro-capitalist mainstream so we need to be more explicit that any effective GND or Just Transition must be anti-capitalist and ecosocialist. We also need to decide which are the core elements of an ecosocialist GND/Transition that can appeal to activists and a mass audience and make them think that, yes, this is a future worth fighting for! What’s our equivalent of Peace, Land and Bread? 

George Monbiot has proposed the slogan of ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’. The second part sounds good to me, the first part not so much. ‘Sufficient’ is the term used to describe a level of water quality just above ‘poor’ in Dublin Bay! Private “security” or “comfort’ sounds more appealing but maybe we need to get past the public/private distinction entirely. It’s so fundamental to capitalism that it gets in the way when we try to imagine alternatives. 

So what are our main selling points? For me, it’s something like “Equality, Security/Comfort, and Freedom/Free Time” (obviously we need a better slogan!).

Top of my wishlist is the potential for much greater leisure time. Once we are freed from the dual burden of pointless paid labour - whose only real purpose is to generate profits for capitalists regardless of the human or environmental cost - and the grossly inefficient privatisation of domestic labour under capitalism, which forces each individual household to constantly cook and clean when such drudgerous tasks could be organised collectively - with much lower emissions and food waste. 

Jason Hickel, in his book Less is More[12], points out how historically unusual our current level of paid working hours is. Prior to capitalism, Spanish peasants enjoyed five months’ holiday a year! They worked only so much as was necessary to provide them with what they considered a good quality of life. A post-capitalist society without the need for continual exponential growth would do the same but on a much higher level of living standards.

Given the huge technological advances of the intervening centuries, this should be possible with even less work. A four day or 30-hour week with no loss of pay would be only the beginning. Keynes predicted a 15-hour week under capitalism in two generations. Without a parasitic 1% monopolising half the world’s wealth, it could actually be possible. 

Our fundamental demand then must be for equality. To lay the basis for ample free time and a comfortable life for all without destroying the ecosystems on which all human life depends, we have to break with the failed capitalist model of unequal exponential growth and move to a massive redistribution of wealth and a democratically planned transition to zero emissions.

Most importantly, what Marx called the means of production - land, manufacturing and technological capacity, and the investment capital necessary to set it all in motion - must be taken from the private hands of a few into the collective ownership of everyone. This would enable democratic planning of a just transition to zero emissions that would minimise negative impacts on ordinary people and maximise the benefits. 

A small step would be to abolish carbon tax on unavoidable fossil fuel consumption by working families who can’t afford to retrofit their homes or have to drive their kids to school because of a lack of public transport and tax the high-emissions luxury consumption of the wealthy instead, like SUVs, private jets, yachts, business class flights and excessively large houses. Bigger steps would be ecosocialist transition taxes on corporate profits and expropriating the fossil fuel industry. 

All this is necessary to pay for the collective security and comfort of high-quality public childcare, education, housing, healthcare, transport, healthy and delicious, low carbon and zero-waste food freely available to all and the necessary rapid transition to renewable energy. If all those elements of a “good life” are democratically decided on and provided universally, this can help do away with longstanding, social inequalities and provide huge numbers of quality, public sector jobs.

There’s little point in increasing “leisure” time if women end up spending it doing unpaid domestic labour, or in redistributing wealth if Black, brown and LGBTQ+ people continue to be discriminated against in housing, jobs or religious-run education. To be real, equality must be social and political as well as economic.

Consistency is key

At the outset of this article, I argued that the essential thread running through all our tactics must be continual reference to the strategic end-goal of the ecosocialist transformation of society needed to avert the looming collapse of the earth’s climate and biodiversity and deal with the damage already done.

This means we should be consistent in our demands and think about how they all fit together, in particular how to marry the sometimes competing demands of mass support and effective environmental advocacy, and decide which issues and campaigns to support and develop. One of the main merits of Marxism is that it provides a holistic framework for analysing society, the environment and the economy and intervening to change them. Ecosocialist strategy should reflect that. 

