Eco-activists Vandalise a Trump Golf Course

Several media outlets are reporting that a group of environmental activists did a massive nocturnal redecoration job on the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA. Under cover of night, a group of anonymous individuals snuck onto the $250 million course and carved the message,

“No More Tigers, No More Woods” in giant letters. They even took video of the whole thing for your viewing pleasure.

According to a statement from the group sent to the Washington Post they said, “In response to the president’s recent decision to gut our existing protection policies, direct action was conceived and executed on the green of his California golf course in the form of a simple message: NO MORE TIGERS. NO MORE WOODS.”

“Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” they went on to say. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right. We hope this sends a message to Trump and his corrupt administration that their actions will be met with action.”

Write up from Earth First.

Dutch Election - Wilders Falters, Labour Crash, Green Left Gain

The political establishment across Europe are celebrating yesterday’s Dutch general election result, where Gert Wilders' party, PVV, did not make the large gains that opinion polling have been suggesting. The turn-out, at 80%, was unusually large.

The PVV stood on an unambiguous platform of anti-EU, anti-Muslim immigration policies, and it was thought would follow the right wing popularist trend of Brexit and Trump in recent protest votes. Well done to the Dutch people for rejecting this type of divisive politics.

The high turnout and spread of votes amongst several parties, played a part in halting PVV's advance, but perhaps more significantly, the centre right VVD party, stole some of the anti-immigration rhetoric from PVV, and the public row with Turkey probably helped as well.

Echoes of the UK, where the Tories are playing the same game, and thereby gaining former UKIP voters with anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric. It is a widely held view that the rise of the National Front in the UK in the 1970’s was halted by the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, which was big on patriotism.

The Labour Party, PvdA, were the big losers, after participating in a coalition government with the centre right party VVD, with further echoes of the Lib Dems, this time, in the UK, and a continuing slide by social democrat parties in Europe that have embraced neo-liberalism. PvdA went from 38 seats to just 9.VVD won the most seats, with 33, down 8.

Smaller parties were the main gainers, with the Dutch GreenLeft Party (GroenLinks in Dutch) gaining 10 seats, going from 4 to 14. As the name suggests the party is a left wing environmental one, and describes itself as "green", "social" and "tolerant." Not explicitly ecosocialist, it is after all a reformist party, but certainly heading in an ecosocialist direction.

The result demonstrates that a Green Left party can take significant votes off social democratic parties, particularly in the bigger cities. GreenLeft topped the poll in Amsterdam.

A coalition government will have to be built between at least 4 parties, but GreenLeft have said all along that they will not participate in a right or centre right government. It would be wise to stick to that after what happened to the PvdA at this election.

This is an English translation of a statement by GreenLeft about yesterday’s Dutch general election. 

From their website GroenLinks:

Thank you for voting, thank you for your commitment to the campaign. We have shown along that ideals do matter in politics. We showed together that we can get the country moving. We have written history.

Together we form a great new movement, which connects green and leftist values together. A movement for change. We go on.

Join us so we can listen to you. We need you, to share concerns with each other. To exchange new ideas. To discuss how we proceed not only from The Hague, but also in the country to bring real change in the Netherlands.

Let's change the Netherlands together.

Congratulations to GroenLinks from Green Left in London.  

20th Century Socialism took the Eco out of Socialism

You could, no doubt, write a long book along the lines, and some have, that my headline suggests, but this a short blog post, so I can’t really go into huge detail here. It is a summary. However, I hope this blog stimulates some debate, and maybe encourages some to think about socialism differently.

There have been threads of socialist thought, and ecosocialist thought, going back hundreds if not thousands of years, but the concept really, self-consciously, began around the 1820s and 1830s. 

Around this time, of the industrial revolution, capitalism started to resemble the economic system we see today. The factory workers would soon realise their strength within the system, as well as their weakness, and a way of thinking about the way capitalism worked began to form out of necessity.

Later in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx emerged as the most important socialist thinker and writer, and his three volume work Capital, became the basis for much of what socialism stood for, and what it was against. In fact, it was mostly about what it was against, capitalism that is, in what was a brilliant and radical critique of how the system exploits those who only have their labour to sell.

