It’s a reality. If the climate crisis were playing out over the course of two hundred, three hundred, or a thousand years, one could have an interesting theoretical debate about whether we should change the system we have and tweak it slightly in order to take on the crisis, or whether we should create an entirely new mode of production and build up a workaround alternative.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have that time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined in its 2018 report on 1.5 degrees Celsius that we had roughly twelve years. That is now nine years in which to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, which is an enormous challenge. In order to meet that ever-shrinking twelve-year window, we have to use the productive system in which we live — which is not my ideal situation, but then again, neither is global warming.

There are different ways of meeting that crisis; there are enormous political stakes in how we use those twelve years. There are different visions of climate action, which can put us on a path toward something like socialism or leave many of the extractive systems that define capitalism today in place. There’s nothing baked into capitalism that says it has to run on fossil fuels, and it’s an enormously resilient system. There’s no reason to think that it will be invulnerable to the climate crisis, or that it won’t figure out a way to extract profit off of renewables, solar, and wind.

These are the stakes we’re talking about when making the case — as programs like the Green New Deal do — that the road toward dealing with the climate crisis should be one of non-reformist reforms, to use André Gorz’s framing. We want a better world as socialists. The ultimate goal is to transcend capitalism, but we have a really short-term problem that gets lost in the mainstream liberal thinking about the climate crisis and how to take it on, which is that capitalism as a logic is incompatible with dealing with the climate crisis because it has a constant thirst for expansion.

I spoke to a climate scientist named Kevin Anderson who does a lot of modeling on this question. He said, “If we deal with this problem, it entails a root-and-branch change to capitalism as we know it.” I don’t know whether that looks like any capitalism we would recognize today. I don’t know if that looks like socialism, but it looks very different than what we have now.

The big lie of mainstream liberal thinking about the climate crisis is that there’s an easy switch that can flick on the type of power that’s flowing through our lines, keeping basically everything we have today in place and just changing what powers it. And that will deliver us from the climate crisis. That’s not true. Any sort of reasonable solution to dealing with the problem looks like a really radical shift in our current economic order.

That has been a very controversial question on parts of the climate left. They can be useful tools — carbon capture, storage, and sequestration more so. But part of the problem is that the current industry-led conversation about carbon capture says that we can keep up business as usual if we just add in a lot of technology that doesn’t work at scale, and hope that at some point we can scale it up to levels we’ve never seen. Right now, that seems unfathomable, given the limited use that it has.

At the same time, there is almost no climate modeling on a 1.5-degree scenario in particular, where there is no carbon capture and no direct air capture, which is another process that sucks carbon directly down from the atmosphere. We need some level of these technologies, and as a socialist, I want those conversations to be had on the Left, and not cede that ground to Occidental Petroleum or Exxon-Mobil, to determine who owns those technologies and who is profiting off of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson has written that carbon sequestrations should be treated like a public utility, which is basically right. If this technology is so needed, why leave it up to companies that have spent decades lying about this problem and misleading the public?

A lot of different things can be true of the Biden administration at the same time. Biden came in talking a big game about climate policy in particular, and we don’t have any climate policy right now. Ongoing talks between Republicans and Democrats lean toward familiar tropes about pursuing bipartisanship. I don’t think it bodes well, and I don’t think Biden deserves a lot of the praise that he’s gotten for his climate plans.

Meaningful things are changing. At least for the COVID stimulus, Biden and his administration were willing to spend a lot of money. They were willing to put up a big package that expanded the social safety net, albeit temporarily, in critically necessary ways. Pandemic measures like unemployment insurance and child tax credit are probably going to go away. But there was willingness to say, “The government can spend a lot of money. We can do big things that can make people’s lives better. And we don’t have to be afraid of that.”

The message to Congress from Obama and his 2010 State of the Union was, “We need to tighten our belts; it’s time to buck up, and these days of fat spending are over.” We haven’t seen that yet; maybe we will next year. I’m not totally convinced. There has been some progress on spending levels, but when you look at the climate content of the American Jobs Plan, for instance, so much of it is not designed to deliver direct benefits to people. Even if that might be true of other parts of the plan, or of the American Families Plan, when it comes to climate, the goal is to leverage private investment.

