Ten years on, Donald Trump has waved aside decades of climate science as a “con job”, recently joining Saudi Arabia in sinking a landmark deal that would cut global shipping emissions. Meanwhile, Europe, bound by the knots of its own climate bureaucracy struggles to execute an ambitious industrial strategy. At COP30, Brussels will speak the language of leadership — but with diluted goals and waning momentum. Washington, turning inward as a newly unapologetic petrostate, may arrive only to heckle from the wings. The climate consensus is fracturing.

China will arrive in Belém with confidence — and control.Over the past decade it has built the world’s most complete clean-energy manufacturing base: it now produces well over 80% of global solar modules, leads the battery supply chain from raw materials to final assembly, and dominates the rare-earth mining and processing vital for EVs, wind turbines and electronics. Clean-energy projects around the world depend on components that pass through its industrial ecosystem. Put simply, Beijing controls the infrastructure of decarbonization.

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As the principal architect of the low-carbon era, China can build what others only promise — but at a price. For some, Beijing remains an indispensable partner in decarbonization, able to mobilize capital, equipment and contractors faster and cheaper than Western institutions. But others are more cynical, regarding China’s strategy as a new form of green colonialism. China’s ascent as the world’s system-builder inspires as much admiration as unease.

With its grip on global supply chains, China has de facto control over certification regimes, pricing structures, and emergent standards for green finance, all of which increasingly govern market access. The electric-vehicle sector offers a glimpse of what is to come: Chinese batteries and EVs may have higher life-cycle emissions than Japanese or Korean rivals, yet cost and scale have allowed Beijing to dictate the terms of competition. Falling emissions are reinforcing China’s claim that state direction delivers results.

But Beijing’s path to decarbonization is riddled with contradictions. China is both the world’s dirtiest industrial behemoth and its leading green architect. In 2024, China broke records for wind and solar installation even as it approved more coal plants than at any point over the last decade. Critics interpret this as “green-washing” or bad faith, but for Beijing, it’s “sequencing” — the belief that industrial might in strategic sectors must come before emission cuts.

It is a transition philosophy without precedent. “The path, method, pace and intensity… must be determined by ourselves,” Xi Jinping has insisted. What has followed is a multi-trillion-dollar experiment: China is attempting to reach its dual carbon goals — peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 — without dismantling the largest industrial base on Earth.

For Beijing, industrial strength is the foundation of geopolitical power. Commanding roughly 35% of global manufacturing, with projections of 45% by 2030, manufacturing is not something China is willing to trade for climate credibility. On the contrary: it believes the world’s low-carbon future can only be built by those who still know how to make it.

In Beijing’s view, whoever builds the clean-energy economy will write the rules of the next world order — just as the United States once did through oil, arms and the dollar. Decarbonization, by this logic, is statecraft, not climate stewardship. Domestically, it doubles as an insurance policy,  securing water, food, and energy on China’s terms before scarcity and climate shocks arrive. This strategy grants Beijing the mandate to plan decades ahead and mobilize entire sectors.

China can also pursue policies that would be unthinkable in pure market economies. While Western governments set climate targets and leave delivery to the market, Beijing intervenes directly. Strategy is directed from the top, and capital is treated not as a market outcome, but as an instrument of national power. Policy banks funnel cheap finance into strategic sectors often years before they are commercially viable. State-owned firms absorb early risk, allowing new technologies such as carbon-neutral steel and advanced battery chemistries to be trialed without needing to turn a profit. Once a technology shows promise, the state withdraws protection and unleashes a brutal survival-of-the-fittest competition: the strongest are rapidly scaled up, the rest are abandoned.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL) is a product of this system. A decade ago, China granted subsidies to dozens of battery startups before ruthlessly pruning the sector. Graveyards of failed EV startups now ring the outskirts of Hangzhou and Nanjing. CATL survived the cull, and was quickly scaled up into a “national champion”. Today, its dominance in battery technology anchors China’s lead in the global EV supply chain.