Marx is a somewhat controversial figure for ecosocialists, with some thinking he was essentially a productivist, whilst others arguing that he was misinterpreted, and Marx was at heart ‘green.’ The American ecosocialist writer, James Bellamy-Foster, has developed an impressive thesis with the work he has done on identifying Marx’s theory of capitalism causing a ‘metabolic rift’ between humanity and nature. Taken from Marx’s volume 3 of Capital, and building on his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Bellamy-Foster says this is a "mature analysis of the alienation of nature."

Personally, I take the view that Marx’s thinking and writing was of its time and perhaps more crucially, it is incomplete. I can certainly see that Marx had a green side to him, and much of this is demonstrated in his volume 3 of Capital, where ecosocialists find encouragement.

Take this quote from the same volume of Capital which most ecosocialist will be familiar with, but maybe other socialists will not be:

“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”

The Russian revolution in 1917 made socialism flesh, and in the early days of the revolution, it had ecosocialist content, such as the conservation of land and the integration of production at sustainable levels. And Lenin introduced national parks to the country.

Arran Gare, in Soviet Environmentalism: The Path not Taken writing about Lenin says he ‘interpreted Marxism in such as way as to acknowledge the limitations of the environment, and of the existence of dynamics within nature with which humanity must accord.’

This concern with ecology did not last though, under pressure internally and externally from enemies of the revolution, understandably in many ways, socialism in Russia took a productivist path in competition with capitalism. The economic advances made in a relatively short time, from near feudal economy in 1917 to putting the first man in space by 1961, was impressive. But this all came at a cost, to the environment and in the lack of freedom and democracy, not forgetting the brutality of the regime too. It also sowed the seeds of the eventual demise of these societies.

Marx’s concept of a free association of producers, which is accepted in the anarchist political tradition also, which he explored in, yes, you guessed it, volume 3 of Capital, is completely absent from the 20^thcentury socialisms that came into being, led by Russia (USSR).

What Marx meant by this is a relationship among individuals where there is no state, social class or authority, and no private property of the means of production. This gives individuals the access to the means of production enabling them to freely associate, and produce their own conditions of existence and fulfill their individual and creative needs and desires.

The 20th century socialisms all relied on the Party-state as the active force directing the revolution. They used the centralised state to direct accumulation by political means rather than the economic incentives that capitalism uses for the same purpose. What has been called state capitalism was the result. It was not socialism, in the true meaning of the philosophy, which to be fair these states realised, but they saw it as a staging post along the way to socialism, when in fact it was the wrong pathway completely.

A pathway that led to ecological destruction on a scale that was even worse than that of capitalist nations, as well as being rigid and authoritarian.

Ecosocialism is an attempt to return socialism to the right pathway, but this means going back to the beginning in terms of theory, there is no short cut. The ecosocialist revolution, if it comes, will not only come from the bottom up, rather than be directed from above, it will need to stay grounded at the bottom, to refresh and democratise the revolution as it proceeds. No vanguard party, no Party-state. A democratic, decentralised socialism with ecological rationality.

 

This is what ecosocialism is, and what socialism should have always been.

Grim news for the success of recycling in England

Guest post by Dr Aidan Bell, director of EnviroBuild, a supplier of sustainable landscaping and construction materials. Please note I am not endorsing this company, but find the post of interest.

For the first time since 2010, the percentage of household waste recycled in England has fallen. The overall drop, from 44.8% in 2013/14 to 43.9% in 2014/15, might seem small, but it’s a troubling statistic nonetheless.

None of this is to say that there aren’t areas that have improved, but as you can see in our map, there are very few areas shaded green and indicating an improvement in recycling. Despite the success stories, the inconsistency in the recycling rates of England’s various local councils raises questions regarding the wisdom of giving local council complete control over recycling measures that they currently have.

Worrying signs for the future

If the fall in recycling rates was the only negative statistic to have arisen in the last couple of months, you could perhaps wave it away. However, there is at least one other significant figure that suggests our issues with recycling are deeply ingrained. As the BBC discovered, the percentage of waste put forward but rejected for recycling has risen by 84% in the past five years. Does this suggest a lack of education from councils as to what can and can’t be recycled?

