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Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. His latest book is Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022).
The US electricity system has long been dominated by corporate interests. A truly democratic energy system will require public control and large-scale state planning, with especially significant input from the workers who know how to make that system run.
Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land. Karl Marx’s thought gives us the tools to do just that.
Despite the plummeting costs of solar and wind power, renewables have not been profitable enough to attract adequate private investment. To decarbonize, public investment in clean power and reclaiming electricity as a public utility are essential.
Kohei Saito’s degrowth rewrite of Marxist theory is not only incorrect — if taken seriously, it would lead to political disaster for both the socialist left and the environmental movement.
The Biden administration recently announced badly needed investments in carbon capture. But it shouldn’t be handing out money to fossil fuel companies — carbon capture technology needs to be a state-run public service.
We need radical change to address climate change. But degrowth needlessly shackles its vision of a socialist future to a program of aggregate reduction.
The latest UN climate report was just released, and it’s brought the usual doom loop of grave headlines as emissions keep rising. The way out isn’t getting people to “believe the science” but building a pro-worker climate politics that can win power.
Sections of the environmental movement bemoaned the birth of the world’s eight-billionth person, but the Left should have no part in this cynical misanthropy. The cause of food insecurity and climate change is the irrationality of capitalism — not rising populations.
Policymakers who have belatedly recognized the peril of climate change now promote incremental, market-based solutions to the crisis. But there’s no way we can prevent ecological disaster without tackling the vested interests at the heart of global capitalism.
Spreading knowledge and awareness of the climate crisis isn’t enough. There’s no hope for the planet without climate policies that address the material interests of workers.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the greatest achievements of FDR’s New Deal. But a new generation of liberals and leftists are turning against the dream of “big public power” in America.
Climate legislation is failing under Joe Biden because the Green New Deal strategy was ignored from the beginning. We need to link decarbonization directly to material gains for the working class, not technocratic clean energy policies.
And those are exactly the people we need to save the planet.
This summer has been a cascade of climate disaster. But we shouldn’t assume that ever-worsening floods and heat waves will spur political change — we need a working-class strategy that can excite and win over people to save the planet.
The Green New Deal program has enormous potential to generate mass popular support. But absent real leverage from labor, it’s likely to be continually watered down into a toothless slogan for NGOs.
Rich people have enormous carbon footprints. But the fundamental problem with their climate impact isn’t what they consume — it’s that they own the means of production, and it’s extremely profitable for them to pollute.
The oil industry, long characterized by boom and bust cycles, has crashed, with prices hitting below zero. The White House will reach for a corporate bailout, but now’s the opportunity to move away from oil extraction and build a rational system of clean energy.
Coronavirus has emphasized a truth we knew before the pandemic: capitalist food systems are irrational and don’t serve human needs. Socialists have to demand a food system based on social and ecological needs — one that can provide food for all.
To build the power to take on climate change, we can’t simply validate individual movements or assume single-issue struggles will add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. We need class politics to connect the dots of our many struggles — and to save the planet.
Solving the ecological crisis requires a mass movement to take on hugely powerful industries. Yet environmentalism’s base in the professional-managerial class and focus on consumption has little chance of attracting working-class support.