Notes

1. Malm, Andreas. How to Blow Up a Pipeline, (Verso, 2021).

2. Malm, Andreas, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming, (Verso, 2015), pp. 469-470. 

3. Interview with Rupture Radio, 15 March 2021. https://anchor.fm/ruptureradio/episodes/ATR---How-to-Blow-Up-a-Pipeline-w-Andreas-Malm-esif3b 

4. O’Dwyer, Diana. ‘Debate: Should We Ally with “green” Capitalists? No.’ Rupture Issue 3, Spring 2021.

5. Trotsky, Leon. ‘Chapter 1: We Must Study the October Revolution’, in The Lessons of October, 1924.

6. Lukács, György. ‘Chapter 1 - The Actuality of the Revolution’, in Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, 1924. 

7. MacNamee, Alanna. ‘Extinction Rebellion Target Penneys with Protest Fashion Show’, EVOKE.ie, 9 October 2019. 

8. Gayle, Damien. ‘Extinction Rebellion Targets City of London in “Blood Money” Protest’, The Guardian, 27 August 2021.

9. Heffernan, Breda, Doherty, Caroline and Dillon, Fiona, ‘Extinction Rebellion begins week of action with march through Dublin’, Irish Independent, 9 October 2019. 

10. O’Dwyer, Diana. ‘Free, Frequent & Fast: Public Transport & the Right to Mobility’. Rupture Issue 4, Summer 2021.

11. Rother, Nicholas. ‘Strike Together: Strengthening the Climate Movement & Trade Unions’. Rupture Issue 3, Spring 2021.

12. Hickel, Jason. Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Cornerstone Digital, 2020).

Citizens’ Assemblies Won’t Save the Planet

Written by Callum McGeown and first published at Green European Journal

Citizens’ assemblies are receiving increased recognition as a way to ensure greater public participation in shaping government responses to the planetary crisis. The interest reflects a growing perception that the governments of representative democracies are either unwilling to or incapable of implementing the radical measures necessary to decarbonise their economies. Indeed, findings steadily report emissions trajectories in line with the worst-case scenarios set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement. After a year of record-breaking wildfires, droughts, and flooding, the evidence is tangible.

The calls for citizens’ assemblies have come from climate activists and politicians alike. However, as transformative as they may be for decision-making, they are an insufficient fix for the democratic deficits that frustrate confronting the interconnected crises of climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse, and social inequality. To stand a chance of achieving a timely and just post-carbon transition, demands for democratisation must focus on the state and the economy.

What are citizens’ assemblies?

A citizens’ assembly is a group of people brought together to learn about, deliberate, and make recommendations on specific issues or proposals. The assemblies are independent and established through a process of sortition whereby individuals are randomly selected to form mini-publics roughly reflective of the wider population according to various criteria (such as age, race, gender, region, and income).

Their conspicuous presence in the imaginary of contemporary climate politics is largely attributable to the activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR), which identifies going “beyond politics” through the creation of a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice as one of its core demands. The rationale is not without merit, as placing ordinary citizens within decision-making structures can help mitigate against the influence of powerful lobbies, money, short-termism, and professional political ambition on the climate- inert “politics as usual”.

Much emphasis is placed on an initial learning phase made up of expert testimonials and presentations, Q&As, and supplementary resources. XR and the wider climate movement have homed in on this with good reason, given the potential to ensure that the incontrovertible science and gravity of climate breakdown can be communicated to an audience without the distortion of mis- and disinformation.

This learning phase aims to facilitate respectful and factually informed deliberation that incorporates members’ various interests and perspectives. The assembly’s final task is to agree on and present its recommendations for review, uptake, or dismissal.

Lessons from Ireland

The Irish case is often cited as an example of how citizens’ assemblies can navigate contentious issues and clear pathways for transformation. Convened in 2016, Ireland’s 99-member citizens’ assembly was tasked with making recommendations on complex constitutional and political problems in five areas: abortion, ageing population, fixed- term parliaments, referendums, and climate change.

The assembly was organised in large part in response to increasing domestic and international pressure related to Ireland’s constitutional amendment on abortion. By granting equal rights to life to the mother and the unborn, Ireland’s Eighth Amendment had banned termination under almost all circumstances for over 30 years. Caught between demands for women’s rights and the “pro-life” social conservativism of a historically dominant Catholic Church, electoral politics had proved incapable of resolving the matter.