So much of spending on transmission lines, electric vehicles, or clean energy is framed in terms of tax credits, baiting banks and private finance into green spending, and little direct spending on things like a Civilian Conservation Corps. Even as Biden has taken up some of the bigger climate demands as a result of pressure from folks like the Sunrise Movement, he has not taken up the political logic of the Green New Deal, which bakes in a virtuous cycle in which climate policy has to win both big-D and small-d democratic majorities, and the way to do that is to make it clear that climate policy will make your life better.

Biden is not doing that. He’s taken up some demands from the movement. But the Green New Deal is powerful because there is a political strategy baked into it, one that is based on a reading of how climate policy in this country has ignored the lives of working people. Until there is a climate program in tune with the fact that many people in this country are suffering, and that climate policy has to make its offer clear to people who don’t care about this issue, there’s a limited ceiling on what can happen.

It’s a complicated question, because on the one hand, the overwhelming block on climate policy is the Republican Party, which will not vote for climate policy. Inter–Democratic Party coalitional politics are also holding up climate policy in their own right. Most obviously, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are not keen to vote for a Green New Deal, but they’re not alone in that.

There is still commitment to the line that climate policy is important when it’s convenient, but it’s not core to democratic governance. There’s also a complicated question around labor. Different segments of the labor movement who have sway in the highest echelons of the Democratic Party, like the leadership of certain international unions, have veto power in many influential democratic spaces to say what climate policy should look like, and to take constraints on fossil fuels off the table.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and DSA’s Ecosocialist Caucus is organizing for the PRO Act with the Painters’ Union and many other unions, pushing for what is now the demand of the US labor movement. It would be great for climate policy, and it’s important for making sure that solar and wind can be pro-worker industries as they develop. There are signs of progress. I don’t think that the climate jobs conversation is where it was a decade ago, in part because the Left has gotten a lot better at navigating those conversations.

DSA deserves an enormous amount of credit for helping drive it forward and having the concrete fight, rather than having the conversation about jobs and the environment in the abstract, and creating a ground for shared struggle around it.

At the same time, the conversation is frustratingly behind. Mainstream Democrats and even parts of the green movement still look at the fossil fuel industry as an enormous source of good union jobs. That’s obviously not true if you look at the coal industry, or if you look at the oil and gas industry, where well over a hundred thousand people recently lost their jobs.

The companies got a lot of money from the federal government. They got bailed out after oil prices crashed, took full advantage of PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loans, and turned around and fired a lot of people. They’re actively interested in automating huge parts of their workforce.

The interests of the fossil fuel industry are still seen by well-intentioned climate activists as synonymous with those of workers in the fossil fuel industry, which could not be less true after the last year. The most grotesque example of this is the coal industry, where companies like Blackjewel in Kentucky going bankrupt and shorting their workers of health care, pensions, paychecks.

Reliably for the coal industry, and increasingly for the oil and gas industry, these companies have used bankruptcy courts to write off any responsibility to their workers, whether through remediating mine lands or the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, which the coal industry has had an obligation to pay into and developed elaborate ways to shut off.

These industries, and their executives in particular, have no interest in their workers. The coal industry, the oil industry, and the gas industry have been busting their unions for a very, very long time. It’s bizarre, when hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off, for Democrats to argue in Congress that they want to protect jobs.

Unfortunately, there are any number of examples of the Democratic Party swallowing right-wing talking points and spitting them back out to make themselves seem reasonable. To look at the oil and gas industry, which has gone through such turmoil over the last year, and to say that everything looks like it did in 2010 is insane.

I put out a chapter about nationalizing the fossil fuel industry as an alternative to that scenario — which is already happening, allowing fossil fuel executives to throw people under the bus. If this conversation doesn’t put things like nationalization on the table, the terms of the transition are left up to fossil fuel executives, who are more than happy to abandon whole parts of this country if they’re no longer profitable.

In conversations about climate policy, people say, “Why don’t we just regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence?” But this leaves fossil fuel executives to make every decision about how coal, oil, and gas plants close down. This transition is horrible from the perspective of anyone in solidarity with working people: they’ll get screwed over. But in a politically pragmatic sense, it breeds opposition if you allow these processes to continue. In places like Appalachia, the coal industry has walked away and left; the public sphere has cratered. This breeds opposition that will make climate policy almost impossible.

