by DSA’s eco-socialist strategy should draw inspiration from Kate Aronoff’s excellent new book Overheated.
By Ty Moore
“In some ways, the question of whether or not to nationalize fossil fuel assets is even simpler: Do we trust the companies that have spent decades delaying action on climate and spreading misinformation about its existence to steward a transition off fossil fuels, as they claim they will? To value the urgency of the climate crisis and the needs of their workers over the interests of their shareholders? If the answer is no, nationalization is our best option to decarbonize as quickly as is needed to avert catastrophes both economic and ecological.”
– Kate Aronoff, from her new book Overheated
Last spring, as Biden’s agenda for his first 100 days dominated the media cycle, DSA’s National Political Education Committee responded with our own “100 Days of Socialism” campaign. “Exploring what the first 100 days of a socialist government might look like,” an April 7th article outlining a socialist Green New Deal in DSA’s Democratic Left, included seven “guiding goals,” the second of which reads:
“We would quickly nationalize fossil fuel companies to phase them out — and try fossil fuel CEOs for crimes against humanity. We would publicly own electric utilities, so we can control the shift to 100 percent renewable, fossil-free energy by 2030.”
DSA is almost alone within the wider environmental movement in calling for public ownership of the fossil fuel industry, and even within DSA some still argue against it. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and most of DSA’s elected representatives limit themselves to calls for public ownership of electric utilities which, while absolutely vital and more immediately winnable, remains totally insufficient unless paired with a public takeover of the wider energy industry including the fossil fuel giants.
This is a central argument in Kate Aronoff’s new book Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet — And How We Fight Back. Aronoff, an acclaimed climate journalist and DSA member, argues that “Green New Deal proposals, though, have largely neglected the need to constrain fossil fuel supplies directly.” She questions the “market logic at work here: by boosting supplies of the good stuff, the bad will wither as it’s outcompeted and regulated away by new standards. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that this road leads to a zero-carbon economy.”
The two central strengths of Aronoff’s book are her recognition that 1) any serious movement to address climate change must forcefully challenge the logic of capitalism and, flowing from that, 2) building a united working-class movement, with organized labor at its core, will be vital to winning that fight. Aronoff’s central weakness, which I explore in the final section of this review, is her failure to draw the full political conclusions from her own argument that defending earth’s climate requires dismantling capitalism.
Kate Aronoff’s Vision of “A Postcarbon Democracy”
In her chapter titled “A Postcarbon Democracy,” Aronoff begins her case for nationalization by outlining the extreme dangers of leaving fossil fuel executives in charge of their existing assets:
“Trillions of dollars of fossil fuel profits will have to go unrealized if the world is going to cap warming at 2 degrees Celsius. As their decades of denial and delay have proved, executives aren’t going to want to give those up willingly. Despite all their newfound green rhetoric, fossil fuel companies annually spent $1 trillion building out new supply infrastructure between 2014 and 2018. As late as January 2020, ExxonMobil planned to increase its carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent through 2025, doubling its earnings by expanding its oil and gas business.”
Aronoff outlines the multiple legal mechanisms available to the Biden administration:
“If the Biden administration takes up demands from the Sunrise Movement and others to create a cabinet-level office of climate mobilization — modeled on wartime planning agencies — its mandate could mirror that of the bodies that seized factories for the war effort. Invoking the National Emergencies Act to declare a climate emergency could unlock additional powers and spending authority. So could wielding the Defense Production Act (DPA), which was used in the pandemic to compel companies to produce PPE. The Pentagon has long stated that global warming is a threat to national security, so utilizing the DPA to spur along the energy transition wouldn’t be too far a stretch. The US has nationalized companies to deal with crises before. It can do it again, whether Republicans control the Senate or not.”
Throughout, Aronoff emphasizes how the economic volatility of the fossil fuel industry makes them vulnerable. While working-class people reliant on the industry pay the heaviest price, the fortunes of these companies rise and fall with the booms and busts of capitalism, the constant shifts in geo-political alignments, and whether or not governments maintain the generous subsidies, tax havens, and regulatory framework that fossil fuel companies often require to turn a profit. In this context, Aronoff writes:
“It might not cost much. As of writing this [in early 2021], energy stocks have begun to rebound…. Whereas a takeover of the world’s top twenty-five oil, gas, and coal companies would have once cost some $1.15 trillion [at their pre-pandemic market valuation], buying them out now would cost somewhere between $550 and $700 billion — or half that with a 51 percent rather than full stake. Nixing market distortions like production-side fossil fuel subsidies could bring that price tag down further still. So could any number of common-sense reforms like those mentioned above, including energy efficiency measures and renewable portfolio standards that would erode fossil fuel demand.”