Climate change represented another – albeit very different – problem that Irish politicians had long preferred not to address. In failing to come close to emissions reduction targets, Ireland had been labelled one of the EU’s worst performers on climate. The nature of Ireland’s post-economic-crisis recovery made matters worse: from 2011, Ireland’s agricultural and transport sectors were targeted as drivers of economic growth, and emissions grew in parallel.¹ 

Issues of political legitimacy were, and continue to be, exacerbated by Ireland’s economic dependency on carbon-intensive agriculture, as well as the enduring cultural significance of farming in the country.

The decision to institutionalise participation in the Citizens’ Assembly followed the perceived success of the 2012 Constitutional Convention. Indirectly the product of the independent “We the Citizens” initiative, the convention brought elected representatives and citizens together for 18 months to consider changes to Ireland’s constitution. It is best known for its recommendation on marriage equality, which resulted in a historic popular vote in May 2015 to legalise same-sex marriage.

The 2016 assembly was also to have important consequences for social justice: after its members recommended repealing the Eighth Amendment, a landmark national referendum endorsed the decision which marked a triumph for women’s rights and a significant moment of detachment – both real and symbolic – of Irish society from entrenched religious moralism.

Despite these historic advances, both the 2012 convention and the 2016 assembly were constrained in other areas by the same political obstacles they were intended to circumvent. Although the assemblies made clear recommendations on other issues, the government did not act as quickly and decisively as it did on marriage equality and abortion.

Tasked with making proposals on how to make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change, the Citizens’ Assembly proved more ambitious than expected. Its 13 recommendations ranged from steps to support the transition to electric vehicles and prioritise cycling and public transport infrastructure, to emissions taxes on agriculture and an end to state subsidies for peat extraction.

Despite the high level of consensus, the government response was disappointing. A separate parliamentary committee was established to consider the report, with a lack of clarity on the overall uptake of the proposals. Ostensibly, this was due to the difficulty of translating the complex recommendations into the kinds of binary choices suited to referendums.

The climate bind

The level of climate action required to meet international emissions targets will necessarily disrupt the political and economic status quo. Any restrictions the government imposes on a climate assembly in terms of what is put on or kept off its agenda therefore matter a great deal. More than a question of feasibility, whether an assembly’s recommendations are upheld, modified, or altogether ignored comes down to power. It is telling, for instance, that the Irish citizens’ assembly was not mandated to give recommendations on political economy. This dynamic is somewhat at odds with achieving a just transition to a post-carbon economy: unseating the socially and ecologically exploitative capitalist model definitively means putting the status quo on the table.

The 2018 gilets jaunes protests in France demonstrate the risk of taking climate action without simultaneously addressing social justice. This experience offers an important lesson: any green political project with social justice at its core must take a holistic approach to ecological transition. The scale of change demands much more of political and social forces than might be achieved with policy reforms.

No matter how radical an assembly’s recommendations, if it does not or cannot address the institutions that endorse it (and of which it is an extension) then its efficacy is inevitably constrained. The citizens’ assembly finds itself in an irreconcilable bind when it comes to climate: while it depends on state buy-in to wield political influence, to achieve the necessary changes the same state must open itself up to scrutiny, challenge, and transformation.

The crux of the problem lies in the status of the citizens’ assembly as an advisory body. Lacking legislative capabilities, these assemblies are effectively toothless; their influence over decision-making is curtailed by the state, both in terms of its prescribed mandate and uptake of the recommendations. This is not to undervalue the functions these assemblies serve as forums for learning, deliberating, and, ultimately, deepening citizen engagement with the decisions that govern their lives.

These virtues are observable in the ambitious recommendations made by Ireland’s citizens’ assembly, which influenced the government’s 2019 Climate Action Plan. However, while the plan endorses – to varying degrees – some of the measures proposed by the assembly (such as accelerating the uptake of electric vehicles and expanding renewable energy micro- generation), it notably passes over the more redistributive recommendations (in particular, taxes on Ireland’s disproportionate agricultural emissions).² 

The outcome questions the capacity for citizens’ assemblies to effectively counter the entrenched structures of political economy that shape the climate question in Ireland as elsewhere.