Some MPs do seem to be trying to carve a path through Brexit’s environmental uncertainty. A cross-party group has recently pushed for a new Environmental Protection Act to be passed before Brexit is completed, which would maintain the UK’s environmental targets and ensure that existing EU environment law doesn’t get eroded into nothingness in the years after the UK’s exit.

Glimpses of success

It is easy to be negative in light of the most recent statistics, but there are councils out there doing a good job, and education seems to be the reason why. Richmondshire District Council was the most improved local authority, and displays a prominent banner on its site informing people of new collection days.

Similarly, high-performing Colchester Borough Council displays a big advert for their Greener Living newsletter, which encourages locals to ‘reduce waste and get involved in your local community’.

When you compare examples like these to the worst performing councils, you see a lack of similar promotional material that would encourage residents to recycle. This, in essence, is the problem that England is facing at the moment: although there are areas performing well, the lack of consistency between local authorities means that benefits and success are unlikely to be emulated beyond the borders of individual councils.

The futility of local recycling schemes

There are over 300 different recycling schemes across the UK today. That’s over 300 different ways of promoting recycling, and over 300 different lists of what can and can’t be recycled. There are at least two major problems with this segmented approach.

The lessons learned by successful local authorities are not being shared with others. On a national scale, it doesn’t matter if Richmondshire has an effective way of advertising changes to recycling collection, or if Colchester has a greener living newsletter that helps their residents live in a more environmentally friendly way, because these ideas aren’t getting used more widely.

The other major problem is the lack of consistency in what is recycled. Different local councils work with different recycling companies, which means that what is and isn’t classed as recyclable waste changes. In a time of high geographical mobility and a bombardment of information from countless sources, it is inevitable that a lot of people will be confused about what they can recycle, leading some to not bother, and others to try and recycle waste that they can’t, which wastes time and money down the line.

Thinking towards a solution

One logical solution would be to coordinate recycling guidelines on a national scale, with a single scheme in place for the whole country. It would be much easier to gain publicity for changes to a nationwide scheme, and there would never be area-by- area confusion as to what can and can’t be recycled.

Of course, there are question marks over this approach as well. Existing infrastructure isn’t identical throughout the country.  There would need to be conversations with the businesses that actually recycle the waste to decide on an optimal process and to ensure the convergence of a system. Under a government determined to slash the budget more and more for environmental issues, it is unlikely that the resources would ever be invested into a unified recycling system.  There would also be pushback from councils who would likely feel suspicious of central control and implications on their budgets.

Another mechanism that has proved successful across Europe is the principle that the polluter pays.  Manufacturers and retailers have to pay towards packaging on products: the more packaging there is, the higher the fee.

There are various solutions available, but their implementation will require political will: technology alone takes too long to implement in a fragmented market that requires large capital investment and the security of long-term policy.

If there can ever be such thing as a definitive solution, it will have to run deeper than a unified environmental policy. It would require a national commitment to good environmental education in schools and further incentives to avoid landfill.

Climate Change and Eco-Socialism

Written by Jason O’ Neal and first published at Facts for Working People

Climate change is a fact of life in the twenty-first century. Our society’s dependence on fossil fuels to encourage more economic growth is directly contributing to the global warming crisis.  Climate models accounting for changes in surface air temperatures, ocean currents, land masses, and polar ice cover have forecast extreme weather events occurring on a more regular basis.  Organizations such as the Pentagon, the UN, NASA, and 90% of the world’s scientists forecast the end of life on Earth as we know it in the decades ahead unless things are changed.

For the past several decades, scientists and government policy makers have modeled possible solutions to the problem based on stabilizing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at 350 ppm, (parts per million) a level that is probably no longer feasible.  If CO2 concentrations within the atmosphere continue to increase, the ability of the planet to sustain the environment will diminish.  Possibly crashing the entire ecosystem.  How did we arrive at such a dangerous precipice? And, can we do anything about it?  Current debates are between market-based approaches of taxes on emissions or trading programs against stricter government regulation.  What is left out of this discussion on the economic front is how to rapidly reduce emissions and improve carbon sequestering capabilities, both natural and technological.  With the easiest path to 350 ppm by the year 2030 becoming an unrealistic expectation, where do we set the next target? And, how did climate science and our political and economic goals become so disconnected?  

