Why Climate Politics Still Matter

Welcome back to The BREAK—DOWN’s newsletter! This week we have a piece from Casey A. Williams, in which he takes on those arguing for hopeful signs for decarbonization in the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as geopolitics drives the global market toward low carbon energy (see for instance, new data from Ember showing that China’s exports in the first month of the war for batteries, EVs and solar were up an impressive 70% year-on-year).

“The political economic questions at the heart of the climate issue” Williams writes, “ought to be answered democratically, by everyone who has something to gain or lose from an energy transition.” This, he argues, can and should not be left to market forces.

You can read the full essay below, or on our shiny updated website. But first, thank you to everyone who has subscribed since we announced our latest print issue, Airborne. Copies have arrived with us, and will be posted to our lovely print subscribers in advance of publication day (6 May).

On that note: if you’re in London on 6 May, we’re hosting a party to mark the launch, featuring a live podcast recording on the state of climate politics with an exceptional panel comrpised of Geoff Mann, Daniela Gabor and Oliver Eagleton, and chaired by our Editor, Adrienne Buller.

Tickets include a copy of the print issue, but for the existing print subscribers among you who’ll already be getting a copy, discounted tickets are available using the code BDSUPPORTERS at the link here. There’s a limited number, so get yours fast! And, if you haven’t bought your copy or subscribed yet, you can do so now. A print subscription starts at just £25 per year, which gets you two beautiful print issues per year and acccess to our full digital archive.

Plus, as a thank you, anyone subscribing between now and 6 May will get a bonus copy of our inaugural issue, Right Turn, featuring thinkers like Brett Christophers and Ilias Alami, for free. Every subscription helps us publish the best new writing and conversation on capitalism, nature and the climate. Join our community today!

It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment climate change ceased to be a salient political issue in the US and Europe. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Trump’s re-election, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the outbreak of COVID—all are plausible contenders, acute crises that seemed to push climate change to a blurry horizon. The need to decarbonize has not diminished, but the reasons now offered for energy transition are security, freedom, dominance, affordability—anything but climate change.

What is most striking about this rhetorical shift is the way it has been narrated as a reason to be hopeful about decarbonization’s prospects. This has been particularly pronounced since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, quickly described as a potential catalyst for the energy transition. One consequence of the closure, Simon Mundy wrote in the Financial Times, “is likely to be an acceleration of the global shift to low-carbon energy”, or, as Bill McKibben put it in the New Yorker, states will clamour for low-cost renewables to avoid relying on an “indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch” for cheap energy. Those that rely most on that ditch, mainly Asian states, have already begun to invest in renewables and electric vehicles—moves that could kick off long-term “demand destruction” for oil, as Kate Mackenzie suggests in her recent contribution. Matthew Zeitlin, likening the Iran war to the 1970s’ oil shocks—when high prices pushed France and Japan towards nuclear power, shrank cars, and spurred US investment in solar—suggests that something similar may happen today, with “ever-so-slight signs of a thaw toward renewables and in favour of an all-of-the-above strategy in the US.”

Some see an even more general truth in these signs—that the mercenary logics of national security and economic competitiveness offer stronger reasons to build renewables than concerns about climate change. As oil analyst Rory Johnston told Heatmap in March, “Energy security and affordability is a much more compelling political argument” for the energy transition than curbing planet-warming emissions.

Given the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels, anything that convinces states to build renewables must be treated as a positive force. But does placing our hopes for an energy transition in the uncoordinated efforts of states to insulate their national economies from supply shocks not express a deep pessimism about the prospects of a deliberate, just response to the climate crisis?

What’s lost in much of this talk is that the more immediate consequence of the war has not been a boom in renewables, but a revival of coal, especially in Asia. Japan has lifted restrictions on coal power production and India has announced incentives for new coal gasification plants. Coal may prove to be only a temporary redoubt: Europe briefly increased its coal use after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, before dramatically expanding renewables; but European states also quadrupled their imports of liquified natural gas from the US, contributing to the expansion of LNG export terminals in Texas and Louisiana. What the lesson of the 2022 energy shock suggests, then, is that geopolitical risk calculations can and often do encourage renewable energy investments, but they will not precipitate a durable or just transition.

Nor do energy shocks put anyone in a better position to demand such a transition. Oil companies have already made a killing from the US-Israel-Iran war, raking in windfall profits from high oil prices. Some of these profits may be ploughed into new production; most will fund an unearned payday for asset managers and private equity firms, increasing finance capital’s already enormous influence over economic policy worldwide. In any case, few things are worse for the climate than war. A Climate and Community Institute report found that the first two weeks of the war “drain[ed] the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined.”

It is nonetheless tempting to squint for silver linings, especially in moments of weakness for the left. After Trump’s second election, some countered the sense of defeat by arguing that economics, not politics, was now driving the energy transition. As Columbia Business School’s Gernot Wagner told Grist after Trump’s victory, “this is bad for the climate, full stop… That said, this will be yet another wall that never gets built. Fundamental market forces are at play.” The Financial Times made the more general point: when it comes to climate, “economics has a habit of winning out over politics.” This idea has since become a kind of elite common sense. In a February column, David Wallace-Wells recounted a conversation with Christina Figueres, former head of the UN’s climate change body, who told him that “climate politics didn’t matter nearly as much as ‘climate economy’—the combination of cheap solar and battery power, the price volatility of fossil fuels, domestic energy crises and geopolitics pushing countries toward energy autonomy and the relative ease of installing new renewables are all powering the global transition.”