That is not to say that citizens’ assemblies should simply be bestowed with national-level legislative responsibilities. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile such responsibilities with the legitimacy of a small, randomly selected body of citizens. Neither is it to say that citizens’ assemblies should not be used, full stop. It does, however, problematise citizens’ assemblies as a mechanism to address the climate crisis.

Focusing on the state

The predicament of state power may be understood through two observations. First, the efficacy of citizens’ assemblies depends on the degree to which governments buy into them as a transformative process. This has significant implications throughout, from what is on the agenda to how the issues are framed to the uptake of recommendations.

And second, despite their perceived autonomy, citizens’ assemblies may be used strategically by those in positions of power to distance themselves from difficult decisions or to pacify discontent without committing to real change. Rather than offering a solution to the democratic deficit, citizens’ assemblies may thus offer an alibi to governments that wish to appear to democratise climate action but are in fact reluctant to take meaningful steps.

Nation-states hold the power to drive radical decarbonisation, but currently, this change is nowhere in sight. The state must itself first transform to facilitate greater public scrutiny of and control over the economy and its post-carbon transition. Any project of democratisation presupposes a certain decentralisation to subordinate political authority and shape the economy according to the needs of individuals and communities. This is more likely to come as a result of pressure from large-scale social mobilisation than advisory deliberative forums.

In this sense, rather than positioning themselves as “beyond politics”, eco-social movements would be better advised to focus on the necessarily messy occupation of enlarging politics. That means breaking down the institutional and ideological divides which keep capitalism beyond the reach of democratic control, and building support both within and outside of the state (though always with the goal of its ultimate transformation).

Rather than shying away from politics, what is needed is an effective, persuasive alternative to exploitative and growth-centred neoliberal politics.

While citizens’ assemblies represent a form of participatory capacity building which should not be underestimated, so long as they are not established to transform the logic of the state, their potential will remain limited. Ireland’s citizens’ assembly shows that an informed public would savour the opportunity to instigate real change. Despite their shortcomings as an instrument of democratic reform, they offer an instructive lesson for framing the political struggle of tackling the climate crisis.

The high levels of respectful deliberation and informed collective decision-making observed in citizens’ assemblies speak to the importance of (approximate) equality as a precondition for effective participation.³ Regardless of factors such as race, gender, or class, all members are equally valued and given an equal opportunity to listen, speak, and participate.

They have equal access to information, educational resources, and opportunities to interrogate experts. Every interest or opinion is considered. These are the necessary conditions for a fair and functioning participatory democracy, and they should inform the strategic objectives of any eco-social alternative.

The fight for a climate response must therefore prioritise the redistribution of income and wealth. Key utilities and public services as well as extractive, polluting, and carbon-intensive industries should be targeted for democratic control in order to secure equitable provision and accelerate transition.

This means demanding political decentralisation and economic re-localisation to empower communities to build their own versions of a just transition while diminishing their dependency on economic centres. Once this level of agency is achieved, local contexts represent the best opportunity for forums such as citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, and participatory budgeting.

This could help counter the alienating elements of representative politics and address the democratic deficit by opening up political and economic institutions to effective participation.

First and foremost, this means building an intersectional movement committed to non-violent struggle against all forms of exploitation and inequality. It must be prepared to fight within and beyond the state.

In this age of protest and pandemic, as injustices are increasingly laid bare, the opportunity to make inter-movement alliances should not be missed. Integral to that process is learning the lessons of respectful deliberation as the basis for effective collective action that addresses the root causes of the planetary crisis.

Notes

1 Diarmuid Torney (2020). “Ireland’s Policy Response to Climate Change: An Historical Overview”, in David Robbins, Diarmuid Torney & Pat Brereton (eds). Ireland and the Climate Crisis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

2 Clodagh Harris (2021). “Democratic innovations and policy analysis: climate policy and Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly (2016-2018)”, in John Hogan and Mary Murphy (eds). Policy Analysis in Ireland. Bristol: Policy Press.