As we know from France’s gilets jaunes protests, if you don’t know what policy means on the ground to folks who are dealing with it, then the policy doesn’t happen. If today’s oil and gas bosses manage this decline, I don’t see how massive political opposition doesn’t happen. The public alternative to this is nationalization — saying that this transition will be orderly and managed, putting workers first, which we know that we can’t trust the fossil fuel industry to do.

When the coal and oil industries were becoming historically important, we were at a point of much stronger union density. Unions could negotiate strong contracts for oil refineries, for instance, which still have well-paid union jobs. In the coal industry, the bosses have tried to break up a lot of the unions and have succeeded, and there is still a core of strong union jobs that are being killed off, in no small part by the bosses.

But the solar and wind industries are much more recent. The recent growth and importance of these industries has come along in a period of historic weakness for labor. And that’s beneficial in no small part for solar and wind companies, who would much rather have nonunionized workforces and pay bad wages. Even in unionized parts of the renewable sector, wind tends to have more union contracts than solar.

I’ve talked to workers who build pipelines and wind turbines and say, “My work is a lot better when I build an oil pipeline than when I build a wind turbine.” The wind turbine contracts are worse, even though the work is kind of the same, and the same people can do it. The protections aren’t as strong; the work is less steady and well-paid.

All of these things have made it easy to say that renewables are anti-worker. How dare you ask people to go into this industry that does not come with the same protection that comes with fossil fuel jobs? Pitting those two things against each other makes such a tantalizing talking point for the right, even for liberal Democrats.

I don’t think that is necessarily helped by the fact that solar and wind are often talked about as inherently good actors, as if they are soldiers in the climate fight who are willing to put everything on the line so that we can save the world. But they are companies; they have a profit motive. They often are anti-union. Ignoring that fact doesn’t serve the climate movement very well.

This industry is about to get a lot of money, regardless of what happens in the United States. Policies in the European Union, China, and many other parts of the world will make wind, solar, and clean energy a much bigger factor in the global economy. Pretending that they’re climate activists instead of for-profit companies doesn’t serve anyone.

If the argument from unions is that these jobs aren’t good jobs, it’s worth asking why. There’s nothing magical about coal or oil that lends them to having strong unionized workforce. People died so that coal mines could be unionized. Solar and wind will not organize themselves magically. There have to be drives to make that happen.

This connection is important, and not necessarily because ecosocialism is budding within those strikes. But what those strikes did represent in part were claims on natural resources. Coal companies, especially in West Virginia and Kentucky, have gotten very wealthy. Their decline has meant that schools are struggling to make ends meet. The most absurd of those situations was in Oklahoma, where the oil and gas industry has made a ton of money off of the fracking boom, and yet school budgets have declined.

There are different ways to deal with resource wealth, including within the United States. In Alaska, the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out a check to people who live there because the state has enormous oil resources. Extraction has been more of the case in Appalachia — funneling these resources up toward the top.

As a climate reporter, I was interested by this story because the jobs-versus-environment debate is often framed between unions or fossil fuel workers — very masculine professions — and kind of tree-hugging environmentalists. But in practice, the decline of fossil fuels has not just affected those workers, it’s affected their whole tax bases, which are bound up in the fossil fuel economy and depend on these revenues from it.

The idea that there’s only one conversation about jobs and climate — transitioning fossil fuel workers into a clean-energy economy — ignores how our world is tangibly bound up in fossil fuels, including through public school budgets. There’s no reason not to think of teachers and nurses as low-carbon workers, people who are doing very socially necessary work, but also as workers who are on the front lines of the climate crisis and an energy transition. It’s not just a matter of transitioning a very small number of extractive workers, but instead of transitioning the whole community that is built up around these industries.

Full employment has historically been a hugely important demand for big parts of the Democratic Party coalition. It’s important for climate in part because there’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done, and that the private sector does not consider valuable. These are things like remediating the urban heat island effect in big cities, remediating wetlands — necessary work that is difficult to profit from.