To say that “market forces,” “economics,” or the “climate economy” matter more than “climate politics” is to say that capitalism’s hegemonic form of rationality—maximizing private gain—is compatible with decarbonization because renewables are now the least-cost, lowest-risk choice for rational actors. This is a powerful idea because it rebuts a key argument from the left, that capitalism’s singular concern with short-term interest maximization makes capitalist rationality the enemy of planetary health. An energy transition driven by an uncoordinated scramble for value can even make the global swing to the right appear like something other than a climate disaster, while insulating capitalism against allegations of ecocide. If “economics” is driving the energy transition, in other words, then capitalism starts to look like the planet’s saviour rather than its enemy.

Such an argument rests on shaky historical foundations. A simple logic of interest maximization has never been quite enough to explain past energy transitions. As Andreas Malm’s account of the rise of steam power in England stresses, coal was more expensive than water power during its adoption in the 1830s, and did not immediately boost profits. What steam did enable factory owners to do, however, was exercise more control over workers. The upshot of this history, outlined forcefully in Malm’s polemical work, is that an active politics of class struggle played a key role in the first modern energy transition and will likely play a role in any future transition as well. In any case, as Brett Christophers has argued, renewables have yet to prove their long-term profitability, casting doubt on the likelihood of a straightforward market-led transition anytime soon.

Wallace-Wells argues that renewables’ strong market performance is nonetheless a reason to be a “transition optimist.” There is a case to be made for optimism, not least because it offers a welcome reprieve from the apocalypticism that often shadows the climate issue. This is, however, a passive optimism. It entrusts the future to forces that exceed the conscious agency of any particular group, but which afford maximum influence to those who already wield the greatest power. The question is not really whether these forces can deliver an energy transition at some point in the future, but rather what sort of transition this is likely to be.

For one, it is likely to be inadequate from the perspective of climate change. The rapid growth of renewable energy has so far not corresponded to a decline in greenhouse gas emissions. For a number of reasons, including rising energy demand, renewables have mostly supplemented not replaced fossil fuels. The world is currently on track to consume more renewable energy and more fossil fuels in the near term unless states adopt measures to phase out oil, gas and coal on specific timelines. If rubrics like “economics” and “security” continue to govern the energy transition, rather than a commitment to human wellbeing, the result is likely to be a transition that fails to confront the civilizational crisis it was meant to solve. In this scenario, the root causes of climate crisis go unaddressed and the question of climate justice—how to root out the inequalities that distribute climate change’s effects—falls entirely out of the picture.

A market-driven transition is also a depoliticized transition. Governments and corporations cannot simply go to the marketplace and select low-cost renewables to plug into existing infrastructures. Energy transition is more like an industrial revolution than flipping between inputs, requiring changes in everything from the voltage of electrical wires to what engineers learn in school. It therefore raises questions of profound social importance: How much energy should we use and for what purpose? Where, how and for whom should we build the infrastructures needed to produce that energy? Who decides?

Transition optimism cedes the authority to answer these questions to incumbent powers and the interests that move them. Beyond investing too much hope in forces that have not yet delivered adequate emissions cuts, such optimism writes climate politics out of the history of the present. In the US, environmental justice groups pressured the federal government to cut emissions and address climate change’s unequal impacts beginning in the 1990s. After the 2008 financial crisis, a nascent US climate movement mobilized mass popular opposition to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines. These movements were full of contradictions, as Kai Bosworth has documented, and they lacked a coherent class politics, but they made sufficient inroads with labour around the “just transition” concept that the International Trade Union Confederation joined a global climate strike in late 2019.

Green New Deal legislation crystallized some of these movements’ aspirations while abandoning their more radical anti-capitalist and anti-colonial demands. The compromise reflected the balance of power at that moment; the “climate left” did not have a broad working-class constituency with enough organized power to win green social democracy in a single move. The resulting policies did not meet organizers’ ambitious demands, but they set in motion processes of investment, budget allocation, rule writing, construction and job retraining that have helped constrain the options available to state and corporate actors in the present. At least in part, the possibility of an energy transition today should be seen as a belated effect of this political agitation.

The point is not that political movements deserve all or even most of the credit for renewable energy growth. It is that narrating transition as a byproduct of uncoordinated attempts to minimize financial and geopolitical risk oversimplifies a complex history of agitation and compromise, and it ascribes to “economics” a historical force it cannot justly claim.

As the climate left has consistently and emphatically stressed, the political economic questions at the heart of the climate issue—how, for whom, and to what ends should the world’s energy resources be put to use?—ought to be answered democratically, by everyone who has something to gain or lose from an energy transition. Creating the conditions for substantive democracy in even a single city is a herculean task that would, at a minimum, require imposing the kinds of severe restrictions on capital that have always been a goal of the socialist project. This does not make it impossible. People all over the world continue to believe in socialism and its vision of economic democracy despite the enormity of the challenge. Ernst Bloch called this belief “militant optimism,” grounded in an awareness of one’s capacity to intervene in history as a member of a class whose daily labours make the world. “False optimism,” he wrote, by contrast, is the “banal, automatic belief in progress as such.”

Bloch was writing against certain Marxists who supposed that the iron laws of history were bound to deliver a revolution. But the critique applies reasonably well to “transition optimists.” To find optimism in market competition and geopolitical rivalry is to place one’s faith in abstract forces rather than human beings. It is in this sense a kind of pessimism. It concedes that conscious political decisions are unlikely to shape the energy transition in the near term, and it leaves powerful corporate and state actors to decide what form that transition should take in the long run. Reducing emissions is essential. Even more important is building political institutions that can operate on a different kind of logic, that can prioritize environmental and human wellbeing when doing so inevitably comes into conflict with the interests of today’s great powers.

Casey A. Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, an Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Tokyo.