3 Matthew Flinders et al. (2016). Democracy Matters: Lessons from the 2015 Citizens’ Assemblies on English Devolution. The Democracy Matters Project. Available at <bit.ly/3eIR12z>.

Calum McGeown is a climate activist and PhD student of political theory at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests include green political theory, post-growth political economy, state theory, climate breakdown, and the post-carbon transition.

Imagining an ecosocialist future

Written by Gerard Madden and first published at Rupture

Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest climate fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, opens with a punch to the reader’s stomach. It is 2025, and northern India is struck by a mass casualty heatwave extending from Gujarat to Bengal with ‘wet bulb’ temperatures in excess of 35C, which humans cannot survive for more than a few hours.

We see events through the panicked eyes of Frank May, a 22-year-old American aid worker in a town in Uttar Pradesh, who ineffectively tries to respond to the humanitarian catastrophe around him as corpses pile up in the streets. Appealing to his headquarters in Delhi for urgent help, Frank finds them completely overwhelmed. With help not arriving, he invites as many locals as he can to his air-conditioned clinic, but its generator is stolen at gunpoint by raiders, one of whom pointedly tells the American, ‘you did this’.

Frank urges those taking refuge to shelter in a nearby lake, but this proves futile as the lake itself is too hot to cool anyone, and he is the lone survivor when help eventually arrives. The heatwave kills twenty million people in just one week.

The most terrifying aspect of this opening scene is that everything Robinson describes is consistent with current scholarly predictions of what will unfold if carbon emissions continue on their present trajectory. A 2017 study warned that ‘extremes of wet-bulb temperature in South Asia are likely to approach and, in a few locations, exceed this critical threshold [of a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C] by the late 21st century under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas emissions’.

The Ganges and Indus River basins are described as most at risk.[1] It is no surprise then that Robinson portrays India, rather than the West, as the global centre of resistance to climate catastrophe. As support for the BJP and Congress plummets, a new governing socialist coalition takes power; it geoengineers the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by releasing sulphur dioxide into the skies, nationalises energy, decommissions coal plants and installs solar arrays across the entire sub-continent. 

Nor will mass casualty heatwaves be confined to south Asia, and the novel describes one extending from Arizona to the Florida panhandle killing between two to three hundred thousand people in a single day. The heatwave’s political impact is blunted by the fact most of the victims are poor people of colour.

Robinson’s novel here reflects the current climate racism in the United States and Canada (see ‘Environmental racism & the climate crisis’ in this issue). The July heatwave in Western North America this year disproportionately killed working class people, people of colour and the elderly, paralleling Covid-19. In Oregon alone, two-thirds of heatwave fatalities were people of colour.[2]

Given science fiction has long produced radical visions of how society can be reshaped, it is appropriate that a science fiction novel should be among the most important recent books on the climate emergency. Much of Robinson’s work, such as 2312 and New York 2140, deals with the future impact of the climate crisis, and he is probably the current leading exponent of the ecosocialist strand of science fiction pioneered by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy.

Robinson has acknowledged the influence of Le Guin, his former teacher whose central works such as The Dispossessed outlined alternatives to capitalism.[3] While Le Guin’s ‘ambiguous’ eco-utopia outlined in the novel takes place on the fictional anarchist world of Annares, Robinson frequently sets his books in the relatively prosaic setting of Earth in the near future and explores the worsening climate crisis directly.

The novel follows both Frank and Mary Murphy, the Irish head of the eponymous Ministry for the Future with whom Frank’s life intersects. The Zurich-based international agency is established in 2025 under the Paris Agreement to defend ‘all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves’. Robinson formerly lived in Zurich, and the book is filled with affectionate depictions of the resting place of James Joyce and its people, alongside withering descriptions of Swiss history and politics. In one chapter,

Murphy curtly reminds Switzerland’s federal council of the country’s wrongdoings and obligation to atone for its shameful past – ‘the Nazi gold, the Jewish gold, the tax havens for oligarchs and kleptocrats, the secret bank accounts for criminals of all kinds’ – and the novel contrasts the devastation of the climate crisis caused in India with the initially slow response in the West.