The federal jobs guarantee reemerged as a demand in the last several years. It can do that work, saying, “If we think this sort of thing is important for the government to embark on, to remake our public sphere on the order of what the New Deal did, there’s no reason why we should trust the private sector.”

Why does it seem so impossible to deal with the climate crisis, in the United States in particular? We’re living at the tail end of decades of destruction of the labor movement, of left ideas, of social movements. Neoliberalism has a creative element that is important to understand, injecting radical ideas about how markets and governments relate to one another. But it’s also a destructive project: destroying the idea that anything else could exist, or that there are any sort of alternate ways of organizing society. Capitalist realism tries to say that not only is anything else impossible to imagine, but that it’s really stupid to imagine. As if what we’re living in now is so great that any alternative would be unthinkable.

The climate movement does not necessarily come out of a socialist organizing tradition; it doesn’t have a deep history of utopian thought. It’s interesting to see the Green New Deal reinject that into the climate debate, putting out a vision for how the world could look better and bringing ideas like full employment back onto the table, pushed for by the labor movement and black freedom struggle. These ideas are starting to reemerge; they aren’t new, but are being fit into a vision of what a low-carbon, better society could look like.

I was originally going to call the book The New Denialism. That’s a less sexy title than Overheated, so it got lost. But part of the inspiration for writing the book in the first place was seeing how these dynamics work in different places where denialism hasn’t been a part of the mainstream conversation.

I looked at climate politics in Europe and saw a huge spectrum of proposals for how to deal with a crisis, not just a debate about whether it exists or not. During the Trump administration, when I did most of the reporting for this book, I saw how low the bar really was. It’s not that the bar hadn’t been low before, but we had a climate-denying president who called global warming a hoax.

Slogans like “We believe the science” are lauded as progress. But they’re meaningless when they aren’t connected to a serious policy agenda. Democrats have been remarkably uncreative about how to take on this crisis. They’ve gotten a lot of credit for doing very little, not looking at the scale of the crisis head-on.

In the book, I try to mine the difference between what’s on the table politically and the astounding scale of what’s necessary. Climate change is the terrain on which politics in the twenty-first century will play out, regardless of how you think about climate change as an issue.

It’s a reality for the rest of our lives. The entire new human existence is keeping warming below 1.5 or 2 degrees; that is an awesome challenge to have to take on. For the last several decades, the Democrats have been happy to put out the idea that a few market tweaks or cautious, nudging investments are going to take that on, but really, it’s a planning challenge.

For the last thirty years, it’s been uncomfortable for the Democrats to think about the constructive powers of the state and the government, and to say, “If we think these sorts of jobs should be done, then the government can hire people directly to do them.”

The text of the Paris Agreement says that warming should be constrained to well below two degrees Celsius. 1.5 degrees is an aspiration. It’s good to understand where that demand comes from; it has been a standing call from the folks in climate-vulnerable countries in the Global South, for whom the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is huge. The folks talking about 1.5 degrees have been marching through the halls of UN climate talks, chanting “1.5 to survive,” because for low-lying island states, warming of 1.5 degrees represents an existential threat.

Currently we are on track for about 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming. That gives us a punishingly short window in which to meet even two degrees, which is a bit of a fabrication; there’s some debate about where the two-degree target came from. Some people credit that to the economist William Nordhaus, who is not the most reliable source on a lot of these things. But there’s something comforting about a target. There’s something comforting about saying that this thing that is happening is far-off, and that we can potentially avoid it. We have a bit of time, and two degrees gives us more time than 1.5 degrees.

Reaching targets has been the popular goal. That’s what you see in the fossil fuel industry assessments. But the conversation about targets can sometimes obscure what’s actually happening. It’s not as if somebody who is living through a hurricane or a natural disaster will say, “Oh no, we’ve hit two degrees Celsius.” The climate crisis is playing out all around us. There’s not a point at which we cross the boundary toward a disastrous future. Every tenth of a degree of warming that we avoid makes an enormous amount of difference, saving on the order of tens of thousands of lives.

If we cross 1.5 or even two degrees of warming, it’s not that we should all pack up, go home, and wait to die. There are still millions of lives that can be saved by preventing each additional tenth of a degree of warming.

