John Bellamy Foster

 

We are seeing today what appear to be the beginnings of an ecological revolution, a new historical moment unlike any humanity has experienced.(1) Not only is the planet burning, but a revolutionary climate movement is rising up and is now on fire in response. Here is a brief chronology of the last year, focusing on climate actions in Europe and North America—though it should be stressed that the whole world is now objectively (and subjectively) on fire this time:

 

• August 2018: 15-year-old Greta Thunberg begins her school strike outside the Swedish Parliament.
• October 8, 2018: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC pointing to the need for “systems transitions…unprecedented in terms of scale.”(2)
• October 17, 2018: Extinction Rebellion activists occupy UK Greenpeace headquarters demanding the staging of mass civil disobedience to address the climate emergency.
• November 6, 2018: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat) is elected as a Congressional Representative on a platform that includes a Green New Deal.
• November 13, 2018: Members of the Sunrise Movement occupy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional office; newly elected Representative Ocasio-Cortez joins them.
• November 17, 2018: Extinction Rebellion activists block five bridges over the Thames in London.
• December 10, 2018: Sunrise Movement activists flood key Democratic Party Congressional offices demanding the creation of a Select Committee for a Green New Deal.
• December 19, 2018: Members of Congress in support of a Select Committee for a Green New Deal rises to forty.
• January 25, 2019: Thunberg tells World Economic Forum: “Our house is on fire.… I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
• February 7, 2019: Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey introduce the Green New Deal Resolution in Congress.
• March 15, 2019: Nearly 2,100 youth-led climate strikes occur in 125 countries with 1.6 million participating (100,000 in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal).(3)
• April 15–19, 2019: Extinction Rebellion shuts down large parts of central London.
• April 23, 2019: Speaking to both Houses of Parliament, Thunberg states: “Did you hear what I just said? Is my English okay? Is the microphone on? Because I am beginning to wonder.”(4)
• April 25, 2019: Extinction Rebellion protesters blockade the London Stock Exchange, gluing themselves across its entrances.
• May 1, 2019: UK Parliament declares a Climate Emergency shortly after similar declarations by Scotland and Wales.
• August 22, 2019: Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unveils the most comprehensive Green New Deal plan to date, proposing a public investment of $16.3 trillion over ten years.(5)
• September 12, 2019: The number of Congressional cosponsors of the Green New Deal Resolution reaches 107.
• September 20, 2019: Four million people join the global climate strike, staging more than 2,500 events in 150 countries. 1.4 million protest in Germany alone.(6)
• September 23, 2019: Thunberg tells the United Nations: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”(7)
• September 25, 2019: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere is released, indicating that many low-lying megacities and small islands, especially in tropical regions, will experience “extreme sea level events” every year by 2050.

 

The outpouring of climate change protests over the last year were largely in response to the IPCC’s October 2018 report, which declares that carbon dioxide emissions need to peak in 2020, drop by 45 percent by 2030, and reach zero net emissions by 2050 for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a catastrophic 1.5ºC increase in global average temperature.(8) Untold numbers of people have suddenly become aware that, in order to pull back from the edge of the cliff, it is necessary to initiate socioeconomic change on a scale commensurate with that of the Earth System crisis that humanity is facing. This has resulted in System Change Not Climate Change, the name of the leading US ecosocialist movement, becoming the mantra of the entire global grassroots climate movement.(9)

 

The meteoric rise of Thunberg and the student climate strike movement, the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Green New Deal, all within the brief span of a year, coupled with the actual protests and strikes of millions of climate change activists, the vast majority of them young, has meant a massive transformation of the environmental struggle in the advanced capitalist states. Virtually overnight, the struggle has shifted from its previous more generic climate action framework toward the more radical climate justice and ecosocialist wings of the movement. The climate action movement has been largely reformist, merely seeking to nudge business-as-usual in a climate-conscious direction. The 400,000-person climate march in New York in 2014, organised by the People’s Climate Movement, proceeded to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, a non-destination, rather than to the United Nations where climate negotiators were meeting, with the result that it had more the character of a parade than a protest.

 

In contrast, climate justice organisations such as Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement and the Climate Justice Alliance are known for their direct action. The new movement is younger, bolder, more diverse, and more revolutionary in its outlook. In the present struggle for the planet, there is a growing recognition that the social and ecological relations of production must be transformed. Only a transformation that is revolutionary in terms of scale and tempo can pull humanity out of the trap that capitalism has imposed. As Thunberg told the UN Climate Change Conference on December 15, 2018, “If the solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself.”(10)

 

The Green New Deal: Reform or Revolution?