Despite the continued rebound in fuel prices this year, the general picture remains highly unstable for the industry, and a viable mass campaign to nationalize them would only deepen investors’ fears. And as DSA’s Green New Deal principles outline, we should “try fossil fuel CEOs for crimes against humanity” and their ongoing efforts to deceive the public. The huge fines and reparation costs levied against these corporations and their billionaire owners should bring the price tag down much further.
Can We Win Nationalization?
Any serious discussion about winning a Green New Deal on the scale needed must begin with how to build a mass movement strong enough to overcome ruling-class resistance. Aronoff is absolutely right to emphasize that building a powerful climate justice movement requires revitalizing labor and a majority of unions mobilizing their millions of members and resources behind the effort. This is precisely the strategic promise of the Green New Deal. Aronoff writes:
“We can harness a different kind of feedback loop: by prioritizing climate policies that make people’s lives better in the short run and grow the power of democratic institutions like labor unions, a Green New Deal can swell the multiracial, working-class coalition invested in designing and fighting to expand those programs as they scale back emissions and build up a fairer, cleaner economy. And it can create durable electoral majorities that ensure those changes stick for decades to come. What critics of the Green New Deal have tended to miss is that its policy ambitions are one and the same with its political strategy.”
Defying conventional liberal wisdom, one of the most valuable contributions of Aronoff’s book is her argument that nationalization could prove more politically viable, especially for winning over workers and communities reliant on fossil fuel jobs. In an industry already facing decline, rife with instability and layoffs, Aronoff argues that “nationalization offers an alternative to letting either private equity vultures or CEOs take the money and run, prioritizing communities whose livelihoods have historically depended on fossil fuels.”
Nationalization could prove more politically viable.
Of course, opposition from big business would be even more frenzied if DSA’s call to nationalize the fossil fuel giants was adopted by Congressional sponsors of the Green New Deal. If Hillary Clinton felt confident enough to proclaim “it’s never going to happen” in answer to Bernie’s Medicare-for-All proposal, the chorus of angry denunciations would be twice as loud against taking democratic control of ExxonMobil.
This may explain why Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamal Bowman, and other socialists in Congress have avoided the issue, limiting their calls for public ownership to our country’s electric grids. Unfortunately, most DSA chap-
ters appear to be adopting a similar approach. It’s excellent that DSA chapters from NYC to Texas have launched campaigns for public ownership of regional power utilities, but from what I can tell, with the exception of East Bay DSA’s “Let’s Own PG&E” campaign, most of these don’t even mention the call to nationalize fossil fuels on their websites.
But DSA’s correct tactical decision to prioritize campaigns for public power would help advance, not sidestep, building popular support for a comprehensive socialist program to fight climate change. Such a campaign, if energetically waged by DSA’s public representatives and a wider labor and community coalition, could win majority support. It’s essential that we use today’s fights to publicly prepare a campaign for democratic ownership and control over all global fossil fuel reserves.
Uniting with Fossil Fuel Workers
Taking nationalization off the table makes promises of a just transition more complicated. For communities economically dependent on fossil fuel companies, calls to increase regulations and tax burdens, or to subsidize clean energy competitors, all amount to a policy of slow strangulation.
Yet a winning socialist strategy for the Green New Deal involves uniting labor and the working class more generally behind the scale and speed of economic change necessary to avoid climate catastrophe, and Aronoff argues that nationalization offers a far more compelling promise of a planned transition for fossil fuel workers than the disorganized decline embedded in the existing GND policy proposals.
“Nationalization holds some serious political upsides but requires recognizing that a transition isn’t some far-off event. A credible plan to keep people on payrolls could head off opposition, potentially peeling off unions and workers that executives have cynically wielded to curry favor for new infrastructure projects and regulatory rollbacks. The idea behind a managed decline is not to shut off all the taps overnight but wind down the fossil fuel industry’s core operation along a timeline that allows the country to meet energy needs as no-carbon alternatives continue to scale up.”
If displaced fossil fuel workers cannot find re-employment in a fast-expanding green economy, with equal or better pay, “Green New Deal advocates including Bernie Sanders have proposed five years of full wage and benefits parity… with an option for early retirement to older workers,” Aronoff points out. “Free college and universal health care would make that transition easier still.”
“Winning such labor-friendly protections will take ambition and a solidarity with social movements and other unions that the international leadership of the trades has been loath to embrace in recent decades as they have tried to protect their own narrowly defined turf. It will also mean recognizing that the interests of fossil fuel workers and their bosses are categorically different things.”
Despite the enormous popularity of the Green New Deal, including 62 percent of all union workers according to a 2019 Data for Progress poll, “Labor is often, mistakenly, treated as a unified and reactionary bloc on climate.” Aronoff points out:
“The ‘jobs versus environment’ narrative peddled by the press and policymakers, including many Democrats, tends to assume that the outspoken building trades union leaders — which have bused workers to Washington in support of the Keystone XL pipeline and lashed out at climate campaigners — speak for the 12.5 million members of AFL-CIO- affiliated unions, for large non-AFL-CIO-affiliated unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters, and for working people as a whole. It’s tough to square that picture with the several union internationals and locals, including SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, and the New York State Nurses Association, that endorsed the Green New Deal… Fossil-fuel-adjacent unions themselves are hardly a monolith, either.”