The narrative that we can’t take on the climate crisis has come from many places. The line that it’s hopelessly complicated, and that we can’t know all of what’s happening, has come from the fossil fuel industry. It’s a knock-on effect of years of climate denial proper — people saying that the sun is causing global warming, that global warming might actually be good because it makes the plants grow, or that we should create more carbon dioxide because it makes our lives better. Those lines never put out a holistic theory of what was happening to the planet, but instead try to make it seem confusing.

The line about climate diplomacy similarly says that there’s something hard-wired into humans that makes us incapable of making good decisions on climate policy. This is how we talk about environmental problems — like the Pogo cartoon where he looks out at a field of rubbish and trash, saying, “We’ve met the enemy and he is us.” It comes out of an older type of environmentalist thinking that humans are the problem, and that we are feeding this mess.

That particular line flirts closely with certain veins of xenophobic thinking and nativist thinking, claiming that there are too many humans in the world and that we have to keep specific humans out in order to keep ourselves pure and clean, or to keep our emissions down. That is an incoherent, indefensible line, but it fed into the moment in the late ’80s, at the tail end of the Reagan administration, when climate change entered the popular consciousness.

In 1988, James Hanson gave testimony before Congress, saying that climate change was something to worry about. That kicked off a first round of global negotiations on global warming, or on the “greenhouse gas problem,” as it was called then. This thinking ended up working out very well for fossil fuel companies — an antidemocratic impulse to say that humans have collectively gotten us in this mess.

This individualist thinking comes from the neoliberal revolutions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, claiming that there is no such thing as a society. There are only individuals in a family, which is the unit of societal progress, and thinking anything outside of that is a fool’s errand. That reflects a real cynicism about the positive role that states can play in society.

There are many tools we could use to take on the climate crisis, like stringent regulations on greenhouse gases or using the EPA. Those tools have largely been taken off the table. By 1988, when climate change was being talked about publicly, everything was filtered through the perspective that market forces are the most powerful force in society, as a result of fossil fuel industry lobbying.

BP was formerly “British Petroleum.” It’s now “Beyond Petroleum,” a rebranding after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which obviously brought them a lot of bad press. In the ’90s and 2000s, BP began to perpetuate the concept of a carbon footprint. They have a carbon footprint calculator on their website, which advises people to turn off the lights and gives a menu of ways that individuals can bring down their carbon footprint.

The result of this is to say that we’re all doing our part; BP is doing its part… as if BP doesn’t have an out-sized responsibility for this crisis. It’s as if the fossil fuel industry were one of many actors, not actively fueling demand for fossil fuels and causing a lion share of the problem.

The framing of this conversation is different in Europe, in part because climate denial has not been a through line of right-wing politics in the same way that it has been in the United States. The Republican Party doctrine is that maybe climate change is real, but they aren’t going to do anything about it. That’s really not the case for right-wing parties in Europe, including the far right. These parties have huge majorities that want to see climate action, but that do not have commitments to a pluralistic and multiracial society. In some cases, it’s quite the opposite.

Leaders in the National Rally in France, for instance, say that borders are the environment’s greatest ally. There’s huge public support for climate action. And once the question is not, “Is climate change real or not?”, the existing political spectrum holds the debate on how to deal with it.

European far-right parties have articulated the message that we need to protect ourselves from climate migrants. And it’s not only the far right. The Social Democrats in Denmark have run xenophobic campaigns and passed aggressively racist policies against Muslim people in particular. Then, they turn around and say that they’re committed to taking on the climate crisis.

I don’t know how influential a far-right environmentalism will be in the United States. Strains of it are scary, but the far right and the Republican Party itself are already writing climate policy by militarizing borders and empowering agencies like ICE to come and rip people from their homes. Whether there’s a legal designation or not, those people are climate migrants if they are fleeing a drought or a natural disaster in Central America.

That passage discusses the US Climate Action Partnership, which got going just before the Obama administration and looked to pass cap-and-trade legislation. The United States dealt with acid rain through a cap-and-trade program through amendments to the Clean Air Act, and this was treated as a success story.

