to stop the carbon pollution that’s driving the climate emergency and to crush the companies erecting the greatest political obstacles to decarbonizing.
It’s easy to forget how simple this problem is when we navigate our own little energy landscapes. We can flick a switch without much thought for the long-dead creatures compacted into coal, oil, and gas, their unrecognizable carcasses exhumed by fossil fuel companies and shipped around the world to be incinerated, unleashing heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and threatening millions now living. Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions—or billions in the worst case scenarios—unleashing chaos and suffering on an unprecedented scale, all to pad a few corporate bottom lines.3
Yet for as long as it’s been in the public consciousness, climate change has masqueraded, like other environmental problems, as a fight without enemies—as the old Pogo cartoon mourns, with the titular character staring out at a field of litter, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Demand shapes supply, so we’re all a tiny bit complicit in fossil fuels’ toxic excavation. These companies and their products are ubiquitous. That we all use them has been a powerful defense for the companies profiting from them: energy executives spare no expense painting shareholder and public interest as one in the same. “Very few aspects of modern life aren’t touched in some way by natural gas and oil,” a shiny ad campaign from the American Petroleum Institute argues. “Thousands of products made from natural gas and oil make life healthier, safer, more comfortable and more enjoyable … They support creativity, help us manage our environment and think beyond ourselves.”4
The strategy has worked, shifting focus away from the obvious: the first step to preventing catastrophic climate breakdown is to keep the fossil fuels that cause it in the ground, as Indigenous-led fights against projects like the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines have argued.
Potentially trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel profits—stranded coal, oil, and gas assets—will have to go unrealized. The industry’s legendary profitability is far more fragile than it looks. The moment world powers make credible commitments to slash carbon emissions, the stock value of oil will crash, likely precipitating a global economic crisis if we don’t plan for it. We have met the enemy and he is a few hundred fabulously wealthy executives.
The inflated value of these companies is premised on a promise to kill. Prioritizing the lives of billions means seizing public control of the energy economy and assuring a just transition that improves people’s lives, with a special focus on assisting fossil industry workers and the frontline communities that have been hardest hit by extraction. For ethical and practical reasons, a just transition also requires naming and shaming our enemies, focusing the climate movement’s rage where it belongs: on fossil fuel CEOs and private utility executives.
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