Whenever they strike, those coming crises will be chances to charge forward with our organizing. And when market crashes coincide with progressives and leftists holding state power, militant organizing proliferating, and millions marching in the streets, our leverage will be huge. Each win that cuts carbon and betters everyday life lays the groundwork for more. The premise of a radical Green New Deal is that we’re entering a new era for politics—a whole new terrain, material and imaginative, for deciding how to channel our collective energies. The future is coming at us fast—but we still have the chance to shape it. We have nothing to lose, and a planet to win.
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1 Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018, wir2018.wid.world; Lisa Dettling et al., “A Wealthless Recovery? Asset Ownership and the Uneven Recovery from the Great Recession,” FEDS Notes, federalreserve.gov.
2 Christopher Alessi, “US Expected to Produce Half of Global Oil and Gas Growth by 2025,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018.
3 Reed Hundt, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decision (Rosetta Books 2019).
4 Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming,” Harvard University, prepared for the symposium on the politics of America’s fight against global warming, 2013, scholars.org.
5 Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns,” New Yorker, October 3, 2010.
6 Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking 2018), p. 280.
7 Philip Bump, “4.4 million 2012 Obama voters stayed home in 2016 — more than a third of them black,” Washington Post, March 12, 2018.
8 Zach Beauchamp, “A Clinton-era Centrist Democrat Explains Why It’s Time to Give Democratic Socialists a Chance,” Vox, March 4, 2019.
9 Danielle Kurtzeblen, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline,” NPR, February 7, 2019.
10 For example, see Editorial Board, “Want a Green New Deal? Here’s a Better One,” Washington Post, February 4, 2019.
11 “Pelosi calls the Green New Deal ‘the green dream or whatever,’” The Week, February 7, 2019.
12 60 Minutes, CBS News, June 23, 2019.
13 Johan Rockström et al., “A Roadmap for Rapid Decarbonization,” Science, vol. 355, no. 6331, March 24, 2017.
14 Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” New Republic, August 15, 2016. Also see Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016).
15 Oxfam International, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2, 2015, oxfam.org.
16 Kevin Ummel, “Who Pollutes? A Household-Level Database of America’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint,” Center for Global Development, Working Paper 381, October 10, 2014, cgdev.org.
17 Kevin Anderson, “Response to the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report,” Manchester Policy Blogs, October 8, 2018, blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk.
Aluminum has a melting point of 1,220° Fahrenheit. If you aren’t a welder or a chemist, there’s no practical reason to know this. From beer kegs to the foil we wrap our leftovers in, aluminum is ubiquitous. But it’s one of the less charismatic elements on the periodic table, not a show-off like neon or cobalt or a celebrity like carbon.
More carbon in the atmosphere has helped make ten of the last fifteen years the hottest on record. Fourteen of the largest twenty wildfires in California history have occurred over the same period: less rain and higher temperatures create petri dishes for wildfires to spark. Climate change increases the variability in rain and temperature, and a wet winter one year can sprout vegetation that becomes kindling during a dry season the next. The Camp Fire, which leveled the town of Paradise, killed eighty-six people after sparks from a poorly maintained transmission line owned by mammoth California power provider PG&E met the surrounding brush.
Those trying to escape flames were surprised as their cars’ aluminum rims turned molten, splaying out onto the overheated pavement. Drivers who managed to flee on foot found that their shoes melted to the road as they ran. Rubber melts at 356° Fahrenheit. Many didn’t make it out. Flames burned so hot, one local official in Alameda County told the New York Times, that there was no DNA left on human remains; emergency response officials and cadaver dogs sorting through the ruins often found only unidentifiable bone fragments. “People have been cremated, for lack of a better term,” he said.1
Breaking the Chain
It’s rare to be able to name who caused climate impacts with confidence. We can’t blame any given weather event on a coal or oil company any more than we can pin a particular lung cancer death on a particular cigarette company, however often the deceased lit up Marlboro Reds. Yet just ninety greenhouse-gas-producing companies—almost all privately held or state-owned fossil fuel producers—have been responsible for two-thirds of planet-warming emissions since the dawn of the industrial age; half of those were released in the last thirty years.2 As state investigators in California found, a private utility squeezing out extra profits by neglecting maintenance of its power lines is responsible for the sparks igniting them. From extraction to delivery to lobbying, the fossil fuel industry and private utilities work hand-in-hand as the masters of an energy system dominated by shareholders and driven by all the wrong priorities.
To keep warming below 2° Celsius, about four-fifths of known fossil fuel reserves must not be dug up and burned. And yet companies’ valuation is premised on the expectation that everything they own will be sold and combusted. The fossil fuel industry’s business model, and hence their executives’