Given the wholly inadequate response of governments here to the climate emergency over the last decade, it is slightly amusing to an Irish reader that Murphy, an Irishwoman and fictional former Minister for Foreign Affairs, leads the agency spearheading the international response to the climate crisis. Appointed primarily as a conduit between the Ministry and the international corridors of power, a fraught encounter between Mary and Frank makes her more open to radical solutions, and she remains silent when her right-hand man from India, Badim, reveals he runs a black ops wing of the Ministry engaging in violent sabotage without her knowledge.

Other characters, from the Ministry’s legal expert Tatiana to its non-binary IT expert Janus Athena, bring Mary ideas which begin to inform the global response. Robinson’s novel portrays women as leading the global response to the climate crisis, and references how real-life women such as the Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva are responding to climate catastrophe, reflecting the importance of women at the vanguard of ecological movements across the global south.[4]

Alongside these plot threads in Zurich, short chapters describing the unfolding horrors of the climate crisis, ranging from third-person descriptions to accounts by often unnamed first-person characters and even inanimate objects such as a photon, are interspersed throughout the novel. An unspecified city runs out of water after twelve years of continuous drought, and residents learn to use any water brought into the city for cooking and filter their urine into potable water.

The Los Angeles basin is flooded, forcing residents to travel around the city on boats and kayaks, and infrastructural damage means the entire city has to be replaced. Several chapters from Antarctica relate the devastating loss of ice cover on the continent and the trial-and-error efforts of scientists there to mitigate it and stabilise sea levels; they eventually succeed in doing so by pumping out groundwater under enormous glaciers.

Alongside this, the book details the growing resistance to the climate criminals responsible for the horrors emerging worldwide. Paraphrasing Trotsky’s thesis in The History of the Russian Revolution that the party is always trying to keep up with the masses, a French student recounts their experience taking part in a popular uprising in Paris which briefly establishes a commune in the city but is suppressed.

A series of spontaneous worldwide strikes bring major world cities to a standstill. In a grimly comic chapter, climate activists kidnap wealthy attendees at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland and compel them to watch footage of the climate crimes they have perpetuated. The political, business and celebrity elites in attendance are unmoved, apart from petulant irritation at the inconvenience of it all. The chapter’s narrator, a Davos participant, tells the reader: ‘So, effect of this event on the real world: zero! So fuck you!’

Out of the mass deaths of the Indian heatwave emerges a network of climate militants, the Children of Kali, which blow up the infrastructure causing climate disaster and kill the individuals who own them. While they are initially scrupulous in taking care to avoid civilian casualties, groups using the name internationally become much less discerning as the climate crisis worsens during the 2030s.

On ‘Crash Day’, sixty global commercial flights are destroyed using thousands of drones which assemble into a missile seconds before impact. Container ships using diesel fuel are targeted and drones introduce mad cow disease to cattle populations on a mass scale. Even the US Navy is impotent in the face of the new drone weapons.

This will remind many readers of the ecosocialist author Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up a Pipeline, which argues that sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure is justified to keep global warming below disastrous levels, and Malm himself describes Robinson’s book as ‘the most important book on climate politics since Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything’.[5]

His argument is controversial among climate activists, critics asserting he does not consider the threat of the state’s oppressive apparatus and the role of violence in repelling people from mass movements.[6] In Robinson’s world at least, it proves effective - by going to extremes that Malm himself would not countenance.

Carbon emissions tumble as ‘Crash Day’ leads airships to replace airlines, while mass mad cow disease outbreaks lead consumption of beef and milk to plummet. The objections to Malm are applicable to Robinson here as well – would an event like ‘Crash Day’, with numerous civilian casualties, not instead repulse people internationally from the climate movement.

This violence – which, it is implied, is more than helped by Badim’s black ops unit – in Robinson’s narrative helps to accelerate the political changes the Ministry is pushing. Chief among these is Janus Athena’s concept of a ‘carbon coin’, a digital currency backed by hundred-year bonds underwritten by the world’s key central banks.

