“I wouldn’t start from here if I were you…” Trad.

1. The first point that we have to be clear about is that we are now in a period of damage limitation. Continued emissions of greenhouse gases are putting humanity well behind the curve of saving ourselves from the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for the survival of human civilisation. In the current relationship of forces, the question is not whether we can avoid the crisis, but how much damage we can avoid. As we need far more dramatic shifts that current political and economic relations allow, we have to seize and build on any and every change that is immediately possible in order to bank it – limit the damage – and build on it to have any prospect of breaking through the limits of those conditions. It is imperative to do both.
2. The paradox is that fossil fuel interests are now under such a threat from the transition that is already taking place, even at its current slow pace, that they are putting significant resources into political movements that are either denialist, like Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, or go slow, like Sunak. The dynamic of this is towards denialism; in practice if not in theory. This dovetails with the impasse of neoliberalism, which requires a dramatic shift in the balance of power against the working class and Global South to restore profitability and capital formation in the US allied countries. This tends towards fascism; because “normal” politics will be incapable of imposing that scale of defeat required. The question here is not whether Trump, for example, is a fascist, but whether the movement he fronts up (and which is an expression of very powerful class forces) is heading in that direction. This tendency is not inevitable, but has to be seen for what it is. As the inequality of wealth, and stratospheric concentration among the wealthiest has increased, political acceptance of democratic constraints among the wealthiest has declined sharply. Resistance to this is one of the motors of transformation.
3. Fascism is a last resort for ruling classes because it is ultimately suicidal, requires exponential escalation of confrontation to a point of total victory or total defeat: but the prospect of ecological collapse makes this less of an inhibition in a kind of last days of Nazi Berlin recklessness; and generates the sort of exuberantly self indulgent celebration of irrationality that is such a feature of movements like MAGA.
4. The capitalist class is divided on climate, however. Significant capital is going into renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other key transition sectors. Others are perturbed about the future, and want there to be one. We should note that there was a significant participation from private school students in the climate strikes for example. If you expect the world to be your oyster, then find out it is going to hell in a handcart, you’re going to be upset about it. It is also noticeable that the active cadre of climate denialism in the Global Warming Policy Foundation are not only rich enough to be part of the global 1%, they are also almost entirely over 70 years old. Lord Lawson, of course, is already dead.
5. This division also plays out not simply in “green sector” businesses, among scientists and academia, but also at different levels in government. Cities are vital laboratories for a green social shift. The C40 movement, the most important legacy of the Livingstone Mayoralty in my view, knits together the Mayors of nearly 100 of the world’s biggest cities from New York to London to Jakarta to Beijing, Paris and Buenos Aires. All of them are working on ways to green construction, transport, urban planning, waste and recycling; and sharing the results in a vast process of mutual experimentation and shared learning. You can read about that here. The need to make such a conscious shift in every aspect of life is a new challenge and no one has all the answers. We are making it up as we go along, and any and every lever we have any access to is vital. Every small step that works is a seed, because it shows what might be done on a bigger scale. These cities cover a multitude of political sins, and at present it could not be otherwise. And they make a big contribution to the Paris process. Actions taken by US cities aligned with C40, and to some extent States, reduced the impact of Trump’s rollback on climate measures during his last Presidency by about half. Whatever the political character, and limitations, of the Mayors of NY and LA and the other cities involved, this is essential work. This could be seen as an application of Gramsci’s notion that we are in a war of position, seeking to gain ground in a myriad of social forms and organisations as part of the process of shifting hegemony towards a point that the old unsustainable order cracks.
6. Nevertheless, pro Net Zero views among capitalists tends to a kind of techno Micawberism – the view that technological changes alone, leaving existing social and economic structures intact – will be enough. Given the studies by Oxfam and others that show that the carbon emissions of the wealthiest 10% will, at current consumption rates, take us beyond 1.5C on their own, regardless of what the rest of us do, this poses the limits of any bloc with them, and also a rule of thumb guideline for how much income is too much in global terms; roughly anything above £75,000 per person at the moment. For people above this, getting to sustainability will be harder than a camel threading a needle, but there we are. We can travel to sustainability, but not in private jets or yachts.