 

What has made the struggle for an ecological revolution a seemingly unstoppable force in the last year is the rise of the Green New Deal, a program that represents the coalescence of the movement to arrest climate change with the struggle for economic and social justice, focusing on the effects on workers and frontline communities. However, the Green New Deal was not originally a radical-transformational strategy, but rather a moderate-reformist one. The phrase Green New Deal took hold in 2007 in a meeting between Colin Hines, former head of Greenpeace’s International Economics unit, and Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott. Faced with growing economic and environmental problems, Hines suggested a dose of Green Keynesian spending, labeling it a Green New Deal after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression in the United States. Elliott, Hines, and others, including British entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett, launched the UK Green New Deal Group later that year.(11)

 

The idea caught on quickly within environmental policy circles. Barack Obama was to advance a Green New Deal proposal in his 2008 campaign. However, he dropped the Green New Deal terminology along with what remained of its substance after the midterm elections in 2010. In September 2009, the UN Environment Programme issued a report entitled Global Green New Deal, consisting of a sustainable growth plan.

 

All of these proposals, introduced under the mantle of a Green New Deal, were top-down combinations of Green Keynesianism, ecomodernism and corporatist technocratic planning incorporating a marginal concern for promoting employment and eradicating poverty, while standing for a mildly reformist green capitalism. In this respect, the first Green New Deal proposals had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt’s First New Deal, from 1933 to 1935 in the United States, which was corporatist and heavily probusiness in character, than with the Second New Deal from 1935 to 1940, which was animated by the great revolt of industrial labor in the mid-late 1930s.(12)

 

In sharp contrast to these early corporatist proposals, the radical version of the Green New Deal that has gained traction in the last year in the United States has its historical inspiration in the great revolt from below in the Second New Deal. A key force in this metamorphosis was the Climate Justice Alliance that arose in 2013 through the coalescence of various primarily environmental justice organisations. The Climate Justice Alliance currently unites sixty-eight different frontline organisations, representing low-income communities and communities of color, engaged in immediate struggles for environmental justice and supporting a just transition.(13)

 

The Green New Deal first metamorphosed into a radical grassroots strategy during Jill Stein’s two successive Green Party presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016. The Green Party’s Green New Deal had four pillars: (1) An Economic Bill of Rights, including the right to employment, workers’ rights, the right to health care (Medicare for All), and the right to tuition-free, federally funded, higher education; (2) a Green Transition, promoting investment in small businesses, green research, and green jobs; (3) Real Financial Reform, including relieving homeowner and student debt, democratising monetary policy, breaking up financial corporations, ending government bailouts of banks, and regulating financial derivatives; and (4) a Functioning Democracy, revoking corporate personhood, incorporating a Voter’s Bill of Rights, repealing the Patriot Act, and cutting military spending by 50 percent.(14)

 

There can be no doubt about the radical (and anti-imperialist) nature of the Green Party’s original Green New Deal platform. Its designated halving of US military spending was the key to its plan to increase federal spending in other spheres. At the heart of the Green Party’s Green New Deal was thus an attack on the economic, financial, and military structure of the US empire, while focusing its economic policy proposals on a Green Transition that would provide up to twenty million new green jobs. The Green Transition part of the program was, ironically, the weakest component of the Green Party’s Green New Deal. The innovation of the Green Party, however, was to link vital environmental change to what it conceived as equally necessary social change.

 

But it was not until the radical Green New Deal burst forth in Congress in November 2018, spearheaded by the newly elected Congressional Representative Ocasio-Cortez following the midterm US elections, that it suddenly became a major factor in the US political landscape. Ocasio-Cortez had decided to run for office after joining the hard-fought indigenous-led protest aimed at blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota in 2016–17. In campaigning in New York’s 14th Congressional District (representing the Bronx and part of north-central Queens), she signed the Sunrise Movement’s No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, with the result that the Sunrise Movement canvassed for her, contributing to her surprise election victory against ten-term-incumbent Representative Joe Crowley.

 

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign drew much of its inspiration from Sanders’ self-described democratic socialist campaign for president in 2016 that led to the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which Ocasio-Cortez joined prior to her election. From the start, the people’s Green New Deal resolution thus took on what was in many ways an ecosocialist character.

