But when workers heard the ruling class say “tighten your belts,” they correctly understood that such a program was never going to apply to the wealthy. It would always mean: lower your expectations. And accept a worse tomorrow for your children. The entire history of the labor movement was clear: it was the class enemy who told them to do more with less. In 1980, the Democrats’ share of the union-family vote dropped from 63 percent to 50 percent. Reagan won with Morning in America while Carter lost with his Protestant hand-wringing over decadence and materialism.

Volcker and Carter weren’t environmentalists (nor were they anti-environmentalists), but their belt-tightening policies fit all too neatly with an environmentalism increasingly focused on consumer cutbacks. And the corporate drive to make such regulation a matter of voluntary consumer choices quickly made it a middle-class lifestyle, the antithesis of Mazzocchi’s vision. As companies moved jobs overseas to cut down on labor costs, it was all too easy to blame environmentalists and diffuse the power of the environmental-labor united front.

That McDowell coal miner might be skeptical about climate change but that’s only because those are the cards (and the economy) capitalism has dealt him. Instead of trying to get him to #FuckingLoveScience, we should be trying to organize him into a socialist program of full employment and democratic control of production to rebuild the country and the world with an eye on radically lowering emissions.

Cap and trade doesn't disciple capital; it coddles it. It does alarmingly little to force a sharp break from fossil fuel dependence. In fact, it actually establishes barriers to the comprehensive zero-carbon transition we need by giving big emitters an easy out. Instead of making the big, risky investments necessary to ditch carbon-intensive technologies outright, they can simply purchase cheap offset credits from other countries, deferring the vital work of building a carbon-free future.

[...] We have to recognize that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced “carbon footprint” — as if we could just step more lightly and allow nature to repair itself. This is, paradoxically, one of the most anthropocentric positions imaginable, since it presumes that it is the eternal and natural state of the world to be habitable for humans. But God didn’t create the world specifically for us. Natural history is indifferent to humans and every other living being, and is characterized by chaotic change and mass extinctions, not homeostatic balance.

In response to the charge of hubris and Prometheanism, it is just as important to emphasize that though we accept the inevitability of attempting to “plan” nature, the socialist project does not aim at controlling nature. Nature is never under our control, and there are always unintended consequences. But just as we cannot trust either the market or a policy elite to automatically produce just economic outcomes, we cannot assume that an unmolested nature will provide us with a safe and abundant world in which to live, in this or any other social system. And so, in the process of achieving the post-scarcity order that the Marxist biologist David Schwartzman calls “solar communism,” we will take up the task of cleaning up the mess capitalism has made, and creating an Anthropocene more rational, democratic, and egalitarian than the one we now inhabit.

Venture capital is designed to demand large returns in the short term. This makes VC firms unlikely to support the sort of research that produces technological breakthroughs, which requires generous financing over long periods of time. Science operates on a different timetable than capitalism.

[...] the Right may be onto something when it describes global warming as a Bolshevik plot: curbing climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of our economic system and the role of the state in orchestrating it. Conservatives grasp at a visceral level just how vast the implications of the ecological crisis really are. For them, rejecting climate change is a perfectly rational political position.

We shouldn’t think for a moment that popular GOP denialism is set in stone. The Right’s fundamental mission is to preserve capitalist class power — if we let them, they’ll find a way to use climate policy to do that.

But as Adorno put it, “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.” This aesthetic aversion to ambitious technologies and Promethean modernity communicates precisely the wrong message about what must be done to address new environmental dangers and improve people’s lives.

What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable. Worse still, many things that undermine human flourishing or even threaten our existence remain profitable, and, without regulatory intervention, companies will continue to produce them.

This — the market’s profit motive, not growth or industrial civilization — caused our climate calamity and the larger biocrisis.