It is not tidy or efficient, but waste and failure are built into the system. Duplication builds capacity; missteps refine technology. Beijing doesn’t care about short-term profitability, instead incubating firms that will dominate the industries of the future.

Foreign expertise has also helped to accelerate industrial innovation. Tesla’s experience in China is a case in point. Lured into Shanghai with tax breaks, land grants and regulatory exemptions, it was welcomed not just as an investor but as a benchmark against which domestic firms would be forced to compete. Silicon Valley might have interpreted this move as market openness for Beijing, though, it was a controlled experiment in technological transfer. Within a year, nearly 90% of Tesla’s Shanghai-made components were sourced locally. The company thrived, but so did the rivals it helped train. Elon Musk laughed off BYD as a joke in 2011; by 2023, it was outselling him. China hosted the world’s most celebrated innovator to train its own, and then scaled beyond his reach.

This dual system — ruthless competition steered by state direction — has already delivered China’s overwhelming manufacturing dominance in solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Now Beijing is applying it to the dirtier, harder-to-abate sectors.

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Greening heavy industry is one of the toughest frontiers in climate action. Steel, cement and aluminum are responsible for a third of China’s emissions and more than half of global output. These sectors are the backbone of the modern economy — and they are almost entirely coal-dependent. Replacing that foundation is  technically daunting and financially risky;blast furnaces burning at over a thousand degrees cannot be wished away. Instead they must be carefully reengineered with new, low-carbon technologies. Those alternatives, including hydrogen-based steelmaking, carbon capture and low-carbon smelting, demand deep pools of capital and years of industrial trial and error. China’s system is built to keep funding the effort until one of them works.

Now, China has an opportunity to experiment with changes to production without disrupting growth. A prolonged slump in the property sector and population decline have lowered demand for carbon-intensive cement and steel, driving a fall in emissions. This slowdown affords Beijing breathing room to trial hydrogen and carbon capture technologies, all while embedding its own certification systems into supply chains.

The stakes are enormous: Beijing is betting that it can decarbonize the world’s largest industrial base and then export the model abroad. Success would not only yield clean factories, but would grant China the power to define what counts as “green” and thus shape the standards of global trade.

Beijing is seizing the opportunity to build a parallel economic order. Through carbon certificates, “zero-carbon” industrial parks, and an expanding taxonomy of green finance, it is embedding Chinese standards into global regulation and capital flows. These mechanisms are fast becoming the plumbing of 21st century commerce: converting carbon footprints into tradable data, and data into passports for goods and investment. In the coming decade, carbon content will likely become a default value — printed on everything from car batteries to shipping containers. Beijing wants to be the one writing the label.

The longer the United States and its allies delay a credible counteroffer, the more likely it becomes that the world’s low-carbon future will be wired, financed, and standardized in Beijing. Western policymakers increasingly recognize the scope of China’s industrial strategy — but their responses remain piecemeal and defensive: tariffs, tax credits, and talking points in place of coordinated vision. As COP30 convenes in Belém, that asymmetry is laid bare. All eyes are on China.

The scorners and the doomsayers, however, miss the soul of the matter — and also an opportunity.

Intentionally or not, tariffs appear to be making cheap imported stuff more expensive. At least, this is the consensus among the critics. The reciprocal tariff chart may have broken the commentariat with its crudeness as an expression of economic policy, but it had a certain rough elegance in terms of identifying stuff that’s too cheap and making it cost more. It has been weird to watch the resistance to this idea, since stemming the flood of made-for-landfill consumer goods has long been a popular talking point for the Leftists and environmentalists who oppose Trump.

It’s an article of faith for these people — and I’m one of them — that our limitless appetite for disposable consumer goods from China and the developing world shortchanges domestic workers, underwrites brutal labor regimes abroad, and is morally and environmentally reprehensible. A globalized food system is unsustainable and undesirable, and so on. It has been funny to see the about-face as we demand our low-cost Chinese goods and wintertime raspberries.

