On Everyday Utopias, Public Imagination, and Breaking the Fossil Fuel Industry: A Review of A Planet to Win.
If Nancy Pelosi calls the Green New Deal a dream, the authors of A Planet to Win are lucid: this is the greatest task of a generation, and a reinvigorated capacity for public imagination is exactly what will help us get there.
Photo by Joe Beck.
In a political climate that, after years of the hollowing out of public power and services, has largely absconded any sense of public imagination, bold ideas are circulating in Democratic and progressive policy circles. The most politically ambitious of these has been the Green New Deal, the common critique of which is that it’s a vague and unrealistic pipedream.
But it’s taken on a life of its own, reaching far beyond the first resolution introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey. From Jay Inslee’s climate-focused presidential campaign to proposals put forth by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in their respective presidential campaigns, the idea of a Green New Deal has gained political salience and reaffirms that climate change is the context upon which every political affair will play out. All politics are climate politics. The question is, do we have the public and collective imagination to pursue a Green New Deal that has the boldness to match the scale of the climate crisis? Does our current conception of politics up to the task of what this moment demands of us?
A Planet To Win: Why We Need a Green Deal, collectively written by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, sketches out the details of what a political project of that scale and imagination could be. They make the case that in order to decarbonize as quickly and equitably as possible, it’s not enough to treat it as a technical challenge, but a radical transformation of economy and society. If Nancy Pelosi calls it a dream, the authors are lucid: this is the greatest task of a generation, and a reinvigorated capacity for public imagination is exactly what will help us get there.
To address the entangled crisis of climate change and inequality, we must first recognize fossil fuel corporations and their executives as our enemies. From there, the fight for a Green New Deal will only come to pass through a broad-based, multi-racial mass mobilization of the working class that is able to leverage real power against the fossil fuel industry and its allied politicians. The future we need is a planet to win, rather than to save or heal.
The book is structured in four unattributed parts, the authors representing a spectrum of the new climate left: Kate Aronoff, the lead author, is a journalist that has, among many other topics, written extensively on utilities and power generation, among many other topics; Alyssa Battistoni, a political theorist at Harvard University, argues for revaluing the work of ecological and social reproduction and centering climate politics in labor organizing. Daniel Aldana Cohen, runs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative at the University of Pennsylvania and co-organized the Designing the Green New Deal conference at McHarg Center. Theo Riofrancos is an assistant professor at Providence College studying global resource extraction, global supply chain politics and popular resistance. Drawing on this varied expertise, the narrative structure, while slightly blocky, altogether provides a coherent roadmap for what a Green New Deal could look like.
In the preface by Naomi Klein, the activist and writer who recently wrote On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal, she sets the stage of the book that draws upon her own work and steps aside to make room for the authors of this book. First, she stitches together the connections of how our predatory form of late-stage capitalism relies on the extraction of the earth and the exploitation of people, particularly Indigenous and other vulnerable communities. Second, she makes the case for an emboldened sense of public imagination and collective action. There are two broad directions the future could play out in, according to Klein: an eco-apartheid of climate barbarism, or an ecotopia in which we’ve done all we can to stop global emissions while minimizing the harmful impacts already baked in. “Climate crisis is entwined with a broader crisis of climate capitalism,” she writes, helping us understand the context behind the political stances and proposals that the authors offer.
The Fossil Fuel Cartel
The fossil fuel industry is the wealthiest and arguably most destructive industry in the history of the planet. Companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, Total Fina Elf, ConocoPhillips, and their executives and shareholders are directly responsible for the escalating amounts of carbon being dug out of the earth and burned, driving the CO2 levels that are smothering the planet and imperiling all of us. The wealth accumulated through this form of planetary violence is staggering, with 1,500 firms worth 4.65 trillion dollars, while 100 different producers are responsible for 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988.
