These might be reforms that operate within the current system and try to make it slightly better. The ones I find most encouraging are the ones that are linked to a much bigger shift in either perspective or in the way that we arrange things. So the Inflation Reduction Act is a good example of this. There are a lot of flaws with the IRA that we won’t unpack here, but one thing that I find really encouraging about it is that for the first time in American climate politics, it represents a shift away from a fixation on pricing and the price system as the way to resolve this crisis. There’s an entire chapter on that in the book, about the need to shift away from the magic of imagined prices and into an investment-based framework or a public investment-based framework. That’s a really interesting shift in mindset that speaks to a much bigger project for reimagining how we organize our economy.
Another thing: In the UK, the Labour Party announced a plan to build a public option clean energy company to compete with the big fossil fuel generators. I think, again, it’s an encouraging shift, and while it’s still operating within capitalism, it moves us away from a world in which everything has to be justified on the basis of profits.
Do you have hope that larger-scale, planned, state-led transitions of the global economy are possible?
Looking at the scale and complexity required to coordinate the transition off of fossil fuels, it demands the capacity of the state. Particularly within the kind of time horizons that we’re thinking about—a decade, two decades? So working with the state apparatus and pushing it as far as it possibly can be pushed is a valuable and necessary exercise. To turn back to the IRA, its ability to pass in the form that did—as watered down as it was—is a direct result of much more radical campaigning around the Green New Deal and much more radical kind of climate futures. Particularly in the US, there’s so much power divested on state and community levels that can be harnessed and is being harnessed.
The place I’m more skeptical of is how international coordination is working in groups with the UNFCCC and the COP negotiations. I don’t think I’m alone in taking the position that they’re really struggling to be fit for their purposes and to deliver what we need. I’m not sure how to resolve that, frankly, or what the best alternative would be.
Do you have any suggestions for direct actions readers can take to help galvanize a larger shift in the way that we approach climate change?
Having done climate activism for years, it often feels as though going to the protests is doing very little. The state often feels like an immovable beast. But I do think that having people turn up to protests and having people be part of those movements is incredibly valuable over a longer trajectory, even if in the near term, it might be disheartening. So I would encourage everyone to give it a try.
The other thing would be this: One of the most powerful forces that we’re going to need to not only drive a transition away from our fossil fuel and carbon addiction, but also to do so in a way that is just and fair, is to have the trade union movement, or labor as you call it in the US, on our side. And so I think anyone who is in a trade union or has thought about joining one should do so and try to bring pressure from the inside, so unions can be really vocal on the climate crisis. They’re often representing the workers that are going to be critical to the future. I think the joining up of the climate movement and the labor movement would be an incredibly powerful nexus, and it’s happening already.
