It has long been clear that an important minority of the leaders of corporations and governments have been desperate to defend fossil fuels. What has changed since about 2020 is that a large proportion of the people in the ruling classes of the world have now concluded that climate change is a done deal.
They are now acting as if there is really nothing that can be done. We will have to start working out how to cope with what we cannot stop. This is now the consensus at the top of society.
Genocide
The climate movement finds itself at an impasse. We are face to face with the question – how can we stop climate change if the leaders of the world will not do it?
Two things make that question more acute. The first is the rise to power of the racist far right across the world. That far right is also sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and deeply opposed to any action on climate change.
On top of this there is Gaza, mesmerizing in the endless cruelty we see day after day, the images on the phones we carry in our pockets.
It’s the impunity that is so undermining, the fact that not only the United States and most of the governments of Europe are allowing this, but so too are the governments of the Arab world. Russia and China are effectively silent.
The genocide is Gaza has raised the bar for cruelty everywhere. Gaza is, among other things, the largest refugee camp in the world. And racism everywhere is encouraged, for a genocide is a racist massacre. Now the walls are going up all over the world.
Existential
Pakistan, for instance, has already deported 800,000 refugees to Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. The Iranian government has begun the deportation of what they say will be another two million Afghan refugees. The world does not notice. This now seems normal.
The determination of the oil states, the strength of the far right and the increasing public massacre and cruelty bear down heavily on people’s appetite for climate politics. We can feel small and helpless and bewildered.
And we can also feel that these are existential, life and death, fights right now, right here, right in front of us, which we cannot dodge, and which require all the strength and courage we can force ourselves to muster.
And so we accept that climate will have to wait. The only problem with waiting is that climate too is an existential fight.
One more change since 2021 – is something that Covid has taught us. We learned then that ‘natural’ disasters can have an enormous economic impact.
Alternative
We have long known that climate change will lead to droughts, famines, wars and floods of refugees. Now we also have to be aware of the cascading economic consequences.
A storm that wiped out much property in New York or Shanghai would have a rippling financial effect across the world. Rainfall changes that lower crop yields will drive up food prices in much of the world.
A general switch to electric cars is likely to crater the price of oil, with disastrous consequences for many Middle Eastern states, Nigeria and Russia. And there will be many more consequences we have not thought through yet.
What’s the alternative? My book – which is today being translated into Greek – argues for ‘climate jobs’.
Housing
This is an idea that comes from the trade unions in many countries. It starts with the fact that humanity has left action so long that we now have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by as close to 100 per cent as we can manage. In a few paragraphs, the argument of the book is as follows:
To cut emissions to near zero we will have to cut almost all CO2 and methane emissions from fossil fuels.
We have to ban all CFC gases used for cooling and refrigeration. We have to plant trees all over the tropical and temperate regions of the world. Taken together, those measures will reduce almost 90 per cent of emissions.
The most difficult reductions, for reasons I explain in the book, will be the last 10 per cent – the emissions from farming and food. But we can probably cut those by half.
We cannot stop fossil fuels without providing an alternative energy system. People will still need shelter, housing, transport, heating, food, water, health care, education and many of the products of industry.
Jobs
So we will have to cover the world with renewable energy – mostly sun and wind power. We have to use that energy to provide renewable electricity for everything we use if for now, for almost all transportation and heating, and for every process in industry.
We can do that in twenty years, maybe less, because the technology is improving all the time. And once we do that, we can ban all burning of fossil fuels.
Building an alternative energy world on that scale will be expensive. What that means is that there will an enormous number of jobs. This makes climate jobs different from the other messages of environmentalists.
Climate action is not about what ordinary people have to sacrifice. It’s about the jobs our people, our families, our neighbourhoods will get while we build a better world.
None of this will happen unless governments do it. Only governments can afford projects on this scale.
Movements
For complex technical reasons I explain, the enormous new grids we’ll need will have to be owned and managed by governments, not for profit.
And politically, we will have to guarantee all the workers in the old carbon jobs new secure jobs in the green economy. Governments can make that promise and keep it. Corporations can’t and won’t.
All of that’s a tall order politically. But it’s not just a good idea. It’s the only way we can halt climate change.
So that’s what has to be done – cover the world with climate jobs and ban fossil fuels. And that’s who can make it happen – the small farmers and working people of the world.
But now we need to get real about why that is not happening. The elites of the world have accepted that we will all have to live with climate change.
And in this impasse, the first reaction of most of the climate movement has been to splinter into many movements. Each of these movements talks about something else as more important than stopping fossil fuels.
CHANGING THE SUBJECT: OVERSHOOT
Among climate scientists, the splintering has taken the form of the idea of “overshoot”. In 2018 the scientists of the IPCC brought out an influential special report arguing that it was essential to hold the average global temperature increase since the year 1850 down to 1.5 degrees.
