The climate movement is at an impasse. It has notched up impressive achievements over the past years, mobilising hundreds of thousands of people in marches and protests, and building popular consciousness about the climate crisis. However, it is now clear that the obstacle to dealing with the climate crisis is not a lack of awareness, nor a lack of popular will — there is an abundance of both. The problem is that our governments are capitalist, and the climate crisis cannot be addressed within capitalism.
This may be difficult for some to come to terms with, but it is vital that we understand this reality and develop strategies accordingly; otherwise, we are heading for certain failure. And on this issue, failure is not an option. The key thing to understand is that the climate crisis — and the ecological crisis more broadly — is 100 percent a problem of the production system. It has everything to do with who controls output, what they produce, and how they use energy and resources.
Under capitalism, production is highly undemocratic. Of course, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect government leaders from time to time, even if we acknowledge that these systems are corrupt and inadequate. But when it comes to the economy, the system of production, not even a pretence of democracy, is allowed to enter. Production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big banks, the major corporations, and the one percent who own the majority of investible assets.
As for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or improve society, much less to achieve any ecological goals. The aim is to maximise and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is known as the ‘capitalist law of value’: capital only invests in producing what is profitable to capital. This poses several major problems when it comes to climate mitigation.
Capital Cannot Be Trusted
First, we must reduce fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy. For many years, economists told us that this transition would occur automatically once renewables became cheaper than fossil fuels. That happened in 2018. Today, renewables are roughly half the cost of fossil gas. But capital doesn’t care about prices. It cares about profits. Fossil fuels are around three times more profitable than renewables. This is because renewables have a low barrier to entry and are highly competitive (driving prices down), while fossil fuels are more conducive to market control and monopoly pricing. Capital, therefore, continues to produce fossil fuels and invests far too little in renewables, even while the world burns around us. We are hostage to this deadly logic.
We can see this calculus playing out in real time. Over the past two years, several major investment firms have abandoned their climate pledges, openly admitting that the green transition is not profitable enough for them. Spain offers another troubling example. The country has achieved a rapid increase in solar capacity in recent years, but as the price of solar energy declines — which is great news for citizens and the planet — profits are dwindling and private developers are slamming the brakes on new solar investments, threatening the government’s targets. This is likely to begin happening elsewhere, too.
This should be a clarifying moment for all of us: capital cannot be trusted to resolve the climate crisis. As long as capital controls investment and production, we are careening toward a very bleak future indeed. It’s also not only energy where this problem arises. The green transition requires many other investments: we need to expand public transport, insulate buildings, develop more efficient technologies, regenerate ecosystems, and implement ecological farming methods. These are essential to the transition, and they are simple to do, but capital does not invest in such activities because they are not sufficiently profitable. Under capitalism, we suffer critical shortages of existentially necessary things that could otherwise easily be delivered.
Furthermore, we know that to meet the Paris Agreement goals, high-income countries must reduce total energy use. Some of this can be achieved through efficiency improvements, yes — and we need more investment in this area. Yet it also requires scaling down damaging and unnecessary forms of production — not just fossil fuels, but also things like SUVs, private jets, mansions, fast fashion, industrial beef, advertising, and the practice of planned obsolescence. Scientists have made it clear that if we want to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonisation, this must be on the table.
This approach can have powerful benefits. Not only does it reduce energy use and make decarbonisation easier to achieve, it also liberates productive capacities — labour and factories — which can be remobilised to accelerate socially and ecologically necessary production. But, here too, we face a wall: capital will not voluntarily degrow profitable forms of production. And all of these things — the SUVs, the private jets, etc. — are highly profitable, so we are forced to keep producing them. Even if capital were willing to reduce unnecessary production, in our current system — where we lack any mechanism that could redirect labour toward socially-necessary activities — this would cause unemployment and social crisis, perpetuating the insecurities that already plague people under capitalism.
Leaning On Democracy
Our politicians like to say that climate is a complex problem and difficult to solve, but this is false. It is, in fact, extremely easy. We know exactly what to do, and we have more than enough productive capacity to do it. The problem is that we are subject to the capitalist law of value and thus prevented from taking the necessary steps. So, what is the antidote to capitalism? Economic democracy. We need to extend the principle of democracy into the realm of production, overcome the capitalist law of value, and organise labour around democratically ratified social and ecological objectives.
This can be achieved with straightforward policies. We need a public finance mechanism and an industrial policy to mobilise production of necessary things regardless of their relative profitability. In the energy sector, this also requires nationalisation. In Spain, for instance, their problem can be solved quite simply by establishing a national solar energy company and undertaking the necessary development directly, totally irrespective of profits. All countries should do this. Similar considerations apply to other climate-strategic sectors, like public transport. This is the key to rapid decarbonisation.
At the same time, a credit guidance framework can be implemented to reduce private investment in damaging industries that we need to scale down. When it comes to particularly large and powerful industries, such as the auto industry, this may require bringing companies under democratic public control to remove opposition and align output with national needs. More broadly, the democratisation of private firms —workplace democracy — can enable businesses to focus more on meeting social and ecological needs than on maximising profits.
A public job guarantee and public works are needed to remobilise our labour around climate objectives. There’s a lot of work required for this transition, and we cannot just wait around for capital to decide it is worth doing. A public job guarantee can enable anyone to train and participate in the most important collective projects of our generation — building public transit, greening the grid, regenerating ecosystems — with good wages and workplace democracy.
The good news is that these policies are highly popular and can form the basis of a winning political platform. Democratic socialism is a viable path — indeed, the only path — to a safe and just future. The climate movement has so far focused on building awareness and trying to push governments to take action. But a lack of knowledge is no longer the problem. Our politicians refuse to take action because they are aligned with the capitalist class and ultimately committed to capitalism. We need a new way forward: build new mass-based political parties that can unite workers and environmentalists in a shared project of transformation, win elections, take power, and deliver on the objectives everyone wants to achieve.