For example, Rue Saint Paul, a “sustainable collective” clothing boutique in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, near where I live, prides itself on sourcing its garments from brands with ethical labor standards. The “about us” section on the shop’s website claims that “guided by our sustainable values… our mission is to help reduce the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, promote ethical manufacturing, and drive responsible and circular consumption.”

Yet shortly after Liberation Day, Kelly Wang, the Rue Saint Paul owner, took to Instagram to lament the tariffs’ disastrous potential consequences for her business and to say, sarcastically: “But surely you can unwind decades old global supply chains in a week, new US factories will be opening tomorrow, millions of new jobs will be created instantaneously, prices of domestically made goods will be cheaper, and all of our paychecks will double. It will all be GREAT again.” Does Wang really think that the global supply chain is awesome, and that we should get everything we want “tomorrow” or “instantaneously,” or else it’s not worth it? The stance is at odds with the brand’s ethos.

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Wang did not return my calls by deadline, but she spoke to the website Gothamist to further explain the negative effects the tariffs would have on her business. Surprisingly for a sustainable boutique in the white-hot “shop-local” center of Brooklyn, 70% of Rue Saint Paul’s merchandise comes from abroad, including its best-selling item, a pair of “two-toned, color blocked” trousers made in China, that currently sell for $200 and will have to be priced at closer to $400 once Wang has to restock them at a higher price. (This is assuming that the Chinese manufacturers won’t eat the price difference, as Trump promises).

Rue Saint Paul offers meaningful and original sustainability initiatives — it allows shoppers to “rent” clothing for short periods of time, and it offers “buybacks” on its wares once you’re done with them. Yet like almost all high-end, ethical businesses, these values mask its promotion of a fundamentally unchanged consumerism. The obvious most-sustainable option would be for Brooklyn women — not a demographic with small wardrobes — to buy fewer pairs of color-blocked pants. Making them cost $400 instead of $200 doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.

This idea comes to mind frequently when reading about tariffs and the impossibility of manufacturing in America. The Smarter Scrubber grill brush guy explains his failed quest to entirely source and make a grill brush locally — he tried, and it can’t be done; we don’t have the manufacturing capacity for one of the parts. Elsewhere, a manufacturer explains that he can fabricate the plastic parts for his custom department-store coat hangers locally but can’t get the metal hooks.

One can’t help but think of the vast number of hangers and grill brushes already in existence, all destined for landfills due to the lack of secondary markets. We have enough grill brushes and hangers for 1,000 years, if only we could reuse the ones in existence. Second-hand dealers, incidentally, expect tariffs to be good for them. One such merchant I spoke with, Kevin Walla, co-owner with his father of A Perfect Piece consignment business in Manchester, Vermont, noted uncertainties about the market but was generally expecting an uptick in sales within a six- to 12-month timeframe. “From a green perspective,” he says “buying second hand means less carbon released from the production of new items.” During the 15-year run of his business, Walla has “consistently” seen greater supply of second-hand goods than demand for them. Imagine if that could change.

Sustainability advocates have often made the austerity argument when it comes to animal proteins: meat is resource-intensive, and to produce it ethically is expensive, so the price should reflect reality, and we should eat meat sparingly. Another endangered business mentioned in the Gothamist story is Aqua Best Seafood, which “services 80% of the Michelin-star restaurants in New York City” with items like salmon from Norway, branzino from Turkey, dorade from Greece and red snapper from Japan. Will Michelin diners still be able to get their imported fish at a good price post-tariff? Well, should they be able to?

A cookbook I like very much, One Pot, Pan, Planet, by Anna Jones, instructs its readers to “consider food miles” when making our purchases, and to consider eating fresh, seasonal foods mostly when they’re in season. Higher prices on imported luxury fish would probably turn such products into what they ought to be in the first place: a splurge and an indulgence.

There are many obvious objections to this line of thinking, including that it’s not really what Trump says he’s trying to do, and that the massive recession from less consumption would be so devastating that we’d regret we tried it, no matter what our values. There’s also the argument that higher prices unfairly affect people with lower incomes, who spend a greater proportion of their money on basic goods, and can least afford the increases.