The use of carbon-dense fossil fuels helped to industrialize America as productivity exploded and the economy expanded.  Two hundred years had passed since the transition from feudal labor relations to industrial labor relations created the Second Industrial Revolution.  Rural communities were realigned with workers migrating to urban areas where they were forced to sell their labor for income.  The emerging economy became one based on social relations and interactions that were held in place by commodities.  Like the arguments between early economists during the transition between mercantilism and capitalism, questions about who was best equipped to responsibly manage surpluses from the economic boom remained.  Because ‘capital’ needs to be free and allowed to work in a global economy, neoclassical economics became the preferred economic system in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century.  The downside of this heightened productivity was that it was based on energy from fossil fuels and the risks associated with climate change were an unknown threat at the time. 

However, economists were concerned with the availability of fossil fuels, as indicated by William Stanley Jevons in his book The Coal Question, published in 1865.  Jevons’ answer was to maximize the “effects at the margin” and to not be “concerned with the last piece” as coal mining was no longer a physical restraint, but an economic restraint based on a “difficult” adjustment to the costlier extraction process.  The material comfort of society was based on efficiency and access to resources, but what Jevons failed to realize was that efficiency accelerated the process of extraction and his concept of maximizing at the margin did not solve the question of depletion.  Again, the atmospheric effects of burning fossil fuels was not addressed, perhaps not even considered, as economists were focused on control of the production and distribution process.

The first pushback against neoclassical economics was from, John Maynard Keynes, a British economist.  Keynes stated that people with money to invest prefer to “sit-out” of the economy waiting for better returns on their investment, “parking cash” elsewhere and saving it for future opportunities.  A strict “monetarist” economy, based on a free and self-regulating market that could only be adjusted by supplies of money through interest rates, would not solve this problem.  Keynes advocated for direct government intervention through increased spending to stimulate the market.  This was a fundamental element to FDR’s New Deal during the Great Depression which allowed the U.S. government to redirect surpluses through taxation of those who were hording the money.

The successes of the New Deal and the increased production during World War II faced a new economic threat.  The Soviet Union and the United States emerged from the war as the two major economic powerhouses in the world.  With both sides arguing for national security and access to developing world markets, the Cold War became a chess game of foreign policy and economic stability.  The hard stance of anti-trust against monopolies taken by the U.S. during the early twentieth century began to change after World War II. 

The Chicago School of Economics took the lead on economic philosophy to counter the state-run socialism of the Soviet Union under Stalin.  The Chicago School’s interpretation of neoliberalism was not as critical of private control of the economy as much as it was with government control.  The 1960s witnessed the horizontal integration of energy companies as they began to control physical resources.  After the early 1970s access to petroleum fields would eventually determine currency pricing and demand as the dollar remained the world reserve.

Part of this shift was helped by Milton Friedman, an American economist and critic of Keynes.  Friedman attacked social programs which he claimed created a dependency on welfare and he argued that the private sector could perform better at providing services to the public.  Economic systems need to naturalize themselves and neoliberal free-market ideology created by conservative economists, like Friedman, limited economic policies to market reasoning.  This gained influence through the popularity of his book, Capitalism and Freedom, and Friedman became a well-known and integral part of the economic policies of the Reagan administration. 

Also, The Volker Fund, named after William Volker, assisted large corporations to spread capitalism as a global management system.  This Volker Fund controlled the structuring, curriculum and ideas that were vetted for the Chicago School during this time and it now functions as The Heritage Foundation, a think-tank promoting neoliberal economic policies.  Unfortunately, neoliberal economic growth models focus on “sustainable growth,” not “sustainable environment.”

A voice of reason not so popular at the time, was an American mathematician and economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.  A Romanian immigrant, Georgescu-Roegen argued for a return to biophysical thought as a foundation for economics.  Because resources have been treated as if they have no limits, his work with ecological economics was classified as outside of the normal parameters of economic policies.  Georgescu-Roegen argued that all production is based on materials and energy and that the earth’s natural resources were irreversibly downgraded when used in the economy.

These natural resources would eventually be depleted and the world economy would ultimately collapse.  Introducing thermodynamics into economics, although he was mistaken in some interpretations, Georgescu-Roegen was the inspiration for “de-growth” movements across the globe.  This forced many people to rethink neoclassical economics and its ties to “Promethean technologies” which helped to industrialize the process of food production and has resulted in more environmental degradation and deforestation to convert ancient forests into farmland.