In her piece “It’s Time to Try Fossil Fuel Executives for Crimes Against Humanity,” Kate Aronoff outlines the indisputable evidence that companies like Exxon and Shell knew about the existence and far-reaching threats of climate change as far back as the 1970s, when their own scientists investigated it. Instead of informing the public in a way that could have led to public mobilization, they took the course of action to protect their business model by embarking on a 40-year program of global gaslighting and climate change denial. Combine that with politicians either bankrolled by fossil fuel executives or too timid to act, and years of necessary action were lost. The fact that this coincided with the neoliberal agenda and the Thatcherization of global society atrophied a sense of public will and any working-class power able to take meaningful action that not only would have mitigated climate chaos, but also laid down the groundwork for a renewable energy system.
Now, the global scientific consensus has abandoned its detached, clinical tone to reflect the true urgency of this crisis. With no factual evidence to support climate denialism, it’s clear the fossil fuel industry and allied politicians are engaging in what futurist Alex Steffen calls predatory delay, a deliberate strategy to slow down decarbonization efforts to protect their near-term profits. They seem to be saying “We must do something…but not too fast lest we disturb the way things are.” The authors of A Planet to Win welcome the necessary disturbance, or what they’d call an uprising: a bomb is ticking down and we have to defuse it as quickly as possible. The fossil fuel cartel is not only preventing a chance to defuse it, but seems to be speeding up its process.
Our industrial society has been soaked by the residue of oil and coal, but the 300-year binge has to come to its end. It’s important, the authors will remind you, to understand that “we’re creative, complicated beings stuck in a capitalist economic system where a tiny number of people direct most major investments to maximize profits, and they shape government action accordingly.” The economic structure of capitalism operates on the need for continual profit growth and accumulation, and energy is needed to fuel the production, coordination, and distribution of how materials and resources move across the globe. The drive for that compound growth has required the exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants. This is why a strictly market-based approach to solving planetary collapse is dangerous — it will just create new forms of exploitation, either through the plunder of workers or the plunder of land.
The original New Deal highlights the role that the state can play in guiding economic activities and taking a direct role in the ownership and the building of infrastructure. The New Deal of that age had its motivations in tempering the radical fervor of labor strikes and creating a redistributive and Keynesian form of American capitalism. Those overall set of policies remade the American political and built landscape and created unprecedented wealth for white Americans, while also further formalizing racial capitalism, as the groundbreaking research of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and her work from Race for Profit shows. A Planet to Win authors are careful to address the problematic framing of the New Deal by showing the ways in which a Green New Deal must expand rights and benefits for those who have suffered the worst of climate change and capitalism: frontline communities, communities of color, and Indigenous nations.
Given the vast reach of this fossil fuel cartel, the authors state that “we need a powerful new low-carbon labor movement” to overcome it. There are shades of how they understand the role of labor organizing in this struggle. First, there is a moral imperative in doing so. We need to not just decarbonize our society but to think expansively to build a better world and strive to end both human suffering and planetary destruction. Secondly, the only way to break the intertwined power of neoliberal capitalism is with a large-scale and coordinated labor movement that is well-organized and ready to win. Mobilizing this movement requires us to think differently about how we organize — to think big and, as Jane McAlevey tells us in her new book, A Collective Bargain, to “raise expectations.” The authors of A Planet to Win echo her call, demanding a new political economy that re-centers the values and aims towards care and solidarity, aiming for everyday utopias. People will fight for a better world, especially when the current one is failing them in so many ways and the current possibilities offered up present a dearth of imagination.
Everyday Utopias
The concept of utopia in political thinking, particularly in socialist traditions, is understandably misunderstood. To those outside of these political circles, it may seem like a call for an unrealistic and abstract future that has no relationship to reality. To counter that, we need to figure out what everyday utopias look like and their relationship to rebuilding this muscle of collective imagination. It’s worth turning to the work of Erik Olin Wright and the project of “real utopias,” the idea that there are real-world examples of policies and projects that deliver emancipatory and liberated forms of economic and social equality. This book is clear-eyed but doesn’t shy away from the poetic possibilities of the better world we could live in.
A Planet to Win provokes the reader to honestly engage with what everyday utopia looks like in different scales and sectors. Take our energy system: the transformation of energy from the environment to make things move is the foundation of our industrial economy, which has relied on the embodied energy and carbon of long-dead animals and plants. Decades of infrastructural choices have created a utility network dependent on fossil fuel extraction, while we know we can get energy from other sources, such as wind and sun, that don’t rely on the burning of carbon. The management of utilities, and thus our energy grid, have mostly been given over to shareholders and private interests that value profit over the fair, consistent and equitable delivery of energy. When the criteria for decision-making is profit-driven you end up with a decades-long backlog of maintenance needs, the interruption of electricity to low-income communities, and failing infrastructure that puts us all at risk to disasters such as forest fires.