To this, it seems essential to point out that a large share of the Walmart demographic voted for Trump, and has shown considerable loyalty to him. They might — might — be open to undergoing economic pain for a perceived good cause down the road. Low-income people are also the ones disproportionately affected by our addiction to cheap, ill-made goods — they’re the ones with the awful Amazon delivery and DoorDash jobs; they’re the ones who suffer most when the made-in-China backpack breaks the first week.

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The most reasonable consensus seems to be that the American “manufacturing jobs” the Trump voters long for won’t fix these problems — we’ll never beat the likes of China and Vietnam, and much of this labor will be done by robots now anyway. But it also might be true that Trump’s voters don’t really want “manufacturing jobs” in the sense that they have a burning need to mine coal or operate a robot arm. The term might stand in for stable, well-paid, meaningful work and goods that don’t suck. And these goals, actually, align with those of their cultural opponents. Surely this is an opportunity for significant reform of a universally hated system.

Katrina Caspelich, the CEO of Re/Make World, a nonprofit devoted to climate justice and fair pay in the clothing industry believes that tariffs will bring us further from these goals. She believes that large, fast-fashion brands — 100 billion new garments produced each year, most ending up in landfills within a few years — will be able to evade the tariffs by moving their production around quickly, and already-marginalized garment workers abroad will be the ones to bear the real costs. Small businesses like Wang’s, engaged in “thoughtful production and long-term supplier relationships,” won’t survive, Caspelich thinks, while fast fashion will.

Maybe, but Re/Make, among other initiatives, challenges its supporters to do a 90-day #NoNewClothes fast that will “reduce your carbon footprint,” “keep your money out of the pockets of exploitative companies,” and “limit waste you send to a landfill” — basically, just don’t shop for three months. Such initiatives are virtuous in theory, but obviously in practice haven’t changed consumer habits. Tariffs just might.

I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the British research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have produced reports that cautiously advocate the very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.

The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, the concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely thanks to the growing panic over climate change. And much of the interest in solar engineering stems from the fact that, unlike other climate mitigation policies, which require decades to yield any significant results, “SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years”, as the White House report claims, even to “the preindustrial level” according to “highly idealised modeling studies”.

That report followed on from a 2021 study by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), “Reflecting Sunlight”, which suggested that “the US should cautiously pursue solar geoengineering research to better understand options for responding to climate change risks”. Mark Symes, director of the UK’s research agency ARIA, agrees: “Through carefully-considered engineering solutions it may eventually be possible to actively and responsibly control the climate and weather at regional and global scale.” Earlier this year, more than 100 scientists signed an open letter calling on governments to increase research into solar geoengineering.

Scientists point to large historical volcanic eruptions — which result in massive quantities of sulfur dioxide and dust particles being spewed into the atmosphere — as examples of the effectiveness of “stratospheric aerosol injection”. They’re not wrong: the 1815 Tambora eruption cooled the Earth by 0.7°C and led to a “year without summer”; more recently, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in 1991, cooled the planet by about half a degree Celsius on average for many months. So, the idea goes, by spraying a certain amount of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, we could replicate the effects of a major eruption and cool the Earth. Problem solved?

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Not quite. All the reports acknowledge that there are serious risks associated with solar radiation modification, which could affect human health, biodiversity and geopolitics. That’s because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies and in fact lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. But despite such caveats, the very existence of these reports represents a huge opening of the Overton window when it comes to the issue of geoengineering. Indeed: “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component”, Shuchi Talati of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering crowed after the White House’s report.

In other words, what matters here isn’t so much the content of these reports — which rightly highlight the risks of such interventions, and the need to proceed with caution — but the mere fact that the issue is treated as a topic of legitimate debate, thus slowly getting the public accustomed to the concept. But even more worryingly, perhaps, now that the geoengineering genie is out of the bottle, can we really expect governments and institutions to keep it under control?