It became a model that could be used to take on any number of environmental challenges. Before Obama took office, there was a slew of bills from both Republicans and Democrats for carbon pricing, a lot of them around cap-and-trade. There seemed to be bipartisan energy around passing some sort of climate policy.

The Environmental Defense Fund convened the US Climate Action Partnership [USCAP], which brought together the likes of BP, ConocoPhillips, and other sort of big business types, with the theory that getting businesses on board for climate policy would unlock Republican support, allowing a bipartisan package to pass.

The coalition was undermined by the fact that the same corporations joining USCAP were also members of the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers. All of those organizations were fueling efforts to make sure that nothing would pass; they were running campaigns against the idea of cap-and-trade.

Exactly. It was a total win-win for them. On the one hand, they watered down anything coming out of Congress. And on the other hand, they turned around and made sure it wouldn’t pass.

Whatever happened, they were set up to win the day, combining corporate Janus-faced self-dealing with the Koch brothers energizing the Tea Party to fight back against climate policy. The climate policy died.

Part of the story is about the total ubiquity of fossil fuel money in politics and the power of the Koch brothers. But in 2009 or 2012, nobody who wasn’t deeply involved in those fights could explain to you what cap-and-trade is. In the midst of a recession, there’s no reason for anyone off the street to say that they want a cap-and-trade policy, or to articulate what that would do for them.

Focus from the green groups and Democrats pushing it didn’t convince anyone that it was a good idea. It opened up a huge opportunity for the Right to claim that this policy would raise gas prices and ruin the economy. There was no attempt to build a coalition around cap-and-trade, or even to make the case for why cap-and-trade is good.

As if something else had been workable. As if the alternative had ever borne any fruit. We haven’t seen technocratic climate measures work in this country, let alone carbon pricing. That’s not necessarily what Smith is talking about, but it’s an insane idea that after decades of Republican priming, you should go on offense against climate policy and write in a couple of line items for renewable energy.

That’s the big question. The Waxman-Markey bill wasn’t just cap-and-trade. It would have included a lot of spending, but it was also built to kneecap the authority of the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide. Even that attempt to degrade the US government’s most powerful tool to limit carbon emissions didn’t work. The carbon-intensive industries would fight it regardless, no matter how many sweeteners were built in for them.

Christopher Leonard’s book Kochland mentions that Koch Industries had people study the effects of Waxman-Markey before they decided to mount an aggressive campaign against it, and they actually found that they would make money off of it. They didn’t like that other industries would get a better deal out of it, and that their refinery business would be impacted. If the politics around climate change are going to be so intense, why try to negotiate with a party or with industries that have no interest in passing anything? Why go groveling to them?

BP has said for years that it supports a global carbon tax. Along with companies like Exxon Mobil and other oil majors, it went ballistic against a very modest carbon price in Washington state in 2018. A big lesson of my book is that anything, no matter how modest, no matter how tailor-made it is to please industry, is going to face wrath from industries whose entire business model is structured around digging up and burning more fossil fuels.

Three or four years ago, I would have said that any sort of statement from BlackRock or Wall Street touting a green initiative was plainly greenwashing. I think that is starting to change. There are arms of capital whose core business model is not fossil fuel; they see a profit to be made from green industrial policy. There is a lot of money to be made.

Increasingly in Europe, though not yet in the United States, investments are being put into green initiatives — for example, the idea that internal combustion engine vehicles are not long for this world, and that something will replace them. And if you’re a company like BlackRock, which represents the entire economy, why would you have an attachment to an industry that isn’t doing well?

Exactly. More and more, the commitment to a fossil fuel economy is not as central to capital writ large as it was fifteen years ago. There’s an agnosticism about what fuels the economy, which becomes an interesting question for socialists at the level of political strategy.

What arms of capital are the enemies in this fight; which can we abide? It’s helpful not to have the entirety of the capitalist class arrayed against climate action. But capitalism is a resilient system, and there’s no contradiction between a clean energy economy and extraction.