Another ecological economist who was critical of neoclassical economics was Howard Odum.  He conducted his Silver Springs study to track energy inputs/outputs in a natural ecosystem.  Working on general systems theory, Odum also introduced the concept of “energy memory,” or Emergy, which is a measure of energy used in the past to form our environment today.  Because of the biophysical limits of the earth, Odum argued that “physical capital” will level off. 

His focus on Energy Return on Investment (EROI) showed how production growth is tied to energy efficiency, or outsourcing the energy consumption, and any step up the energy ladder (possibly using secondary sources which will become more energy expensive because they are based on a dwindling fossil fuel) could lead to irreversible climate change.  Odum advocated for an energy policy which offered a “prosperous way down” arguing that a complex adaptive living system must sustain itself.  Under current economic policies and development the addition of capital and labor has not reduced the use of energy; it has led to more energy consumption.  Increased infrastructure of the energy sector begins drawing more energy to produce and maintain itself. 

This results in an “infrastructure trap” where resources are exhausted with diminished returns on investment for maintaining the structures of society .  Odum criticized the economic philosophy of social structures built on a wave of cheap energy in the face of diminishing supplies from natural resources.  Although he was less enthusiastic of nuclear energy, because of costs associated with production and ecological degradation, Odum was not convinced that neoclassical economists placed our development on the right path.  We are now “constrained by the complexity of society.”

Today’s argument about climate change and how to best reach 350 ppm has become one hinged on atmospheric limits and trade-offs for interest rates by “discounting the future.”  The neoclassical economists’ favorite champion for intergenerational equity is William Nordhaus.  A Yale economist working on climate change models, Nordhaus’s most often cited model is DICE, an interpretation of climate change optimized for the economy while limiting the worst case scenarios for damage to the environment.  Nordhaus is still tethered to neoclassical economics and its “laissez-faire” attitude toward markets as the arbiter of climate change.  His position is that a social cost per ton of carbon should be discounted higher because future generations will have more money to combat climate change.  However, this limits the available options for structural change with every passing year as global temperatures are now exceeding forecasted predictions. 

Nordhaus’s opposition opinion is held by former chief economist at the World Bank, Nicholas Stern.  In his review he called for immediate and drastic measures to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.  Nordhaus was a harsh critic of the “Stern Review” and he claimed Stern went too far, possibly because Stern advocates for a world economy with the ability to regulate carbon emissions to encourage their reduction.  Stern linked climate change to neoclassical economics and called it humankind’s “greatest market failure.”  When models for their positions are compared to one another they take different approaches for reaching their target goals.  Nordhaus uses a higher discount rate to not upset investment in the hopes that future generations will solve the crisis, while Stern uses a lower rate which values the quality of life of future generations over profits.  Perhaps a reasonable compromise between the two would suffice, but it would be more beneficial to do as much as possible now. 

Marx identified the contradiction of a stationary state in capitalism—he said it could not exist.  If a stationary state is needed to “de-grow” the economy and reverse the effects of climate change, then perhaps capitalism must go away.  Currently, policies are drafted about “reality” based on what the “economy is telling us.”  These policies dominate our social and environmental life and they restrict our ability to see our existence without it.  Capitalism is based on growth and, as it stands, infinite growth is not possible.  Would the answer be to allow governments to produce and distribute resources in a sustainable way to prevent ecological degradation, species extinction, pollution, and climate change?  

Economic models explain the interactions of members of different societies and their relationships to one another in a system of exchanges.  A basic mechanical representation of capitalist economics in the United States would be a grandfather clock.  Like the clock telling the time of day, a phenomenon which would still exist without the clock, models of American capitalism attempt to describe what is happening within the economy.  The pendulum on the clock swings from side to side like a smooth and reliable business cycle responding to monetary policies or fiscal spending through government intervention.  However, just like the clock that was designed more than a century ago, the working gears on the inside of the economy need to be re calibrated.  Before mechanics can make the required changes they must decide what size gears to use, this is also the puzzle facing most economists when it comes to adjusting the economy to mitigate for climate change. 