After all, we live in an era in which private and corporate power has largely unshackled itself from any forms of meaningful public control, when it hasn’t outright merged with the institutions of the state, subordinating the latter to its own logic. As a result, billionaires, philanthrocapitalists and investment funds arguably exercise a greater influence over society than most governments. And, of course, they love playing God — especially when it offers massive opportunities for profit. So perhaps it is no surprise that much of the pressure for solar engineering also comes from this rarefied community.

In a speech to the Munich Security Conference last year, George Soros endorsed using solar geoengineering to combat climate change. Jeff Bezos has partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the geoengineering non-profit SilverLining, closely tied to Silicon Valley venture capital, to help create models that show what would happen if we blocked out some of the sun’s rays. Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, is another major funder of SRM projects. And then there is, of course, the ever-lurking Bill Gates: in 2021, he backed a sun-dimming project by the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which aimed to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over Sweden to test its effects on sunlight scattering.

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The project, however, was strongly criticised by environmentalists and indigenous groups, with 30 groups of indigenous peoples from around the world calling upon Harvard University to abandon the Gates-backed plans to test its solar geoengineering tech. “We do not approve legitimising development towards solar geoengineering technology, nor for it to be conducted in or above our lands, territories and skies, nor in any ecosystems anywhere,” stated a letter from the Saami Council, which represents Saami people across Scandinavia and in Russia. In the end, the test was called off. But this didn’t stop the ominously named American start-up Make Sunsets, which focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection — “Cooling the planet one reflective cloud at the time”  — from carrying out several tests in the United States.

This means that sun-dimming experiments are already being conducted by private companies, with little or no oversight or regulation. And the edging of this technology into reality is part of a more general phenomenon in climate action: the emergence of a “climate power bloc” encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, certain climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists”. At this intersection of ideology, class and economic interests, extreme and ambitious ideas such as solar engineering find fertile ground. And they are primed to grow further into the popular consciousness — which has already been conditioned to think of climate change as an apocalyptic threat, and to therefore accept “do or die” solutions.

Activists and scientists have started to push back. We’ve already seen the successful prevention of the SCoPEx test. Then, last year, more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world published an open letter, since supported by more than 450 academics, calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering”. They emphasise the very serious risks: to human health, but also to the ecosystem itself, with precipitation patterns, vegetation and crop production all disrupted.

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The problem, as is often the case, is mission creep — the gradual broadening of the original objectives of a certain programme, often under the influence of technological path dependency. Once a technology comes into existence it tends to be used for the simple fact that it exists, especially if it has been normalised for the public. Hence the call for “research into solar engineering” is, wittingly or not, paving the ground for its future adoption. And its advocates have an existential climate discourse on their side. SRM lobbyists can always claim that the alternative is worse — if that alternative is planetary extinction. As Anote Tong, a former president of Kiribati, a low-lying Pacific island state menaced by rising sea levels, told the New Yorker last year: “It has to be either geoengineering or total destruction”.

In this sense, the debate over solar engineering is symptomatic of how we are interpreting climate change: as a utopian speculation created in response to the dystopia we increasingly see as our future. This logic is designed to spur humanity into action, to find answers to the climate crisis that avoid vicious socioeconomic costs — which is why some sceptics of radical decarbonisation are sympathetic to solar geoengineering. It’s also why climate change activists such as Greta Thunberg oppose it — because it would threaten commitments to decarbonisation. We should oppose this binary logic. We shouldn’t have to choose between radical decarbonisation and geoengineering: fuelled by an impetus towards climate doomerism, they are both dangerous in their own way.

The Conservatives have interpreted their win in Uxbridge as a response to Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), effectively a tax on those who drive cars judged to be over-polluting; Rishi Sunak instantly followed up this victory with the announcement of 100 new oil drilling licences in the North Sea. Last week, sensing the popular backlash building, he went further, pledging to reverse many of the UK’s net-zero policies.

Sunak’s exploitation of the net-zero backlash was typical of an emerging strategy on the Right. Climate-minded policymakers float or implement a policy that, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as harming the economy and working people. The policy then allows Right-wing forces to mobilise mass anger against what is construed as an elite conspiracy to make ordinary life more difficult and costly — and the Right reaps the electoral gains.