There’s a weird shift happening among capitalists on the climate crisis question. For a while, BlackRock had tried to market itself as a climate hero. In practice, it’s offered a few niche funds that are ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] or that have green characteristics — in addition to what makes them most of their money, which are big, passively managed funds that invest undiscerningly in the big index funds and won’t make any sort of exclusions for coal, oil, or gas. They’re entirely run by an algorithm. Both here and in Europe, climate activists have called this out as transparent greenwashing. BlackRock has come under a lot of pressure by people saying, “You are a massive stakeholder in some of the biggest fossil fuel companies on earth.”

Until this recent vote, BlackRock supported fossil fuel industry executives and their boards’ choices. Then it supported the activist shareholder push. I think this augurs well for the climate movement. It shows the climate movement’s strength in pushing the conversation so that shareholders at ExxonMobil feel compelled to push for something on the inside of the company. I am skeptical that it gets us very far.

It made them mad. In the medium to long term, the goal of green ExxonMobil is to invest more in renewables and to take an increasing stake in wind and solar power. Do we want ExxonMobil to be successful in the long run? I would say no. I’m a bit of an accelerationist when it comes to the fossil fuel industry. These shareholder pushes, which often have well-intentioned roots, are setting up the companies for more success in the long term.

I don’t think the goal should be to make ExxonMobil sustainable. At some level, that’s probably just impossible. Their entire business model is to dig up and burn as much oil and gas as possible. That’s not about to change. They’ve misled the public about the existence of climate change. They’re phenomenally bad actors who have their teeth in our political system in a way that degrades democracy.

The fossil fuel industry in the United States is very strange in that it’s dominated by private actors rather than state-run companies, the latter of which is the case in most major fossil fuel producers on earth. This public-private partnership has existed for as long as the fossil fuel industry has existed.

One of the big myths that the industry likes to tell about itself, and about things like the Shell Revolution after the last recession, is that they innovated new technology that makes it possible to access new oil and gas reserves, bring the United States energy independence, and create jobs. It’s a heroic tale about innovation.

In reality, it’s a creature of finance. The technology for fracking had been around for a long time before the shale revolution happened.

Wall Street’s ability to throw around a lot of money made the difference. That cash was greased by an enormous number of federal subsidies, which make oil and gas a very good deal. So it’s not true that the industry innovated its way toward a fracking renaissance, but that the US government picked a winner in the fossil fuel industry, and has been doing that for a very long time. The line that the industry likes to say is that it would be a betrayal of free-market principles if wind and solar were to receive generous subsidies. This ignores the enormous amount of subsidies that the fossil fuel industry gets.

It’s not a matter of directing new state support toward solar and wind and clean energy, electric vehicles, mass transit, or any of these things, but redirecting the enormous amount of state support that already flows into the companies that are killing us. The IMF has estimated that the fossil fuel industry collects something on the order of $5.1 trillion globally in subsidies. What would it look like to redirect the subsidies and funding that go into making those industries possible? They would not exist if it were not for state support.

COPs stands for Conference of Parties: those are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That process got its start most officially at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which set up a framework convention for world governments to discuss how to take on the climate crisis in a coordinated, multilateral way. For the first several years of its existence, it drove toward the Kyoto Protocol, which the Clinton administration signed onto.

This became the bête noire of one of the earlier climate-denying formations called the Global Climate Coalition, convened by the National Association of Manufacturers and a number of rankling think tanks that I’m sure listeners will recognize — like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute. All these groups fought US involvement in the Kyoto protocol, with a lot of funding from companies like ExxonMobil, and they succeeded in getting the United States to pull out. They undermined the agreement and forced the global community to think about a new framework for how to take on the climate crisis under the UN auspices.

From 1997, this framework depended upon including the United States and creating an agreement that would not need Senate approval, which was the crux of why the United States ended up pulling out of Kyoto. This created the Paris Agreement.

In the Kyoto Protocol, nearly all of the emissions reductions were set to come from wealthier industrialized countries like the United States. In the Paris Agreement framework, there’s a bottom-up structure in which every country on earth comes up with nationally determined contributions. They collectively compiled a plan to limit warming by two degrees Celsius.

The Paris Agreement has virtually no enforcement power. There are very few punishments. Compare that to the Energy Charter Treaty or the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, NAFTA 2.0, which protect the right of investors in companies to sue sovereign governments if they threaten profits. They can bring them before a court and say, “Your new climate rule is posing a threat to our coal plants. We will sue you for millions of dollars, and we will get that money in arbitration courts run by bodies like the International Chamber of Commerce.” There’s nothing like that to enforce climate rules.