 

In the fourteen-page Green New Deal Resolution presented by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey in February 2019, the reality of the climate emergency is laid out along with the extent of US responsibility. This is juxtaposed to “related crises” manifested in: the decline in life expectancy, wage stagnation, diminishing class mobility, soaring inequality, the racial divide in wealth and the gender earnings gap. The solution offered is a Green New Deal that would achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a “just transition,” creating “millions of good, high wage jobs” in the process of securing a sustainable environment. It is designed to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialised communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”

 

The Green New Deal Resolution is based on a “10-year national mobilisation.” In this period, the goal is to achieve “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Other measures include opposing “domestic or international monopolies”; supporting family farming; building a sustainable food system; establishing a zero-emission vehicle infrastructure; promoting public transit; investing in high-speed rail; ensuring the international exchange of climate-related technology; creating partnerships with frontline communities, labor unions, and worker cooperatives; providing job guarantees, training and higher education to the working population; ensuring high-quality, universal health care for the entire US population; and protecting public lands and waters.(15)

 

Unlike the Green Party’s New Deal, the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal Resolution as introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey does not directly oppose financial capital or US spending on the military and empire. Rather, its radical character is confined to linking a massive mobilisation to combat climate change to a just transition for frontline communities, including redistributive economic measures. And yet there is no doubt about the radical nature of the demands put forward, which if carried out fully would require a mass mobilisation of the entire society aimed at a vast transformation of US capital and the expropriation of the fossil fuel industry.

 

Sanders’ thirty-four-page Green New Deal plan goes still further. It requires 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 (amounting to a 71 percent reduction in US carbon emissions) and complete decarbonisation by 2050 at the latest. It sets out to accomplish all of this by devoting $16.3 trillion in public investment to the massive mobilisation of resources to displace fossil fuels; insisting on a just transition for both workers and frontline communities; declaring a climate change national emergency; and banning offshore drilling, fracking, and mountaintop removal coal mining. It would offer $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund to support necessary transformations in poor countries with the aim of helping reduce carbon emissions in less industrialised nations by 36 percent by 2030.

 

To ensure a just transition for workers, Sanders proposes “up to five years of a wage guarantee, job placement assistance, relocation assistance, health care, and a pension based on their previous salary,” along with housing assistance, to all workers displaced due to the switch away from fossil fuels. Workers will receive training for different career paths, including fully paid four-year college education. Health care cost would be covered by Medicare for All. The principles of environmental justice will be adhered to in order to protect frontline communities. Funding will be provided to impacted frontline communities, including the indigenous. Tribal sovereignty will be respected, with the Sanders plan including $1.12 billion offered for tribal land access and extension programs.

 

Funding would come from a number of sources including: (1) “massively raising taxes on corporate polluters’ and investors’ fossil fuel income and wealth” as well as “raising penalties on pollution from fossil fuel energy generation” by corporations; (2) eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; (3) cutting back on military spending directed at safeguarding global oil supplies; and (4) making corporations and the wealthy pay their “fair share.”(16)

 

Sanders’s Green New Deal is thus distinguished from Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s House Resolution in: (1) setting a definite timeline for greenhouse gas emission cuts (one far more ambitious for the United States, due to its unique responsibilities, than what is required by the world on average under the global carbon budget); (2) its direct confrontation with fossil capital; (3) explicitly basing its just transition on the needs of the working class as a whole, while focusing in particular on frontline communities; (4) specifying, like the earlier Green Party New Deal proposal, the creation of twenty million new jobs; (4) banning offshore drilling, fracking, and mountaintop removal coal mining; (5) confronting the role of the military in safeguarding the global fossil fuel economy; (6) stipulating $16.3 trillion in federal government expenditures on the Green New Deal over ten years; and (7) relying on taxes on polluting corporations to help fund the Green New Deal itself.(17) The Sanders plan, however, backs off from the Green Party’s bold proposal to halve military spending.

 

The peoples’ Green New Deal strategies now being advanced constitute what in socialist theory is called revolutionary reforms, that is, reforms that promise a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, and ecological power, and that point toward rather than away from the transition from capitalism to socialism. The scale of the changes envisaged are far greater, representing a more formidable threat to the power of capital, than those posed by the Second New Deal of the late 1930s.

 

As capital understood from the start, these changes would threaten the entire political-economic order, since once the population was mobilised for change, the entire metabolism of capitalist production would be challenged. Energy corporations, Klein writes, will “have to leave trillions of dollars’ worth of proven fossil fuel reserves [which they count as assets] in the ground.”(18) For the climate justice movement to take on fossil capital and the reigning capitalist system as a whole in this way requires social mobilisation and class struggle on an enormous scale, with the major transformations in production-energy to be introduced in a mere handful of years.