This conservative mobilisation of class inequality has held for even longer in America. In 1993, the newly elected Clinton Administration rallied around a policy that was all the rage in the environmental think-tank circuit — green taxes. Their language then still had an edge of neoliberal novelty: policymakers could solve the “market failure” by “internalising” the costs of pollution and “nudging” the market toward clean solutions.

Predictably, the policy failed to garner the necessary support in Congress and there was an outcry on the Right. One letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle captured the rage in a way the van-drivers of Uxbridge might now understand: “You will pay this tax every time you turn on your stove, run your refrigerator, iron your clothes, drive your car, water your lawn or flush your toilet. There is nothing that you do or any part of your life that will not ‘pay’ this tax.” Unsurprisingly, the Republicans rode a historic “red wave” in the 1994 midterm elections and gained control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.

Fifteen years later, President Barack Obama rode into office with a Democratic supermajority, a massive economic crisis, and radical calls for a “Green New Deal”. Instead, drawing from the same free-market environmentalism, he unveiled a complicated emissions trading programme called “cap and trade” (immediately labelled “Cap and Tax” by the Right), and helped spark the 2009-2010 Tea Party rebellion and his own party’s defeat in the 2010 midterms. By 2016, Right-wing opponents of climate action were actively claiming to be on the side of the working class. Billionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch declared himself to be “very concerned [about climate policies] because the poorest Americans use three times the energy as the percentage of their income as the average American does. This is going to disproportionately hurt the poor.” Charles Koch, man of the people.

A similar backlash is taking place across the world today: in France, Emmanuel Macron’s 2018 fuel tax incited mass revolt with the Yellow Vest movement, who contrasted liberal concern with the “end of the world” with their own struggle to pay their bills at the “end of the month”. This year, the German Green Party has suggested forcing households to purchase expensive heat pumps, only to see their popularity plummet and the rise of the AfD. Heavily Democratic states such as New York and California have floated banning gas stoves or internal combustion engines, encouraging a tide of populist ridicule.

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Why do these climate policy technocrats repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot? Because, at the heart of their thinking, there is a deeper moralism that won’t let political reality get in the way of their historic mission. Ultimately, such approaches might be dubbed “techno-behaviouralism” — insisting that the main challenge of climate change is to reform the immoral carbon practices of dispersed consumers throughout the upper, middle and working classes. Rather than tackling the problem of who owns and controls fossil-fuel based production (a relative minority of society), carbon behaviouralism aims its sights on the “irresponsible” choices of millions of consumers of all classes. It hopes to use policy tools to get them to drive less (or drive more efficient cars), insulate their homes, eat less meat, fly less. One notorious study in 2017 even went as far as to advise individuals to not have children.

The first phase of this policy outlook was to use the disciplining force of the market — particularly the price mechanism — to “nudge” consumers toward low-carbon choices. But now the severity of the climate crisis is forcing these technocrats to ratchet up their strategy to outright coercion: banning fossil-fuel boilers, gas stoves, internal combustion engines, or forcing farmers to rapidly implement costly practices. Rather than winning them over to an attractive political project, the masses must be reformed into more virtuous low-carbon practices. And even when the climate technocrats focus on society’s rampant class inequality, they only morally reprimand the lifestyles of the rich — their private jets, for example. They hardly ever consider how the rich make rather than spend their money: organising investment and for-profit production with likely far greater effects on the climate.

This has much less to do with the climate than with the ruling ideologies of a dying era — neoliberalism and technocracy. But environmentalism was not always morally fixated on the consumption of the masses. In the Sixties, the modern environmental movement emerged with a strong argument that our problems were rooted in forms of industrial production. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring railed against the chemical industry producing what she called “elixirs of death”. Tony Mazzocchi, a union leader and an organiser of the first Earth Day in 1970, saw that his fellow workers were the ones first exposed to harmful toxic pollution before it went into the community air and water. He also recognised that workers and unions had strategic leverage to force owners to reform these sites of production: “When you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast, right?”

