Reposted from Carter Moon’s Substack. Check out his work here!

I am not sure our species will make it to the end of this century. It is hard to take an objective assessment of where we’re at in this moment, particularly as Americans, and not come to some very bleak conclusions. Living through the LA wildfires at the start of this year really brought the climate crisis to my front door, and it honestly made me spiral for months. We are in the midst of the beginning waves of truly living with the consequences of burning fossil fuels so aggressively for two centuries. Rather than treat this as the existential threat that it is, the US exported shitloads of fossil fuels around the world during Biden’s term. AI data centers are straining our electricity grids and driving up demand for fossil fuels to feed their hallucinating plagiarism machines. Wars around the world, such as the genocide in Gaza, are causing an absolute explosion in carbon emissions. With Trump in office, it feels highly unlikely that the US will meet its carbon goals to keep the planet under 2℃ in order to continue having a climate still somewhat capable of sustaining human life. Human beings are remarkably adaptive and we have survived a great many apocalyptic catastrophes throughout our shared history, but it’s difficult to look at where we’re at and not feel like we’ve finally met our doom, and by our own hands.

As I’ve been wrestling with the bleak realities of the climate crisis, I’ve been engaging with the work of two different authors, Malcolm Harris and Bill McKibbon. They’re two authors who have been biting critics of the failures of our political class to address the climate crisis, and funnily enough, they’re both from Palo Alto, California. They diverge considerably in their politics, as I’ll get into, but I’ve found both their books thoroughly engaging. Harris has a book out this year called What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis; he’s a Marxist who previously wrote a history of the political economy of the tech industry called Palo Alto that is one of the best books I’ve read this decade. McKibbon is a climate journalist and activist who’s often credited with writing the first book on global warming for a non-academic audience called The End of Nature; his new book is called Here Comes the Sun.

Harris’ What’s Left describes the three possible paths the US and the broader globe can take to survive the planetary crisis we find ourselves in. The opening of the book is pretty provocative and remarkable: He states that “oil is life,” that essentially our global political economy has determined that oil is more valuable than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who die every year from the burning of fossil fuels and the billions who will die in the coming decades if we continue our current rates of combustion. The people who run the multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry have decided that the effects of the climate crisis don’t outweigh the profits they stand to lose; their money is more valuable than our lives. I find this to be an extremely useful way of explaining what we’re up against: There are people sitting in board rooms and flying around the world actively making the choice to let large swaths of our fellow human beings die in horrific conditions over the coming decades. Our task is to determine how we’re going to stop them.

Harris lays out the case for the three approaches he sees discussed most. The first is marketcraft interventions; essentially the climate policy of the Biden administration, in which you create favorable conditions to make renewable energy and electric cars the cheaper and more sensible choice over fossil fuels. Then he lays out the case for “public power,” which New York has already been in the process of implementing the Build Public Renewables Act,which pushes the state of New York to work towards building 100% publicly owned renewable utilities that are built and staffed by union workers. This approach was pushed heavily by DSA and has a lot of support from the likes of Zohran Mamdani and AOC. The final path Harris lays out he simply calls “Communism,” making the case for why he believes a communist approach alone can address the crisis we’re in.

This interview Ben Tumin did with Harris provides an incredibly succinct summary of Harris’ arguments in the book. Harris’ argument for organizing towards communism is spelled out well: “organizing around the equality of all people and all peoples.  Communally organized people live in very specific ways tied to the earth, and there are way more implications from their kind of thinking than you might imagine, both socially and ecologically.” He emphasizes this because he believes that without a eco-communist movement, the indigenous peoples who have already suffered centuries of colonialism will be left to watch their natural mineral resources plundered once again in the name of extracting the metals necessary for building solar panels and extended storage batteries.

Let’s put a pin in that line of argument for a moment to turn to McKibben’s Here Comes the Sun. McKibben’s inspiration for writing the book is to inspire Americans to understand just how rapidly the world is transitioning to solar power and inspire hope, and I’ve got to say he overwhelmingly succeeds. Manufacturing solar panels has gotten so cheap and they’ve gotten so good at capturing the unlimited power of the sun that solar is now the world’s cheapest form of energy. China built enough solar and wind energy to power Indonesia or Turkey between January and May of this year. Solar panels are so cheap now that even very poor people in Pakistan are able to install them and independently supply their own power. People across Europe started hanging solar panels from their balconies after Russia invaded Ukraine and sent the gas markets into chaos. Texas, of all places, is building the most clean energy of any state. An acre of solar panels produces dramatically more energy than an acre of corn for ethanol gas. Electric vehicles, especially those built in China, powered by solar are getting better and cheaper, and are already infinitely more efficient than gas-powered cars. We are, in a very real sense, approaching a world where solar replaces fossil fuels. McKibben delivers the good news in a manic blur that oscillates between manic street preacher and exuberant 12-year-old.