 

The Green New Deal proposals could spark a global revolutionary struggle for freedom and sustainability, since the changes contemplated go against the logic of capital itself and cannot be achieved without a mobilisation of the population as a whole on an emergency basis.

 

Still, there are lingering contradictions to the radical Green New Deal strategies themselves, related to their emphasis on economic growth and capital accumulation. The constraints imposed by the need to stabilise the climate are severe, requiring changes in the underlying structure of production. Nevertheless, all of the current Green New Deal proposals largely eschew any mention of direct conservation of resources or cuts in overall consumption—much less emergency measures like rationing as an equitable non-price-related means of reallocating society’s scarce resources (a fairly popular measure in the United States in the Second World War).42 None consider the full level of waste built into the current accumulation system and how that could be turned to ecological advantage. As Klein cautions, a Green New Deal plan would fail dismally both in protecting the planet and in carrying out a just transition if it were to take the path of “climate Keynesianism.”(19)

 

The IPCC and Mitigation Strategies

 

None of this is to deny that a tectonic shift appears to be underway. The radical Green New Deal strategies now being advocated threaten to blow apart the IPCC-led scientific-policy process with respect to what can and should be done to combat climate change. The IPCC’s approach to the social actions necessary to mitigate the climate emergency has been dictated in large part by the current political-economic hegemony. Hence, while the scale of climate change and its socioecological impacts are well captured by IPCC models and projections, the scale of the social change required to meet this challenge is systematically downgraded in the hundreds of mitigation models utilised by the IPCC. Magic bullets emanating from market-price interventions (such as carbon trading) and futuristic technology involving inventions that are not feasible on the necessary scale and that rely on negative emissions are resorted to instead.(20)

 

Most climate mitigation models incorporate bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology, which promotes growing plants (principally trees) on a massive scale to be burned to produce energy, while simultaneously capturing the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and somehow sequestering or storing it, as in geologic and ocean sequestration. If implemented, this would require a quantity of land equal to one or two Indias and an amount of freshwater approximating that which is currently used by world agriculture despite world water shortages.(21) Nor is the avid promotion of such purely mechanistic approaches an accident. It is deeply embedded in how these reports are constructed and the underlying capitalist order they serve.

 

Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom stresses that the reality is that current climate-scenario modeling and projections provided by the IPCC and incorporated into national plans are based on assumptions drawn from the general equilibrium analysis of neoclassical economics, building in notions of gradualist changes, based on the requirements of the profit system. Such stipulations in mitigation scenarios are meaningless in the context of the current climate emergency and dangerous in that they inhibit necessary action—so that nonexistent technology is seen as the only savior. Of the numerous models considered by the IPCC in its 2018 report, all require carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) or so-called negative emissions, mostly by technological means but also including afforestation.(22) The truth is that the whole mitigation approach within the IPCC, Anderson explains, has been an “accelerating failure,” guiding a process that is radically opposed to its projections, with the result that “annual CO2 emissions have increased by about 70% since 1990.” Since the effects of such emissions are cumulative and nonlinear, with all sorts of positive feedbacks, the “ongoing failure to mitigate emissions has pushed the challenge from a moderate change in the economic system to a revolutionary overhaul of the system. This is not an ideological position; it emerges directly from a scientific and mathematical interpretation of the Paris climate agreement.”(23)

 

A major virtue of the rise of radical or people’s Green New Deal strategies, therefore, is that they open up the realm of what is possible in accord with actual necessity, raising the question of transformative change as the only basis of human-civilisational survival.

 

Still, the fact remains that the attempt to construct a radical Green New Deal in a world still dominated by monopoly-finance capital will be constantly threatened by a tendency to revert to Green Keynesianism, where the promise of unlimited jobs, rapid economic growth, and higher consumption militate against any solution to the planetary ecological crisis.