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At this stage, it was pretty straightforward that environmentalism meant a form of “industrial policy”: implementing regulations that would force capitalist industry to install or replace polluting equipment in favour of cleaner alternatives. As such, policies such as the Clean Air and Water Acts had great success. But two political developments nipped this burgeoning movement in the bud. First, free-market reformers targeted both the regulatory and welfare state with the twin processes of fiscal austerity and regulatory reform. An emergent form of free-market environmentalism argued that even if industrial pollution control was successful, it was unduly burdensome, hindered global competitiveness, and, above all, was not “cost-effective”. Cap and trade, green taxes and green consumption all emerged as cheaper alternatives to the top-down environmental regulatory state. Why dictate what industry must do, when you can allow markets and prices to do the work indirectly?

Second, a new and inhuman form of environmentalism supplanted the earlier one. Certain thinkers of the post-war era — most prominently William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich — were comfortable asserting straightforward Malthusian explanations of environmental crisis. Ehrlich famously argued that a “population bomb” in the largely poor, developing world imperilled humanity. It soon became clear, however, that this crude Malthusianism focused too much on the poor, and ignored the outsized contribution of specific populations in the rich counties. Early in the Seventies, “affluence” was discovered as the key driver of environmental breakdown (famously alongside population and technology in the IPAT equation). A follow up to his bestselling book The Population Bomb was Paul Ehrlich’s The End of Affluence, blaming unsustainability on consumer societies — and, at least partially, on the consumption of the ordinary working person.

By the Eighties and Nineties, ecological thinkers such as William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel devised a whole mode of analysis — ecological “footprints” — which traced all environmental impacts to the consumption of resources by consumers (this prompted British Petroleum to invent the concept of a “carbon footprint”, which they happily promoted as part of their ill-fated “Beyond Petroleum” campaign in 2004). While focusing on “consumers” makes sense for natural ecosystems, the capitalist economy disaggregates consumption from owners who control and profit from production. The latter not only enable consumption, but have much more power over societal resources and thus more environmental impact. Footprint analysis erased these capitalists profiteers from environmental responsibility.

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The result of this footprint ideology was a shift to what John Bellamy Foster and coauthors have called “economic Malthusianism”. Like Malthus’s original arguments, it disregards the power of capital in favour of a moralistic focus on policing imprudent behaviour. But, whether focusing on consumption or demographics, it leads to similar calls for radical population reductions. In fact, William Rees published a paper just this year claiming humanity is heading toward a “population correction” and suggested that “informed estimates put the long-term carrying capacity [of the Earth] at as few as 100 million to as many as three billion people”. In other words, between 98.75% to 62.5% of the current human population needs to die off. This is how our modern climate discourse — top-down, moralising, apocalyptic — emerged.

But this also mirrored shifts throughout the larger political economy. Just as deindustrialisation attacked industrial workers and unions and celebrated the educated knowledge worker, a new form of environmentalism downplayed production and glorified the agency of the environmentally conscious middle-class consumer — the people who staff the state agencies and non-profits that deploy carrots and sticks to herd the masses toward environmental enlightenment. Anyone who looks seriously at the problem should realise solving it will require not lifestyle modification but political and social change. New infrastructures for energy, housing, transport built not by the middle class but blue-collar industrial workers. And abandoned industrial regions could find obvious self-interest in a public-jobs programme aimed at constructing this new economy.

It is telling that, rather than gathering around such a programme on the Left, “green” industrial workers — such as those in the Danish wind industry — are rejecting environmentalism and voting for the Right. After all, the environmental movement still remains populated by middle-class activists brimming with moral certitude that their political project must include corralling the consumptive behaviour of ordinary people. That we could both save the planet and make life significantly better for the majority simply does not cross their mind. And as long as the Left simply renews the climate politics of the last 30 years, workers will continue to reject a platform that has nothing to offer them.