Do we make small changes to facilitate continued growth hoping on a technological breakthrough, possibly at the expense of future generations?  Or, do we make drastic changes in our current lifestyle and consumption patterns to allow our civilization to arrive at a safe place in a distant future?  One thing is for sure.  Doing nothing will not fix the clock and, as each second ticks by, the time to act is running out.   

Unfortunately, all the different suggestions for how to combat climate change have one thing in common. They look for a solution within the boundaries of capitalism. But environmental catastrophe, nuclear war, starvation, global drought, these all threaten to destroy life on Earth as we know it and the harsh and brutal reality is that there is no solution to these crises on a capitalist basis.

All these economists and climate change people refuse to face this reality. Keynes, when he was faced with the inability of his economic theories to solve capitalist crisis, when he was faced with the inevitability of wars and catastrophe under capitalism, came up with the pathetic response: "In the long run we are all dead." This is an appropriate answer to all the economists and climate change people who are trying to find a solution on the basis of capitalism. In a recent article on this Blog we referred to the scientist Stephen Hawking who recently said that the human race would only have a future if it emigrated to another planet. Capitalism cannot solve the problems of society. The capitalist class is driving the human species and the planet down the road to disaster. This is the reality. So is there no hope?

A common expression that business likes to use these days is “thinking outside the box.” And this is what working people have to do if we want to solve the issue of climate change. Capitalism is one system of social organization but there is an alternative system and that is democratic socialism. And there is an alternative social power that can bring about that system and that is the working class, the vast majority of people on the planet.

This system would be based on democratically elected workers and poor peoples councils that would be linked together worldwide. Through their democratic integrated structure the wealth and resources of society can be taken out of the private hands of the capitalist class. On this basis, and with the help of today's new technology and communications systems which exist as never before, the working class would be able to draw up a democratic sustainable economic world plan of production, distribution and exchange.  The working class internationally represented in their councils would have available to them the knowledge and resources that humanity possesses.

We rarely think of it but why do factories have to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week all year long?  Think of the energy this requires. The only thing that halts that process is when recessions or slumps occur and production is halted by the capitalists themselves in the interest of profits. Under a democratic socialist system, the drive to produce would be based on social need, not profits. The working class would not draw up a plan that would destroy the planet’s environment and our own futures.  This democratic plan could be broken down industry by industry, sector by sector, workplace by workplace, even worker by worker. On this basis every worker would be able to know what work they had to do to meet the plan.

The building of 2400 square feet homes for two people would be curtailed. Mass transit, rationally planned housing and the way we construct society would be entirely different.  This in turn would allow people to be at one with their labor, would end the alienation of people from their labor. And flowing from this, as production increased and met the needs of society, the working week could be reduced and the human species could move forward into a new world.

Capitalism is wasteful and inefficient because profit is the prime mover. There are more than sufficient solar, tidal, wind and other natural resources to provide energy for the world without using destructive fossil fuels.

This is the alternative to the threatening catastrophe of capitalism and only the working class can make it possible. As Marx pointed out, “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.” The economists and climatologists who tinker at their computers to try and solve the environmental crisis under capitalism are never going to be able to succeed. Capitalism cannot solve the crisis of climate change. Not only that. They are doing harm to the entire discussion of climate change because by their refusal to stand up and say the crisis of climate change cannot be resolved under capitalism, they are maintaining illusions that it can. They are maintaining illusions in capitalism and the capitalist class. They are refusing to assist the working class to see that it and only it can save life on the planet as we know it. 

Jason O'Neil was Founding Member Green Party, UC Berkeley

As the Climate Melts, Democracy Must Be Rescued and Transformed; Capitalism Can’t Be

Written by Stan Cox and first published at Green Social Thought

Both capitalism and electoral democracy impede effective climate action. But while we have to defend and transform democracy, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with either global climate mitigation or social and economic justice.

Donald Trump plans to dismantle America’s already weak climate policy, potentially dooming not only this country but the entire world to runaway greenhouse warming. The day after Election Day 2016, star climate scientist Michael Mann was already saying he feared that it was “game over” for the Earth's climate.