7. The climate movement is necessarily broad. We should be prepared for united fronts across wide disagreements on other matters and to have debates within the movement; and also form blocs with different class forces on particular issues without doing so on their terms. Offshore wind companies, for example, are as ruthless to their workers as any others. This is a contradiction that we have to fight out within the imperative to have as many of them built as we can.
8. The same applies to limited and inadequate political choices which reflect capitalist interests first and human imperatives a long way below. A continued Biden Presidency, for example, would continue to pursue an “America First” green transition, as well as its global war drive against China, arming the IDF assault on Gaza, channeling capital into military spending and sucking green investment away from even its subordinate allies. A Trump Presidency would make the US a complete rogue state on climate, smash up the Paris process, double down on fossil fuels, and spice up the war drive with what Boris Johnson calls “unpredictable violence”. Leon Trotsky’s argument in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany –that when you are confronted by two people who are going to kill you, but one has a gun and the other some slow poison, you bloc with the poisoner against the gunman, while building up your own forces so you can deal with the poisoner later – is relevant to this.
9. Either way, the dominant ruling class in the US centred Global North bloc, for all its protestations of global leadership, will not lead humanity into sustainability. The ease with which they have found billions for wars, and now escalating military spending, compares starkly with the difficulty they seem to have providing climate finance for the Global South.
10. The ideologues of the world’s imperial core have warned us of what they are going to do. In “The Age of Consequences” a projection of potential climate scenarios drawn up by allies of Al Gore in the US Democrat Party in 2008 stated quite clearly that in conditions in which climate driven “massive non linear events” began to unravel societies, “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage, deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad but at home.” When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
11. This is not simply a question of a confrontation with capitalism, it is a question of confronting imperialism in the first instance. The concentration of the major imperial powers into a US led Global North bloc – described by the Tricontinental Institute as Hyper Imperialism – is the last stand of an order that extracts wealth from the rest of the world, seeks to make its own working classes complicit in doing so, is arming itself to the teeth to confront the consequences of its failure to deal with the climate crisis; and is risking war rather than peacefully come to terms with China becoming economically weightier than the US, thereby accepting multipolarity. This means that we may not live long enough to experience the full consequences of climate breakdown, should the kind of US strategic thinkers advocating a war with China in the next five years manage to provoke one. If we manage to avert this – and it will take efforts on our part – the diversion of investment into military spending will cut essential investment in climate transition and do enormous and unnecessary damage anyway. We won’t get this time back.
12. John Bellamy Foster’s call for an anti imperialist climate movement to address the twin threats of 21^st Century exterminism, the US war drive and climate breakdown, is essential, in that there needs to be clarity on this on the Left, but also insufficient, in that there need to be united fronts with forces that are not on the Left, and forces on the Left that don’t see themselves as anti imperialist in the way that Bellamy Foster (or I) would; and this is a dynamic process.
13. The role of the countries that see themselves as Socialist is a more positive one than they are usually given credit for in the climate and labour movements in the Global North. Whether this is Cuba being considered a sustainability model by the UN, or China investing twice as much in energy transition as the US and EU put together this year, or high speed rail investments as part of the Belt and Road initiative. This is examined in some detail here.  I use the phrase “countries that see themselves as Socialist” because large parts of the Left in the Global North don’t think that these countries are what they think Socialism is, but its important to take on board the fact that 90 million Chinese Communist Party members disagree with them – and that should pose (at least) a debate, with them, not about them. A good place to start getting a flavour of their views, and that of quite a broad range of the non Party Left is Wenhua Zongheng.
14. Monthly Review has also made a serious reassessment of the Soviet Union’s ecological record, stressing that the ecological disasters, for which it is well known, generated a significant environmental movement, and big shifts in state policy with real impacts, particularly in the 1980s after Chernobyl; and that its overall environmental impact was no worse than that of the US. Anyone who has seen post industrial wastelands in the US will not find that hard to believe.