 

The path toward ecological and social freedom requires abandoning a mode of production rooted in the exploitation of human labor and the expropriation of nature and peoples, leading to evermore frequent and severe economic and ecological crises. The overaccumulation of capital under the regime of monopoly-finance capital has made waste at every level integral to the preservation of the system, creating a society in which what is rational for capital is irrational for the world’s people and the earth.(24) This has led to the wasting away of human lives on unnecessary labor spent on producing useless commodities, requiring the squandering of the world’s natural-material resources. Conversely, the extent of this profligate waste of human production and wealth, and of the earth itself, is a measure of the enormous potential that exists today for expanding human freedom and fulfilling individual and collective needs while securing a sustainable environment.(25)

 

In the current climate crisis, it is the imperialist countries at the center of the system that have produced the bulk of the carbon dioxide emissions now concentrated in the environment. It is these nations that still have the highest per capita emissions. These same states, moreover, monopolise the wealth and technology necessary to reduce global carbon emissions dramatically. It is therefore essential that the wealthy nations take on the larger burden for stabilising the world’s climate, reducing their carbon dioxide emissions at a rate of 10 percent or more a year.(26) It is the recognition of this responsibility on the part of rich nations, together with the underlying global necessity, that has led to the sudden rise of transformative movements like Extinction Rebellion.

 

Over the longer run, however, the main impetus for worldwide ecological transformation will come from the Global South where the planetary crisis is having its harshest effects—on top of an already imperialist world system and a growing gap between rich and poor countries as a whole. It is in the periphery of the capitalist world that the legacy of revolution is the strongest—and the deepest conceptions of how to carry out such needed change persist. This is especially evident in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, which have sought to revolutionise their societies despite the harsh attacks by the imperialist world system and in spite of their historic dependence (in the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia)—itself imposed by the hegemonic structures of the global economy—on energy extraction. In general, we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways that are equally ecological and economic.(27)

 

The role of China in all of this remains crucial and contradictory. It is one of the most polluted and resource-hungry countries in the world, while its carbon emissions are so massive as to themselves constitute a global-scale problem. Nevertheless, China has done more than any other country thus far to develop alternative-energy technologies geared to the creation of what is officially referred to as an ecological civilisation. Remarkably, it remains largely self-sufficient in food due to its system of agriculture, in which the land is social property and agricultural production is mainly reliant on small producers with remnants of collective-communal responsibility. What is clear is that the present and future choices of the Chinese state, and even more the Chinese people, with respect to the creation of an ecological civilisation are likely to be key in determining the long-term fate of the earth.(28)

 

Ecological revolution faces the enmity of the entire capitalist system. At a minimum it means going against the logic of capital. In its full development, it means transcending the system. Under these conditions, the reactionary response of the capitalist class backed by its rearguard on the far right will be regressive, destructive, and unrestrained. This can already be seen in the numerous attempts by Donald Trump’s administration to remove the very possibility of making the changes necessary to combat climate change (seemingly in order to burn the world’s ships behind it), beginning with its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and its acceleration of fossil fuel extraction. Ecological barbarism or ecofascism are palpable threats in the current global political context and are part of the reality with which any mass ecological revolt will need to contend. Only a genuine revolutionary, and not a reformist, struggle will be able to propel itself forward in these circumstances.

 

An Age of Transformational Change

 

It is commonplace in the social science literature, representing the reigning liberal ideology, to see society as simply constituted by the actions of the individuals that make it up. Other, more critical, thinkers sometimes see individuals as affecting society and society affecting individuals in a kind of back and forth motion.

 

In contrast to all of these mainstream, mostly liberal approaches, which leave little room for genuine social transformation, socialist theory sees individuals as historically born into and socialised in a given society (called mode of production), which sets the initial parameters of their existence. Caught in historical situations not of their choosing, human beings, acting both spontaneously and through organised social movements, reflecting class and other individual and collective identities, seek to alter the existing social structures, giving rise to critical historical moments consisting of radical breaks and revolutions, and new emergent realities. As Karl Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”(29)

 

Such a transformational model of social activity supports a theory of human self-emancipation in history. Existing social relations become fetters on general human development; but they also give rise to fundamental contradictions in the labour and production process—or what Marx called the social metabolism of humanity and nature—leading to a period of crisis and transformation, threatening the revolutionary overturning of the social relations of production, or the relations of class, property, and power. Today we are presented with such severe contradictions in the metabolism of nature and society and in the social relations of production, but in a manner for which there is no true historical precedent.