But at the same time Trump is taking a blowtorch to climate action, he and his allies in Washington are taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. So what do we do when we face two simultaneous emergencies: a slide toward fascism and a descent into a greenhouse climate gone haywire?

Writing recently in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster argued that given the threat we face, the necessary ecological-social revolution will have to be carried out in two stages, and that “The first would involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled after the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s Popular Front would need to be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel-financial complex and its avid right-wing supporters.” But then, “the ecological revolution will have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have to assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all . . .”

The struggle must be taken to every front. Many continue to see the immediate struggle for civil and human rights and against fascism, racism, and economic exploitation as having top priority, given the all-out assault coming down from Washington, many state capitals, and law enforcement. Others continue to argue that we have to lead with an all-consuming effort to eliminate greenhouse emissions and ecosystem destruction if we are even to have a chance at keeping the Earth livable.

Then there are those, including those of us at Green Social Thought, who have long insisted that the two struggles be given joint top priority, because if we succeed in either one but not the other, catastrophe is unavoidable. And importantly, there is no contradiction between the two struggles; in fact, they energize each other.

Capitalism: can’t live with it, might live without it

The dramatic swerve down the road to fascism in the United States, Europe, and Russia has further hobbled our chances of prevailing in today’s struggle for democracy, humanity, and the Earth. I say “further” because the odds were stacked against us long before 2016. The chief threat was then, and still is, capitalism. A well-functioning capitalist economy depends on maintaining large, competing pools of vulnerable labor and on the continuously increasing throughput of energy and resources that feeds the climate emergency.

A few months before America’s political sinkhole opened up, Paul Cox and I put it this way in our book How the World Breaks: “From the point of view of those with vast wealth at stake, the cure for climate catastrophe—deep, ongoing restraint in production and consumption to limit greenhouse gas emissions—would be far more devastating than the worst earthquake, flood, or hurricane.” The same applies to a realignment of economic power in favor of today’s beleaguered majority.

In an article published by Nature Climate Change just fifty days after the US presidential election, two scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that if America does nothing to cut greenhouse emissions for the next four years, it is still possible that the Earth can avoid runaway warming, but only if we do launch drastic actions immediately after that hiatus, and only if the rest of the world ignores our slacker example and starts meeting its climate obligations immediately. That means our chances of maintaining a livable planet are clearly very slim. But they're not zero.

Also in December, Yale economist William Nordhaus published a paper in which he metamorphoses before our eyes from one of the world’s foremost climate optimists into a deep pessimist. Having updated his world economy/climate model with assumptions reflecting the new climatic reality, Nordhaus found that an “optimized” economy (one that, through cost-benefit analysis, carefully balances greenhouse emissions cuts with the need for economic growth) can now be expected to blow through the much-discussed 1.5-degree rise in world temperatures (a widely accepted threshold for global disaster) by 2030 and hit a cataclysmic 3.5 degrees by 2100. (Mann says we have already hit 1.5 degrees.)

More aggressive climate mitigation scenarios that could eliminate net greenhouse emissions by 2040 and keep the temperature rise down to a still-dangerous 2.5 degrees were characterized as “unrealistic” by Nordhaus. So in an eminent economist’s view, capitalism is incompatible even with climate strategies that would reduce emissions but still usher in runaway warming. (Economists would presumably view as worse than unrealistic a detailed, highly practical plan to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees that was modeled on the U.S. mobilization for World War II and published by The Climate Mobilization.)

Nordhaus’s conclusion is not the kind of thing climate optimists like to hear, especially now that they are under assault from retrograde climate deniers at the very top of the power structure. Back when technocrats were still in power, Paul and I characterized what we saw as optimists’ unrealistic view of climate catastrophe this way: “Disaster could be domesticated, soaked up by the economy, so we the people could all experience the event as something distant and manageable, canceled out on future balance sheets by its silver linings. . . . This type of optimism is, we believe, what we will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate change denial anymore.”

What we didn’t know back then was that from 2017 onward, we’re still going to have to worry about climate denial and many more dangers all at once. For years to come, as seas rise and landscapes shrivel, America could remain immobilized within the iron triangle of climate denial, climate optimism, and economic “realism.”