15. The current escalation of extreme weather events is just the overture to impacts that will, on current trajectories, become locally or regionally unmanageable in the coming decades; posing political climate emergencies declared by local ruling classes seeking to survive at everyone else’s expense, confronting working class and popular resistance, forced into revolutionary solutions to seek survival. Developments of this sort can’t help but have a dramatic political ripple effect, transforming debate and actions globally. Columbian President Petro’s insight that Gaza is a dress rehearsal for what the Global North will increasingly impose on the rest of the world as the climate breaks down should also be seen as a promise of the sort of global solidarity it has generated. with the sharp political learning curve, shake up and shake down of allegiances and organisations that goes with it. As Bellamy Foster puts it; “A revolt by the world’s environmental proletariat …, in which hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will inevitably take part, is destined to come about in the coming decades as a result of the struggle for ecological survival.”
16. We are the majority and should act to mobilise it. When Just Stop Oil in the UK says “We need a revolution”, they are proposing a combination of continued non violent direct actions with assemblies to mobilise local communities around matters of concern. We should not be formulaic about what forms “assemblies” should take; as they will necessarily be multiple and will obviously include workplaces; and in some cases, these will be the core of a wider social mobilisation, as they are at GKN Firenze.
17. We should also be clear that any NVDA must be directed at appropriate targets and all actions be aimed at mobilising the majority opinion in favour of more urgent climate action, not substituting for that in ways that provide climate deniers with a popular stick to beat us with. JSO has not always been sensitive to that. Nevertheless, initiatives like this are part of the war of position. Revolutions, and counter revolutions, take place when a social order breaks down to a point that it can no longer go on. That is when the war of position becomes a war of manoeuvre and ecological breakdown or economic impasse or military confrontations can all be causes of that. (See point 13 above).
18. In the UK, the biggest wave of climate activism, and optimism, coincided with the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party, which held out the prospect of a UK government that would qualitatively up the investment in green transition. This fed off, and fed, a series of mass movements outside Parliament and Parliamentary thinking that nevertheless led to Parliament declaring a climate emergency and embedded concern for climate as a top 4 issue ever since.
19. A Parliamentary Road to Sustainability now looks too long and winding to get to its destination anything like fast enough; with the level of investment being proposed by Labour quantitatively better than that already in place, but not to the qualitative degree we need. This is a damaging and retrograde choice by the Labour leadership. The failure of economic logic is examined here. Sir Nicholas Stern and others at the Grantham Institute have also demonstrated that the UK needs at least 1% of GDP to be invested in infrastructure every year to keep abreast of other developed countries. 1% of GDP is £26 billion. Which is a familiar sounding figure. Anything short of that allows continued decay.
20. Rachel Reeves recent Mais lecture got the relationship between climate transition and “growth” completely the wrong way round; with the notion that any investment in green transition will flow from “growth” in the existing economy; within the framework of restrictive fiscal rules and respecting Tory spending plans that have baked in another five years of austerity. Reeves argues that Labour will aim to “grow the pie”, addressing issues of productivity with selective state pump priming. The scale of this is the problem. Cutting planned investment from £28 billion a year to only a little over what the Conservatives have already pencilled in, means that few pumps will be primed. Even with a “growth unit” in the Treasury, there will therefore be little growth, because there won’t be enough investment to generate it; and what growth there will be will primarily reproduce existing patterns of unsustainable production and consumption, not the sharp shift in the economy to a much lower carbon intensity overall that we need. Its not so much that the pie needs to be bigger, but it does need better, more nutritious ingredients, and to be shared qualitatively more equitably. That follows the climate imperative to reduce the overconsumption of the richest 10% outlined above. But Reeves’s approach rejects social redistribution, with all but the most limited taxes on the wealthy ruled out. We should not accept the poverty of low aspirations that passes for “realism” in Labour leadership circles and push for what is realistically necessary.
21. “Growth” in the sense that Reeves poses it, is a way to generate benefits without confronting unsustainable inequalities of wealth and power; leaving them intact. Without differentiating between what is sustainable and what is not. “A rising tide lifts all boats”, but in current conditions, it also drowns all coastal cities.
22. However, “degrowth” is not a good description of what we are trying to do; all too easily translated, in current circumstances, as “austerity”, or an unjust transition requiring the 90% to pay the price for the continued indulgence of the wealthiest 10%. Growth is completely legitimate and necessary in the developing world. The importance of a massive shift in investment to it is to enable this to happen without reliance on outmoded fossil fuel technology, in the same way that Africa has leapfrogged landlines to use Satphones. The failure of the Washington Consensus finance structure to make this finance available is structural and condemns the majority world to continued poverty and a pattern of development that is slow and unsustainable. In the Global North our movement has to be about transformation and regeneration, lowering carbon intensity without crashing majority living standards.