Can We Transition Under Capitalism?
The central weakness of Aronoff’s strategy to win a Green New Deal on the scale needed, including democratic control of global fossil fuel resources, is that she remains trapped within a fundamentally
reformist framework. She spells this out in her introduction:
“My argument in this book is not that capitalism has to end before the world can deal with the climate crisis. Dismantling a centuries-old system of production and distribution and building a carbon-neutral and worker-owned alternative is almost certainly not going to happen within the small window of time the world has to avert runaway disaster. The private sector will be a major part of the transition off fossil fuels. Some people will get rich, and some unseemly actors will be involved. Capitalist production will build solar panels, wind turbines, and electric trains. But whether we deal with climate change or not can’t be held hostage to executives’ ability to turn a profit. To handle this crisis, capitalism will have to be replaced as society’s operating system — setting out goals other than the boundless accumulation of private wealth.”
The contradiction between the first and last sentences of this paragraph is never dealt with. There is no disagreement that, long before capitalism can be toppled, socialists should fight for every climate-friendly reform possible. But Aronoff’s clear contention is that it will be possible to somehow “replace capitalism’s operating system” without actually “dismantling” the economic and military/police power of the capitalist class or replacing it with a socialist “worker-owned” and democratized economy.
While offering a clear-headed strategy to build a mass movement for a Green New Deal, Aronoff leaves vague how mass pressure from below is expected to compel the Biden administration or other capitalist governments worldwide to replace capitalism “as society’s operating system.”
Even if, for example, Bernie Sanders had won the 2020 elections, big business would still wield decisive power over the economy. The army of establishment bureaucrats and politicians dominating the intelligence, security, and military apparatus, the regulatory agencies, not to mention Congress and the courts, would be mobilized to sabotage measures like nationalizing fossil fuels and other vital policies.
The fossil fuel corporations themselves are only one part of the wider global industrial complex that has dominated US and world politics much of the last century. The auto and petrochemical industries, along with aerospace and military
corporations, not to mention the massive investments of global financial institutions — together have reshaped our cities, ripping up the tracks of early public transit systems to make way for highways and suburban sprawl. They have driven US foreign policy in oil-rich regions, fomenting horrendous wars or covert destabilization campaigns against any government seeking to control its nation’s own resources. Enormous amounts of capital are bound up in their technologies, equipment, supply chains, and extraction rights. Decades of foreign aid, military equipment, and political capital have gone to prop up corrupt “friendly” regimes, from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria.
Will this sprawling and dominant section of the ruling class stand by and allow the nationalization of the fossil fuel companies? Or will it view this as an existential threat to its existence and fight back with all the ruthlessness it has shown in the past? Aronoff clearly recognizes that her sweeping vision of an anti-capitalist Green New Deal threatens the fundamental interests of the global capitalist class:
“Capitalist markets are both deeply dependent on fossil fuels and have been built around them, from the coal-powered Satanic Mills of the Industrial Revolution to markets’ acute responsiveness to even modest changes in the price of oil today. That’s not to say that dealing with climate change means we have to start from scratch, crashing out of either fossil fuel usage or capitalism entirely before making any progress… But it does mean seeing market mechanisms as tools in a toolbox rather than a silver bullet and reasserting a critical role for the state.”
Here again Aronoff seems to recognize that the full realization of her GND policies will require “crashing out of capitalism,” but she treats the eventual need for a revolutionary rupture as a light-hearted aside rather than the deadly serious strategic question it is. By “reasserting a critical role for the state,” she is pointing toward an advanced green social democratic vision that gradually “replaces” capitalism rather than “crashing out” of it.
But is it really more realistic to hope that pressure politics on the Biden administration, or other capitalist governments, can win new investments in public transit on the scale needed to replace most private vehicles? Will the US capitalist class accept taking vast swaths of housing real estate out of the market to make way for permanently affordable green social housing on the scale needed? What about taking healthcare and education markets from them, replaced with expansive wealth taxes to ensure quality social services to all? What about the massive carbon footprint of corporate agribusiness? Can full reparations for Black and Indiginous people, and for the poorer nations worldwide bearing the brunt of climate change, be won within the framework of global capitalism?
Even in the most optimistic scenario of electing a Sanders-like president in 2024 and quadrupling the number of socialists in Congress, the history of left reformist governments have repeatedly demonstrated the limits capitalism can impose. Without preparing a mass working-class movement around a strategy to decisively break ruling-class resistance, including broad nationalizations and the replacement of their repressive state machinery with new institutions of working-class democracy, any left government elected to carry out a comprehensive Green New Deal will end in capitulation or deep political crisis.