The old benchmark, 2 degrees, would allow too much damage, they said.
In 2024, six years later, the global average increase was actually 1.5 degrees. There may be cooler years to come, but almost everyone now working in the field believes the new normal will soon be over 1.5.
On present form, it is hard to believe that we will be able to stay under 2.0 degrees. It is technically possible, certainly, but it will clearly be a long struggle before we move seriously and globally to stop all CO2 emissions.
Models
This is appalling. Enter the idea of overshoot. Its proponents say that of course we are going to shoot past 1.5 degrees. Implicitly, the also admit that we will probably cross 2 degrees.
But they propose a possible fix. After we heat the world, we can build an enormous infrastructure to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground. And so it is OK to overshoot the mark and then clean the air.
This book goes into all the problems with carbon capture and storage. I won’t rehearse them here. But the key point for the moment is that overshoot is a trick, a deception, a lie based on magical thinking.
For the scientists of the world assembled collectively in the IPCC have not said openly that we will fail to do what they said we must do. Instead they have quietly folded the idea of overshoot into all of the more than forty major computer models of global climate.
They do not say they have done this. But now when you read anything scientific about the future of the climate, you are reading about ideas in which overshoot – the failure this time round – is assumed.
THE SPLINTERS: DEGROWTH
Then there is the movement of many environmentalists and leftists who see ‘degrowth’ as a necessity to halt climate change.
The debate about this tends to divide into sides. One side argues that the task of halting climate change is so great that we do not have the resources and the energy capacity to allow continued growth.
The other side argues that degrowth is a mistake because it is a policy that will never win the support of workers in the West, much less workers and small farmers in China, India, Africa and Latin America. And we cannot build a movement to halt climate change without their active support.
In this book I agree with the growth, Global South side. But now more and more I think that both sides miss the point. The arguments about growth and about CO2 emissions are arguments about different things.
The simple truth is that over the next twenty years we can replace all the fossil fuels with renewable energy and halt climate change. We cannot possibly reduce emissions by 95 per cent by cutting present average energy use by anything like that much.
THE SPLINTERS: ADAPTATION
Then there is another way many people look to doing something else instead of stopping emissions. This comes from a confusion about the difference between stopping emissions and coping with climate change.
The technical words for this difference are ‘mitigation’, which means cutting emissions, and ‘adaptation’, which means coping. But there is a general tendency now to think of coping with climate change as if it was also doing something about emissions. One form this confusion takes is to talk about ‘climate action.’
Climate action can mean, for example, programs to train farmers in water conservation. It can mean building new irrigation canals, or better flood defences, or food aid to countries threatened with famine from drought.
Resistance
All of these programs are absolutely necessary. Whether rich world NGOs are the right people to deliver them is another question. (Spoiler alert: No.) Still, all of these things absolutely need to be done, and funded. But none of them slow down climate change. No water conservation in the world is of any use to farmers who do not have water.
Until now the main political argument at the UN climate talks for the last several years has been about a global climate fund of $100 billion to help poorer countries cope with the effects of climate change.
A hundred billion dollars sounds like a lot of money to you and me, until you realize that global GDP is $90 trillion a year, 900 times as much. So we need far more money. But never forget that a fund to cope with climate change is not a program to stop climate change.
What we need is political movements, nationally and globally, that weave together resistance to the effects of climate change with political action to stop CO2 and methane emissions and halt climate change.
CHANGING THE SUBJECT: REVOLUTION
Then there’s what many people on the far left do. This starts with two ideas that make sense. One is that the whole crisis of the political, economic and energy system is caused by capitalism. The other is that it will take an economic and social revolution to force governments to save the planet. That idea looks more sensible every day.
But here comes the hitch. The left says it will take a revolution to change the system. The great majority of people listening don’t believe that revolution is possible. So the lesson they take away is we can’t stop climate change.
Back to square one. In the process, much of the left stop talking about getting rid of emissions. The point of the project becomes creating revolutionaries.
This problem reflects a mistake about how people have made revolutions in the past. People changed the world because they had to in order to get what they desperately needed – freedom, land, bread, peace.
And in the process of fighting for those things, they came to understand it would take a revolution to get those things.
The problem is not that the far left want a revolution. Just like it’s not that some people want to help other people cope with climate change. It’s that right now these other things have become alternatives to fighting for renewable energy to stop carbon emissions.
THE SPLINTERS: SOMETHING ELSEISM
And then there are all the movements for something else that is not stopping emissions but still fills that climate space. There are so many examples.
There are the people who say that not eating red meat is the most important thing. It isn’t. The emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels have about 12 times the impact of eating meat.