23. The US bloc is trying to unravel globalisation, as it no longer provides it with global dominance. In cutting the world economy into parts, it breaks up shared efficiencies of scale, making all progress towards sustainability more costly. Local production is not always better than working with a global division of labour, and is often less so, even when transport costs are taken into account.
24. “Extractivism” is also not a useful formulation, as, if we are to make anything at all, we need the raw materials to construct it; and that involves mining, refining and so on. The point here is to have the most economic – sparing – use of these materials, including the most effective possible circular reuse; and the best possible terms and conditions for the workers employed in the global supply chains; which is part of increasing the living standards of workers across the world as we head for sustainability.
25. The food metaphors used in this discussion are unfortunate as, given the choice, most people would go for a fat pie over a thin doughnut.
26. It is a statement of the obvious that, if we are to survive, some sectors of the economy have to shrink dramatically and, in some cases disappear, while others have to expand while the overall carbon intensity of everything made or done has to decrease. That requires continued technological innovation. We can’t presume a magic bullet, and can’t afford to wait for one, but at present there is a 2% annual improvement in efficiency and, according to the IEA, that needs to double to get us on track. That needs investment and coordination. So, the transition is necessarily technologically intense. The figures from the study that drew up maximum sustainable per capita energy consumption in Jonathan Essex’s recent article on the Greener Jobs Alliance blog were based on a presumption of everyone having equal access to the most advanced technology available. This is a long way from “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” but the technological dimension of maintaining a decent and sustainable way of life will be huge (and require the commensurate level of skills to sustain it).
27. At present in the UK, even with stagnant “growth” in the conventional sense, and a transition that is going too slow, the number of jobs being created in “green” sectors is greater than those being lost in carbon heavy sectors.According to the ONS, in 2022, 8,500 jobs were lost in oil and gas, while 40,000 were created in low carbon and renewable energy sectors (almost 5 gained for every one lost). But, they are different jobs in different places. All investment, transition related or not, tends to substitute capital for labour, so transition for workers in threatened sectors must be addressed by any government, or movement, serious about making a shift with public support and avoid devastating local impacts like that at Port Talbot. Our movement should be about anticipating those shifts and for the unions and communities concerned to be ahead of what’s coming to make the appropriate demands for job guarantees, retraining and redeployment. If that does not happen, we end up in the ridiculous position whereby unions representing North Sea Oil and Gas workers campaign against the freeze on new exploration proposed by Labour, even though this is contrary to the interests of the working class as a whole.
28. If you go to the TUC HQ in London, there is a magnificent painting by Dan Jones of the demonstration outside Pentonville prison in 1972 that was the strongest expression of the General Strike that freed the Pentonville 5. If you look at the banners being carried, most of them are from unions and union organisations that no longer exist. SOGAT. The Port of London Joint Shop Stewards Committee etc. This should stand as a warning to us today. A trade unionism that limits itself to bread and butter issues and the immediate perceived interests of members confines itself to trying to get a better deal in someone else’s world; and leaves strategic decisions about the future in the hands of a ruling class that will make them in a self interested way that will destroy whole sections of our movement. This is trade unionism that Gramsci would have described as “subaltern” and “corporate”. Another way to put it is that it is trade unionism that, however militant, ultimately knows its place.
29. We need, instead, to push for Just Transition bodies at every level, in every sector and in every community; and push for a government that could, for example, approach the highly skilled workers making private jets and ask them, “with your skills, and this kit, what could you make instead that would benefit everyone?” and coordinates all initiatives through a National Climate Service. There are vast reservoirs of creativity, imagination and preparedness for hard work that could be harnessed in a universally understood human mission to save ourselves.
30. Article 12 of Paris Agreement states that all signatories have to educate their populations on the nature of the crisis and the measures needed to deal with it. We should not interpret that as a sectoral point, but as a whole society obligation whereby society mobilises itself to deal with the crisis. Our movement has to lead that, or it won’t happen.