“Huber has written a ‘What Is To Be Done?’ for all of us who are vexed by the failure of progressive climate activism to produce a blueprint for a national action with clear strategic goals. In a blazing critique, he skewers ‘radical’ as well as liberal environmentalists who advocate market solutions to a crisis whose very cause is the cost-and-profit logic of energy markets. Equally he shows that the electoral road to a Green New Deal is a dead-end without a massive public struggle, integrally involving labor, for public ownership of the power industry. The shelves groan with books on the coming apocalypse, but here, at long last, is a concrete strategy for socialists.”

– Mike Davis

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’—it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve.

In this groundbreaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class are not capable of building a movement to face this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that will appeal to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working-class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we so need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early Twentieth Century, winning the climate struggle will require an internationalist approach based on a form of planetary working-class solidarity.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3973-climate-change-as-class-war