The precedence of publicly-controlled utilities is promising for a Green New Deal; the most famous example is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a landmark program of the New Deal. The authors point out that public ownership in and of itself does not guarantee more climate-friendly management and decarbonization, but at least gives us the chance to do so. The complex endeavor is understanding how to set up an energy system that has a bottom-line national grid with flexible micro-grids at the local level that can respond to changing conditions. It’s a proposal that requires national coordination and a government with both the political will and expertise to do so.
The public sector has been criticized as wasteful, needlessly bureaucratic and risk-averse, whereas the private sector is often seen as efficient, innovative and risk-tolerant. But the public sector has always had a role in our biggest technological breakthroughs. As Marianna Mazzucato shows us in her book the Entrepreneurial State, we must change the narrative about the role government institutions play in our collective life. The key takeaway here from the authors is that they are not Luddites — they understand the need for technological breakthroughs in energy efficiency and energy capture — but the best way to do so is with public ownership, and that the government is the only way to harness this energy revolution at the scale required. But first, we have to organize to get there.
In the void created by the hollowing out of the public, the pernicious false dichotomy of jobs vs. the environment entered like an oil slick into the waters of public perception. What will happen to the jobs of the coal miners and oil riggers and truck drivers that the fossil fuel industry employs? One way is to retrain workers to be employed in the renewable energy industry, creating technical training programs to help an oil worker learn to install solar panels. A core tenet principle of Green New Deal thinking is that no one should get left behind, and this includes the coal workers of Appalachia and the seasonal workers in the oil plains of the Dakotas. The effective path to a low-carbon labor movement is to demand the things that will have material benefits for workers, such as healthcare and free education. These are not frivolous add-ons, but part of a set of interrelated demands towards a just transition. Coal miners used to be among the most militant faction of the working-class, and giving them a vision for a future they can see themselves in is crucial to building that power.
Transitioning workers to green jobs is a good first step, but in the spirit of everyday utopia, this is not the full vision of what low-carbon labor looks like. Politics is a “war of position,” and a good strategist has to know where the current formations of power reside. Some of the most effective recent labor strikes have been from teachers and healthcare professionals — those tasked with educating our minds and tending to our bodies — and have taken an approach of striking not only for better wages and benefits, but as a militant resistance against the most vampiric tendencies of neoliberalism. In these strikes they are providing some of the most sophisticated analyses of the social dangers of climate change. This book carries the argument, in the spirit of in Silvia Federici, Naomi Klein, and Rebecca Solnit, that domestic and institutionalized care work — the social reproduction of life — is low-carbon work.
Labor movements in this country have often struggled to reconcile race and class and the ways in which they inform each other. “When they saw there is no work,” scholar and philosopher Achille Mbembe says, “it does not mean there is no work to be done — the endeavor to make a world is incalculable. It means that the economy has no place for you in its structure.” One of the biggest challenges for Green New Deal politics is reckoning with how racism has shaped the modern world, and how we revalue of work in a changing economic structure, whether shaped by a Green New Deal or the dreadening realities of the climate crisis.
The authors have a firm grip on these changing contours of labor organizing, and how the source of power may not be on the factory floor of a SunPower plant, but in the homes, schools and hospitals. It’s a political calculus that says that we have to make a moral argument for what world we want to live in and that no one should be left behind, and also that a diverse labor movement will be necessary to create the conditions in which a Green New Deal can become reality.
Housing for Climate Justice
It’s no accident that the first significant policy proposal under the Green New Deal takes aim at the intersection of public housing and climate change, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing the Green New Deal for Public Housing.“The politics of climate change and the transformation of the built environment are the same damn thing,” assert the authors of A Planet to Win. How we live is irrevocably connected with the landscapes, cities and homes that we build. Our politics shape the built environment, which then shapes our politics and our collective behavior. One of the weaknesses in political communications from the left is providing a vision of what the future could look like on an everyday basis. It’s not enough to simply protest the current conditions or offer managerial tweaks and nudges, but to describe alternative futures in specific detail that we can see ourselves sharing with our families, friends, neighbors and strangers.