There are the people who say that planting trees is the most important thing we can do. But fossil fuel emissions each year have about seven times the impact of deforestation.
There are people who don’t want electric cars to run on renewable energy because cars themselves are bad.
And there are so many more, like halting consumerism, stopping plastics, cleaning up rivers. Most of them are good things. But they are things that won’t stop climate change.
SO WHAT CAN WE DO?
So what can we do?
The enormous changes we are living through carry their own possibilities. The main ones are: First, most people know about climate change now, and everyone can know. Second, the solution is obvious. Third, the impacts of climate change grow more and more intense, and in the not too distant future the suffering will be immense. That unrelenting pressure will drive humans to want desperately to do something.
We live in a time of great upheaval, deep economic instability, wars and genocide. More and more, the political center cannot hold. The far right is making the running now, but everywhere, world-wide, there is resistance too.
Everything is possible, including endless horror. Still, we have no choice but to bet on humanity. Clear thinking will help. One thing to think clearly about is that we need a new understanding, right across the world, of the relationship between climate change and the peoples of the Global South
THE GLOBAL SOUTH
One of the distinctive things about this book is my argument for the key role of the Global South in the fight for a renewable world.
When the book first came out in 2021, the general consensus, especially on the left and among the NGOs, was that climate change was a problem caused by the rich countries of the Global North.
Most CO2 emissions came from the rich countries. It was a problem for the North and the rich to fix, while helping the poorer countries deal with the consequences.
I argued then that approach no longer fitted reality. By 2019 62 per cent of global emissions came from the Global South.
That proportion was increasing steadily and would soon pass two-thirds of emissions. If we have to cut global carbon emissions by almost 100%, we have to cut carbon emissions from the Global South by almost 100% too.
That is entirely possible. But the idea of cutting emissions from the Global South keeps getting tangled up with the idea of stopping growth. That will not work. We need a climate movement that shouts as loud as possible:
Intensity
“We want renewable electricity so every home is warmed and cooled and lighted. We want everyone to have a decent house. We want renewable electricity so everyone has cheap, fast transport.
“We want renewable electricity so every country has modern industry. And we want to cover the world with renewable energy to make poverty history.”
To build a movement that can win those things, we have to understand three more things.
First, the people of the Global South are more than 8o per cent of humanity.
Second, the impact of climate disasters will be much worse in the poorer and more agricultural countries. Very large numbers of people in the Global South will be increasingly desperate as the intensity of climate change increases.
Connected
Third, in the last century the great majority of fights for freedom from foreign rule, equality, socialism, trade unionism or enough food to eat have been in the Global South. The era of climate change will be no different.
For all these three reasons, people in the Global South will be the main participants in any successful fight over climate change. But people in Africa, Asia and Latin America will not be able to win the fight on their own.
Europe, South Korea, Japan and North America still produce more than a third of emissions. We are going to have to fight and win both North and South.
How can the two be connected?
I think of the floods in Pakistan that drove thirty million people from their homes and fields, and of the floods in Nigeria that did the same.
Disaster
I think a lot about a student union politician at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India who joined a march to Delhi of tens of thousands of farmers just before Covid. He reported that not one of the protesters’ demands mentioned climate change. But he said that every farmer he talked with mentioned the effects of climate change.
I think too of the young farmers I talked to in South Africa in 2017 who were in the third year of a drought that was destroying crops and animals across South Africa.
And I think of the people in New Orleans I interviewed three years after Katrina, who were so angry about what how they had been left to cope without help, and then the rich and the real estate men had moved in to fire all the teachers and drive out as many black and white workers as they could.
What all these situations, and almost all the other great climate disasters, have in common is that someone has to pay the price for climate change. After the disaster, people need help.
Demonstrations
They need new homes, new jobs or new land. But the rich and the governments do not want to pay those prices. So society grows more unequal, and globally the walls go up.
There is an alternative, every time. Every time this happens, everywhere, there is a possibility of a mass movement for fairness. This would be a fight against the existing government, and against the existing imbalances between poor and rich countries. And it would be on the streets and in the workplaces.
Faced with drought and famine, the climate movement in any one country could send students out through the villages, explaining about climate change. And they invite the afflicted farmers and the city people to come to the capital and to march on both the presidential palace and the American embassy, demanding help.
And at the same time, they ask for demonstrations by people in Washington, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai, demanding that their governments help, and that governments all over the world start massive green new deals.
We will not win all at once that way, and we will not win every time. But it is time we begin to keep our eyes on the prize.
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This Author
Jonathan Neale is the author of Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs and co-author with Nancy Lindisfarne of Why Men? A Global History of Violence and Inequality. He is currently writing a book on climate change in Afghanistan. You can contact Jonathan at [email protected].