The Paris Agreement is important. It’s good that there is a global agreement to deal with the climate crisis, and it’s depressing that it took about thirty years to get to that point.

Debates happening within the UN around climate change are similar to debates that have been happening in the UN for a very long time. The United States plays a big role in these conversations. It’s not the only country pushing this line, but regardless of what party is occupying the White House or who controls Congress, as George H. W. Bush summed up at the Rio Earth Summit, the American way of life is not up for negotiations.

There is a real commitment to making sure there is no conversation about historical responsibility — of which the United States shares an outsized responsibility. The countries that have contributed the least to climate change are feeling the worst impacts already, and have the least financial capacity to deal with it.

Yes, I agree that it’s bad news. That’s an understatement. There are so many parallels between the current vaccine apartheid and eco-apartheid, even down to individual countries not getting the vaccine as the United States hoards it. The phrase “common but differentiated responsibility,” which comes from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has historically meant that wealthy nations have an outsized responsibility and capacity to fund climate mitigation and adaptation efforts that make us all safer.

There is a collective responsibility to make sure that it is not a better option for countries that are electrifying to use coal power or to extract new oil reserves. We are all better off if developing countries do not lock in thirty to forty more years of coal-powered power plants.

It makes the US approach to climate diplomacy look unhinged. John Kerry globetrots around the world and browbeats other countries about using coal when the entire US economy was built on fossil fuels. It’s one thing to do that with a substantive commitment to making solar power accessible. In an alternate reality, the Biden administration is offering something like a Marshall Plan, but there’s nothing on offer. There’s little money on the table to make that happen.

The United States’ approach, shaming other countries for developing in the way that it has, makes no sense — but it’s also just bad politics. It’s impossible for other countries to make a transition to a clean energy economy if there isn’t global redistribution happening in one form or the other. As long as that conversation is kept off the table, as the United States has consistently fought for within the UNFCC in an attempt to obscure the meaning of “common but differentiated responsibility,” I don’t know how we get any further.

Todd Stern, who was Obama’s lead climate negotiator, is credited with the Paris Agreement; he had a hot-mic situation in 2012 in Durban, in which he said, “If equity’s in, we’re out.” That defines how we’re dealing with the vaccine, how we’re dealing with the climate crisis, and how we think about international finance. That has been the bipartisan approach to climate diplomacy: “If equity’s in, we’re out.”

We’re in an interesting spot. Because of movements, the national conversation on climate politics has managed to get very far, relative to where we were in the Obama administration. Big federal investment is on the table. Very expansive climate demands are discussed in the White House in a way that didn’t happen a decade ago.

But the Republican Party is not about to come to the table and pass anything called climate policy. I wish I had some magic ball to tell me what would make Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin vote for an expansive climate package. A lot of work can be done to make climate policy a good deal for West Virginia and Arizona. But it’s important to focus on real investment in communities that have historically relied on coal.

When it comes to movements and climate politics, there is a lot of work to be done over the next ten years. I don’t think we are going to get a resolution to that within an infrastructure package. It’s up to the movements to make the case that climate policy can improve lives, and to focus on building a winning coalition to make more climate policy possible. Advocacy like that for the PRO Act from DSA and unions can help do the type of work that the New Deal did, making structural changes to labor law. These make it possible to build working-class power in ways that can win elections and push popular demands for climate action. They can make it clear that wind and solar will be strongly unionized industries.

This is the work of the next decade of decarbonization: Win as much as possible in the short term, through an infrastructure package, reconciliation, or whatever form that ends up taking, and fight for it to be as big and expansive as it possibly can. It feels dirty to say, but Democrats need to win reelection in 2022 in order for climate policy to pass.

I don’t trust Democrats to win reelection without new ideas from the Left. Given the scale of work required for decarbonization and the sheer amount of policy needed to even start meeting this crisis at the speed and scale required, the route runs through taking state power. I don’t see a path toward that without strong movements or militant action in the streets as soon as possible — starting yesterday.