Rebuilding landscapes is difficult, complex and necessary work; but the opportunity to organize around the built environment is too potentially transformative to ignore. It can be a powerful site of political mobilization in which people are forced to reckon with their relationship to the land and resources. As the authors write, “Cities can provide infrastructures for low carbon collective consumption, social reproduction and public affluence with investment in the environmental and social building blocks communities need to thrive.” Yet, the physical manifestations of U.S. cities are shaped by histories of housing racism and exclusion, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor also shows in her book Race for Profit, and the argument is that capitalism wasn’t polluted by racism, but requires racism in order to function. Undoing that is no small task. This book argues, rightfully so, that a Green New Deal for the built environment also has to expand tenant and housing rights, addressing these entangled forms of exclusion and oppression in the built environment. Another key housing policy proposal called The Homes for All Guarantee, introduced by a national network of state and local grassroots movement organizations called People’s Action, provides an early model, asserting that everyone deserves a dignified home. Building public housing at the scale required, about 10 million homes just to start, will also build the capacity to dream at the scale of an enlarged public.
It will have to reckon with the key functions of urban planning: where people live, where they work, and how they get around. Making better cities gives us a chance to bring utopia into our everyday lives: “we can organize…to beautify our landscapes, ease our mobility and guarantee lovely homes,” the authors dream. In this rebuilding of our cities we have a chance to evolve from “luxury through personal consumption” to “public and communal luxuries” of beautiful parks, homes, public transit, and the type of caring economy where leisure and pleasure are seen as given rights of people and place.
A Global Green New Deal
Because inequality and climate change cross borders, any Green New Deal must consider global ramifications and possibilities. Shifting the energy sector and rebuilding the built environment requires a new set of resources to construct that world, forming what co-author Thea Riofrancos terms the “extractive frontier”. Solar panels require lithium, and building a massive infrastructural system undergirded by solar panels requires lots of lithium, which are mostly found in the salt flats of the Andes Mountains that run through Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. If we undergo this transition under our current model of capitalism, the authors note, it will simply recreate the familiar vast inequality and exploitation of land and people. Solidarity and comradeship is a tricky thing: to commit to it is to commit to it everywhere and at different conjunctural moments.
The fact that we live in a world where major global decisions are decided upon by nation-states and multinational corporations often leaves radical groups on the sidelines. Translating local power and decision-making that takes every human into equal account has to do significantly more work to operate at a global scale. Any democratic and socialist society, however fragmented and incomplete, requires a diasporic mix of assemblies, alliances, and coalitions that respect local autonomy with the need for coordinated action. “Recharging internationalism” might be one of the most important and critical challenges for socialism, as it calls for what David Adler has described in Renewal Journal as an international institutional turn towards “a fundamental reconfiguration of the institutions that determine ‘who owns and controls capital’ at the global level.”
The book argues we need to build local institutions and a new political economy “with a direct focus on ownership, control, democracy, and participation.” Climate change does not stop at national borders, and alter-globalization movements such as Global Climate Justice Alliance, Take Back the Land and World Social Forum provide models for what radical democratic coordination could look like. This type of eco-socialist perspective lends itself to picturing transformative politics on a global scale amidst the concurrent contradictions of global contemporary capitalism. What happens here affects what happens everywhere, and in a global system where power is tipped towards the U.S., what happens here disproportionately affects what happens everywhere.
The dynamics of how a global governance and finance structure would operate opens up a lot of questions. Who would enforce the multidirectional agreements and pacts from state-to-state, state-to-tribe, local-to-state, and so on? How would these forms of “supply chain justice” work in a world that still primarily functions through national politics? How would they avoid the backlash of the perception of a U.S-led green imperialism?