But he also doesn’t shy away from the drawbacks of this transition to solar. He’s honest that a lot of the materials necessary to create these panels and batteries are going to have to be mined from the Earth, and often from indigenous peoples whose lands have already been ravaged by industrial colonialism for centuries. He makes the case that there’s a pathway to do this mining with the least harm possible, and hopefully we can create the conditions where the stewards of this land get most of the profit from this extraction. McKibben ultimately argues that extracting these minerals is less harmful than extracting fossil fuels from the Earth, and he makes the case that with recycling techniques continually improving, we won’t need to keep continuously extracting minerals on the scale we extract fossil fuels. Harris is much more pessimistic about this prospect, and the writer Thea Riofrancos has written extensively about the real conflicts between indigenous peoples and the powers who wish to extract their resources.

This is where the central tensions between McKibben and Harris’ books lives. McKibben is desperate to convince his readers that we need to use whatever tools at our disposal to transition off fossil fuels immediately, and he’s correct, but he also doesn’t contend with some of the bigger implications of what this means. Yes, McKibben writes about how ferociously the fossil fuel industry is fighting against this transition, but I don’t think he wrestles enough with the fact that truly ending the fossil fuel industry means the end of industrial global capitalism as it has existed up until this point. As Harris points out directly at the beginning of his book, fossil fuels are the essential commodity form that has made capitalism the dominant mode of organizing political economy around the world. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital argues that the triumph of the steam engine and the coal required to power it in Britain was the defining moment that freed the bourgeoisie to expand their wealth and power. It created productive machinery that could dramatically outpace what human and animal labor alone could accomplish and allowed production to supercharge profits in a way that had never been possible before. Fossil fuels are the historical, material foundations of the global elite’s wealth; rapidly getting rid of them will mean the total collapse of capitalism as we have known it. In a country like the US, this will mean a total realignment of how our economy is structured, on how wealth is generated and distributed.

There are some wonderful passages in Here Comes the Sun where McKibben describes the potential of a solar transition to dramatically reduce inequality around the world. After all, a majority of the world is dependent on importing oil from the handful of countries that can produce it; this is a massive driver of global debt and how underdeveloped nations remain poor. McKibben emphasizes that solar is a decentralized energy source; you are not dependent on a cartel of oil barons once you have a solar panel on your roof. But I also think McKibben doesn’t spend enough time reckoning with how many barriers there are to getting us to this point. There’s a reason the fossil fuel industry spent almost half-a-billion dollars to get Trump re-elected. Everything in our oligarchy that play-acts as a democracy exists to protect the fossil fuel industry and keep it the dominant energy source worldwide. Global inequality is extremely good for the US as an empire, and our fascist turn in many ways can be understood as a revolt of oligarchs who refuse to have their global power diminished.

It’s also striking that McKibben spends quite a bit of time in the book praising China’s progress on rapidly transitioning to solar, but he fails to really address that they have been able to do this because they are a centrally planned, communist government. The government made the choice to begin the process of transitioning to solar in 2014 and have been laser-focused on it because they are not bound to letting the free market build solar for them. Yes, there are private capitalists within China who are getting rich from the solar transition, but the government directives to build solar to meet well-defined targets have ultimately driven that transition. McKibben is honest that there is simply no way to make the kinds of profits from renewables that exist in fossil fuels, but he doesn’t totally reject market solutions to the transition the way Harris does in What’s Left. The truth is that you need a government like China’s that is primarily concerned about the overall wellbeing of its citizens rather than helping capitalists stay rich, which is why it’s hard not to feel pessimistic about the US making the big structural changes necessary to get us through this crisis. It’s hard not to engage with both of these books and emerge even more convinced that China is set to become the dominant superpower of this century while the US falls rapidly behind.

But I want to conclude here by saying that engaging with these books has ultimately left me more firmly convinced than ever that it’s possible for humanity to figure out how to survive this crisis. The technology is here, China is successfully leading the solar revolution, people around the world are making dramatic changes to adapt to our new reality. Our great strength as a species is that our societies are actually much more fluid and adaptive than we give ourselves credit for. Another excellent concept Harris introduces in his book is “social metabolism,” the conditions that we as a social body are willing to accept. I have faith that we can realize that breathing in polluted air and killing each other with cars is no longer acceptable. I have faith that people can make smart choices about switching to clean energy if you engage with them directly. The historic election of Zohran Mamdani off the efforts of over 100,000 volunteers to knock three million doors demonstrates to us that there is a crack of light that could be a pathway out.

McKibben ends his book with an earnest plea that we all ground ourselves in a renewed reverence for the sun. It is a magnificent thing that this enormous ball of pure energy returns to us every day and provides us all the energy that we need to sustain life. The solar panel truly has the potential to be one of the most miraculous inventions in human history. Since finishing the book, I’ve been trying to take a walk every day and feel the sun on my skin, grounding myself in conscious gratitude that it exists. It will take an enormous upheaval, a total reimagining of the planet we all share and how we go about our daily lives, but it is possible for us to make it through this century. My slogan for this newsletter is “Total liberation for the whole Earth, and nothing less,” and I’m starting to believe that might actually be a reality one day- if we fight for it.