 

In the Anthropocene, the planetary ecological emergency overlaps with the overaccumulation of capital and an intensified imperialist expropriation, creating an epochal economic and ecological crisis.(30) It is the overaccumulation of capital that accelerates the global ecological crisis by propelling capital to find new ways to stimulate consumption to keep the profits flowing. The result is a state of planetary Armageddon, threatening not just socioeconomic stability, but the survival of human civilisation and the human species itself. The core explanation has been pointed out by many on the left: noting that Marx had written about capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the natural laws of life itself’, they point out that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital is eventually going to overwhelm the natural systems on which life depended.  And this is exactly what has happened in the period since the Second World War, through the great acceleration of economic activity, overconsumption on the part of the wealthy, and the resulting ecological destruction.

 

Capitalist society has long glorified the domination of nature. William James, the great pragmatist philosopher, famously referred in 1906 to “the moral equivalent of war.” Though it is seldom mentioned, James’s moral equivalent was a war on the earth, in which he proposed “to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature.”(31) Today, we have to reverse this and create a new, more revolutionary moral equivalent of war; one directed not at the enlisting of an army to conquer the earth, but directed at the self-mobilisation of the population to save the earth as a place of human habitation. This can only be accomplished through a struggle for ecological sustainability and substantive equality aimed at resurrecting the global commons. In the words of Thunberg speaking to the United Nations on September 23, 2019, “Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.” The world is on fire this time.

 

Notes

 

1. Here, revolution is viewed as a complex historical process, encompassing many actors and phases, sometimes nascent, sometimes developed, encompassing a fundamental challenging of the state, along with the property, productive, and class structure of society. On the concept of ecological revolution itself, see John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 11–35.
2. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5ºC (Geneva: IPCC, 2018).
3. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019), 1–7.
4. Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (London: Penguin, 2019), 61.
5. Bernie Sanders, “The Green New Deal,” April 22, 2019, available at http://berniesanders.com.
6. Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 20, 2019.
7. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech to UN Climate Action Summit,” NPR, September 23, 2019.
8. Nicholas Stern, “We Must Reduce Greenhous Gas Emissions to Net Zero or Face More Floods,” Guardian, October 7, 2018; “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech to UN Climate Action Summit.”
9. http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org. See also Martin Empson, ed., System Change Not Climate Change (London: Bookmarks, 2019).
10. Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, 16.
11. Green Party US, Green New Deal Timeline, available at http://gp.org; Green New Deal Policy Group, A Green New Deal (London: New Economics Foundation, 2008); Larry Elliott, “Climate Change Cannot Be Bargained With,” Guardian, October 29, 2007.
12. David Milton, The Politics of U.S. Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982).
13. Climate Justice Alliance, “History of the Climate Justice Alliance.”
14. Jill Stein, “Solutions for a Country in Trouble: The Four Pillars of the Green New Deal,” Green Pages, September 25, 2012.
15. Res. 109, “Recognising the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal.”
16. Sanders, “The Green New Deal.”
17. While the Green New Deal Resolution introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey does not address how it would be financed, the emphasis has been on the creation of public banks, green quantitative easing, and deficit financing under current low capacity utilisation—a view supported by modern monetary theory. It deliberately swerves away from funding by taxes on corporations.
18. Klein, On Fire, 261.
19. Klein, On Fire, 264.
20. Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, “The Trouble with Negative Emissions,” Science 354, no. 6309 (2016): 182–83; European Academies Science Advisory Council, Negative Emission Technologies: What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Targets, EASAC Policy Report 35 (Halle, Germany: German National Academy of Sciences, 2018).
21. See John Bellamy Foster, “Making War on the Planet,” Monthly Review 70, no. 4 (September 2018): 4–6.
22. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5ºC, 16, 96.
23. Kevin Anderson, “Debating the Bedrock of Climate-Change Mitigation Scenarios,” Nature, September 16, 2019
24. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
25. John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Review 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1–16; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 123–44.
26. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: Emission Scenarios for a New World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 20–44.
27. For a discussion of the current ecological situation in the Global South and its relation to imperialism, see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Anthropocene,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 70–88. On the concept of the environmental proletariat, see Bellamy Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 440–41.
28. The issue of China and ecology is complex. See John B. Cobb (in conversation with Andre Vltchek), China and Ecological Civilization (Jakarta: Badak Merah, 2019); David Schwartzman, “China and the Prospects for a Global Ecological Civilization,” Climate and Capitalism, September 17, 2019; Lau Kin Chi, “A Subaltern Perspective on China’s Ecological Crisis,” Monthly Review 70, no. 5 (October 2018): 45–57.
29. Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1963): 15.
30. See Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 175–91.
31.  William James, “Proposing the Moral Equivalent of War” (speech, Stanford University, 1906), available at Lapham’s Quarterly online.

(John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.)