Much of this eco-socialist and “new climate left” vision intellectually owes a lot to radical movements such as Buen Vivir, Zapatista and Fearless Cities, offering a vision of the good life that is not the (high-carbon) personal consumption of luxury goods, but of quality time spent with friends and lovers, in beautiful places, free from the dehumanizing demands of the economy. In short, a life of leisure, pleasure and dignity. The political reality, especially in a world of diminishing public institutions, is that power is derived from property relations. How does a Green New Deal build the foundations of imagining a world beyond property as power? Another significant challenge of a Green New Deal will be restitching a sense of “a public” from the shredded threads of what neoliberalism has destroyed.
A New Hegemony
At a deeper structural level, a Green New Deal requires a different conception of what we consider politics: not as a two-sided argument on a field of shared basic assumptions and facts, or a process of compromise to maintain centrist unity in some mythical ideal deliberative forum, but one of competing ideas of how the world should look and who gets to exist in that world. Recent events have already sketched the outlines of a grim future that is nearer than we think, an eco-apartheid where the wealthy are walled off in protective compounds with access to the resources needed to survive on this planet. We are already seeing this in global border politics: Trump’s border wall is an early weak signal of this eco-apartheid to come, as climate change will increase the flows of migration across the globe.
We have to decarbonize as fast as possible, and we have the technical and technological tools to do so. What is lacking is the political power and imagination, and organizing a broad, multi-racial coalition with aspirational demands is the clearest way forward. It’s an opportunity to completely transform that relationship between work and life, and to connect the dots across housing, economics, infrastructure and labor to build a world with a more humane, egalitarian set of values underpinning it. A world we can all live in will take real political organizing. Even dreaming it will take work.
Hegemony, as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci noted, wasn’t so much coercive as much as it something that becomes ubiquitous and fully salient in people’s lives that they agree must be reality. These ideological structures permeate into people’s everyday lives and determine what is considered common sense. Winning our planet means breaking the ideological power of fossil fuel capitalism – the same “common sense” that says we must grow at all costs and that fossil fuels are the only way to power our industrial economy. In order to confront this, the left can’t just offer technical nudges to net-zero, but has to offer its own hegemonic project that informs everyday lives and creates a sense of utopian possibilities.
“History is made as groups and forces come into conflict,” Marxist artist and scholar Deborah Barndt offers in her under-recognized book, Naming the Moment, developing a Gramscian approach alongside alter-globalization activists. She introduces an analytical tool inspired by conjectural analysis, a way to scan and assess the landscape of actors, institutions, and histories that are present in any current situation, to understand the moment you are in, and identify points of political leverage and ways to build power. A Planet to Win operates in this spirit — the moment is the climate crisis. The enemy: fossil fuel companies. The approach: a low-carbon labor movement as the only way to break this power of fossil fuel capital.
Overall, there are many points that raise further questions, chief among which is how they address the debate around growth vs. degrowth. It seems unlikely to have “one last green stimulus” before jumping off the growth treadmill and breaking the power of capital, and there is no clear way forward towards a just transition without negatively impacting the fortunes of the frontline communities. Engaging in discussions of climate debt and reparations is an intergenerational project for an intergenerational crisis; setting the table for that is a project into and of itself.
Amidst a slew of other recently published Green New Deal books, this one stands out for its ambition and full-hearted appeal to organizing for a better world. The authors’ informative missive equips readers with an accessible set of arguments, while avoiding the easy trap of climate despair. A labor organizer or housing activist could adopt the proposals laid out, and use this policy scaffolding of the Green New Deal to organize for a number of progressive agendas. There is a clear sense of optimism that invigorates this book, that in spite of a grave future that awaits our current trajectory, an everyday utopia is possible.
In all, A Planet to Win contributes to a growing intellectual tradition that talks about the climate in a way that connects with all of our lives. Where the infamous 2018 IPCC special report Global Warming of 1.5 ºC highlights the “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” we urgently need to avoid graver impacts, this book is one map, its own projection of a growing politics of solidarity and commoning built around care, maintenance, and repair. But first, we will have to win that planet. It will require a political imagination — a climate imagination — unlike little we’ve ever enacted.
Joal Stein is an independent curator, writer and organizer focused on investigating spatial and social power through contemporary culture, working across art, critical spatial practice, and social engagement. He works with artists and cultural strategists to create innovative models for social change, and can be found at joalstein.com.
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