The ‘carbon coins’ are dispersed on proof that production is being shifted away from hydrocarbons, and are the focus of the second part of the book. Murphy’s attempts to convince central banks to support it are brusquely dismissed by their heads, who, Murphy morosely reflects, are the unelected and unaccountable leaders of the global economy.

Such is the resistance to the Ministry’s proposals on this and other matters that it is attacked with the same drone weapons used on Crash Day and key members of the Ministry are targeted for assassination. It ultimately sets up a social media site which acts as a credit union for climate coins, challenging the authority of banks internationally when it gains mass acceptance, which helps to finally compel central banks to accede to the Ministry’s scheme.

The book is dedicated to Robinson’s former PhD advisor, Fredric Jameson, and its plot is reminiscent of the saying attributed to Jameson that the end of the world is easier to envisage than the end of capitalism. In exploring resistance from the capitalist class to attempts at socialist change, Robinson specifically notes the example of Syriza, who were elected on a platform of repudiating the debt imposed on Greece, only to accede and implement the Troika’s austerity programme.

The lesson Robinson concludes from Syriza’s failure is that a Plan B is always necessary. However, his conclusions seem to overstate how an instrument of monetary policy could make a difference. Writing in the Financial Times about the book’s description of monetary policy, he argues that through carbon quantitative easing, ‘along with regulation and taxation channelling private capital into useful, survival-oriented projects, we might squeak through’ by ‘returning to some kind of Keynesian balance of public and private’.[7]

The argument here feels out of kilter with the rest of the book, which clearly outlines how capitalism is responsible for the climate crisis.

By the end of Robinson’s book, society as we know it has been utterly transformed. He takes inspiration from an array of present-day challenges to the status quo, from the Mondragon federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque Country to the agroecology revolution in Sikkim in northern India spearheaded by Vandana Shiva, which reduces the use of chemicals and increases soil’s capacity to sequester carbon.

The mass adoption of renewable energy finally causes the global CO2 ppm to fall, an income ratio of one to ten is implemented worldwide, and climate refugees are granted world citizenship in a move reminiscent of the League of Nations’ Nansen passports. A movement known as the Half Earthers return much of the earth, from Montana to Siberia, to wilderness and forest, and wild animals thrive. Discreetly encouraged by the Ministry, in a section of the book which feels unconvincing, a pseudo-religion springs up around ‘Mama Gaia’ underlining the new importance of nature to humans.

Nonetheless, despite all these dizzying successes, Robinson emphasises that the damage caused by man-made climate change will continue for centuries to come, and the radical transformation he envisages only comes after worldwide struggle. The climate catastrophes predicted by Robinson appear certain on our current trajectory, as the most recent IPCC report reminds us – the necessary solutions we need, many of which Robinson outlines, are far less so.

Notes

[1] Eun-Soom Im, Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, ‘Deadly heat waves projected in the densely populated agricultural regions of South Asia’, Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 8, August 2017, p. 1.

[2] Rachel Ramirez, ‘Climate change is fuelling mass casualty heat waves. Here’s why we don’t view them as crises’, CNN, 13 July 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/12/weather/climate-change-mass-casualty-psychology/index.html, accessed 14 August 2021.

[3] Kim Stanley Robinson, ‘Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929-2018’, Scientific American, 25 January 2018, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/ursula-k-le-guin-1929-2018/, accessed 13 August 2021.

[4] Jess Spear, ‘Women and nature: towards an ecosocialist feminism’, Rupture, no. 3, 10 March 2021, https://rupture.ie/articles/women-and-nature, accessed 30 August 2021.

[5] Andreas Malm, ‘When does the fightback begin?’, Verso, 23 April 2021, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5061-when-does-the-fightback-begin, accessed 13 August 2021.                                                                     

[6] Michael Coleman, ‘Should the climate movement always reject violence? A review of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up A Pipeline’, Rupture, no. 4, Summer 2021, https://rupture.ie/articles/should-the-climate-movement-always-reject-violence, accessed 15 August 2021.   

[7] Kim Stanley Robinson, ‘A climate plan for a world in flames’, Financial Times, 20 August 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/ff94df96-b702-4e01-addd-f4253d0eecf6?, accessed 30 August 2021.