Democracy: might not live with it, can’t live without it

It has been obvious for more than four decades that we can have either capitalism or a livable planet but not both. We’ve known even longer that we can have either capitalism or economic and social justice but not both. For most of us, there’s no dilemma there; only for capitalists themselves does the need to preserve capitalism warrant ruining the Earth for human habitation or having the majority of our fellow human beings live in misery. But in coming years we will have to face a question that should terrify us all: have we reached the point at which we can we have either effective climate action or representative democracy but not both?

With every updated run of global climate models, it becomes clearer that only an immediate, steep decline in greenhouse emissions can give us even a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic warming. That will require a hard ceiling on fossil-fuel burning and other emission-generating activities, a ceiling that must be ratcheted down year by year. In a further tightening of the belt, a big slice of that declining resource budget will have to be set aside for building renewable energy generation capacity and other emission-reducing infrastructure. These moves will constitute a rationing of production.

Struck by this one-two punch—the ceiling on resource use and the diversion of much of what’s left into green conversion—the economy will see an inevitable decline in production of consumer goods and services.

Most of the past year’s proposals for a World War II-style climate mobilization are based on a comparison involving only the second punch, that is, a parallel between the walling-off of resources and human power for war production in the 1940s and the necessary walling-off of resources for renewable energy development now. The consequences of that wartime mobilization—most prominently, conversion from civilian to military production and rationing of consumer goods—were broadly accepted by an electorate that was facing an existential threat. American democracy rose to the occasion. Presumably, we could handle a green conversion of similar scale today, were it to be attempted.

The parallel between climate and World War II mobilizations breaks down, however, back on the first punch, with the immediate, steep decline in fossil-fuel use that is necessary to prevent climatic calamity. In the 1940s, by contrast, America had enough resources and pent-up industrial capacity to boost total production and achieve full employment and higher wages. For the sake of fairness, civilian consumption had to be limited by rationing, and there were shortages of some imported items, but people knew that those conditions were temporary, and consumption soared once the war ended.

Now imagine an America of the 2020s that is weighing whether, better late than never, to declare a climate emergency that includes the necessary steep decline in emissions, production, and material consumption. If that succeeds, it will mean that (1) a majority of politicians have turned their backs on Big Business and have committed to severe limits on resource use and (2) American voters are willing to support them in that effort.

But in a society designed so that its basic working parts are individuals, each acting to their personal benefit, a candidate doesn’t get into office by telling voters what is essential for the common good.

You get in by promising voters that they will be harmed personally if your opponent wins but that each voter will benefit personally if you are elected.

So if you’re a candidate wanting effective climate action, you might declare in a stump speech, “If you folks elect my opponent, the consequences will be terrible. Within a couple of decades, millions of people around the world will have lost their homes to flooding, and others will be going hungry because of crop failures.” So far, so good. Voters may think to themselves, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to see that.”

But then you continue: “On the other hand, if you elect me, there will be a much narrower range of goods available to you, and you will be buying a lot less. You will have a smaller house and will be tightly limited in how much you can drive and fly, and you can forget about that new boat. Don’t worry; the government will ensure that you have access to sufficient food, basic goods, a cleaner, healthier world, and your Constitutional rights, but a large share of the nation’s resources will have to go toward building up our renewable energy capacity and reworking our infrastructure—not into the consumer economy. And we’ll never go back to today’s levels of production and consumption.” At that point, you might as well step from behind the lectern, turn around, bend over, and moon the audience. You’re sunk.    

Given that, given our history, and especially considering our recent experience, getting American voters to approve sweeping climate policies is a hard thing to imagine. That has led some (including me at times) to wonder if saving the climate is even possible in our electoral system. But we simply cannot afford to indulge in that sort of speculation. We have no choice but to reject and condemn any calls to jettison our democratic institutions, however inadequate they are. On the contrary; we must first defend democracy against the current authoritarian onslaught and then set about transfoming it.  

Both our form of government and our economic system are throwing hurdles up between us and climate action, but while we can work to improve and transform politics, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with global climate mitigation and justice. We have to use what’s left of our democracy (inside and especially outside of electoral politics) to simultaneously fight the fascism that threatens humanity and the capitalism that threatens the Earth as a whole.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is an editor of Green Social Thought and author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing. Write to him at cox(at)howtheworldbreaks.com.