The book’s chapters are divided into two sections. Part I examines the power of the fossil fuel industry and how the climate movement might overcome it. Chapter 1 examines the pillars of the industry’s economic and political power. It begins with a brief historical overview of fossil fuels and the forces underlying energy transitions since the eighteenth century. Turning to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I trace the Republican Party’s evolution into an unwavering servant of the fossil fuel industry. I also analyze why the industry’s power has not been seriously undermined by Democratic politicians in Washington.

Chapter 2 examines climate wins. I focus on campaigns against coal-fired power plants, oil and gas drilling, and pipelines. Grassroots movements have been one of several important factors in these victories. The outcomes have also depended on the configuration of ruling-class forces, for instance whether or not a particular sector or firm has acquired a material stake in stronger regulations. Recent climate victories come nowhere close to ending the climate emergency, but they offer clues about how we might abolish fossil fuels over the next several decades. 

Part II consists of four historical chapters about non-climate movements that triumphed against capitalists: U.S. abolitionism, New Deal labor reforms, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and campaigns against local air pollution in the 1960s. The first three examples are very well known, and often cited by climate organizers, but the sources of their success are often misunderstood. Some common patterns emerge in my reading of these movements. In each case, a radical minority forced some elites to confront their more parasitic colleagues. Usually the movement’s pressure was locally concentrated in the sense of targeting one or a few companies, industries, or sub-national political jurisdictions; success at the local level then paved the way for larger-scale change. Each of these chapters concludes with a section on “Implications for the Climate Movement.”

Chapter 3 shows how the abolitionist movement forced Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders into open confrontation. Though the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was the immediate catalyst for secession, the most important abolitionist activity of the prior forty years was non-electoral in nature. Enslaved people fled their oppressors, their free comrades sheltered them, and abolitionist writers and orators railed constantly against accommodation with the slaveholders. That resistance, and the desperate reactions from slaveholders, set the stage for the rise of the Republican Party and the military conflagration that created an opening for full emancipation. Once war began, the mass flight of the enslaved led the Union leadership to reluctantly endorse emancipation. The general lesson is that disruptive action by a minority of the population can push some elites to confront others.

Chapter 4 addresses the New Deal of the 1930s, particularly workers’ fight for collective bargaining rights. I focus on the Great Sitdown Strike of 1936–37 at General Motors auto plants, which paved the way for unionization in the mass production industries. This victory resulted primarily from mass disruption spearheaded by radical organizers rather than from electoral mobilization by labor unions. Workers acted courageously and creatively to bring their workplaces to a halt. The resulting disruption forced their employers to alter their behavior and to acquiesce to labor laws that had been unenforceable to that point.

The victory over GM also reveals how reforms at the national level are often only possible when the key changes have already been forced upon elites at lower levels. When movements win a localized victory over a powerful opponent, national- or even international-level reform becomes more likely. The local victories inspire other oppressed people to take action elsewhere, which is what happened after the Great Sitdown Strike. A local victory also alters the calculus of capitalist decision-making, diminishing business resistance to change at higher levels and giving the defeated capitalists an incentive to impose the same changes on their competitors. This dynamic appears in various forms throughout the book.

These lessons are reinforced by the history of Black freedom struggles in the 1950s and 1960s, the subject of Chapter 5. The conventional explanation for the movement’s success is that nonviolent demonstrators in the Jim Crow South won the sympathy of Northern liberals, who then acted to end segregation. That narrative is deeply misleading. Like with the workers of the 1930s, the Black movement’s political power stemmed from the ingenuity, militancy, and resiliency of locally-rooted organizations. Those organizations were most effective when they inflicted direct costs on capitalists, such as Birmingham retailers. The strategic centrality of boycotts and other economic disruption is often overlooked in post facto accounts of the movement against Jim Crow. The climate movement could benefit from intensifying its economic pressure campaigns against capitalists.

Chapter 6 examines the fight for clean air in the twentieth century. The 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA) forms the legislative centerpiece. Though the CAA was far from adequate, it was perhaps the strongest environmental reform in U.S. history. Furthermore, it has largely survived polluters’ attempts to eviscerate it. I analyze why significant air quality protections were achieved and maintained. In brief, the law originated in earlier state-level reforms in California. Those reforms responded to the fears of certain sectors of capital that perceived the smog crisis as a threat to their ability to attract workers, customers, and investors. Once the California reforms and then the CAA took root, they helped expand the number and power of capitalists with a material interest in the maintenance of regulations. Environmental activists accelerated this process in multiple ways, including through petitions and protests targeting regulators, coalition-building with labor unions, and dogged monitoring of polluters. Electoral and legislative mobilization at the local and state levels complemented those tactics.

Chapter 6 also profiles a movement for clean air in the workplace. In 1969 West Virginia coal miners waged a historic series of strikes against the coal dust that was sickening and killing them. The strikes were “political” in that the workers struck against their employers as a way of winning changes in government policy. They forced their state legislature to pass a new health and safety law, which then set the stage for landmark federal legislation. Though not typically considered part of the modern environmental movement, the coal miners’ struggle holds lessons for building the climate movement. It shows that workers who withhold their labor have unique power to force rapid changes in government policy and thus demonstrates what might be achieved if we can unite the climate and labor movements. The 1969 coal miners’ strikes push us to reflect on how we might build that unity.

The book’s main focus is how the movement can contribute to rapid decarbonization. In the Conclusion I turn attention from the pace of the transition to how the costs and benefits are distributed. Human institutions and hierarchies profoundly shape the ways that societies respond to ecological crisis, determining how much suffering accompanies climate disaster and who must endure it. Elites will invariably seek to pass along the costs of both climate chaos and decarbonization to anyone they think they can force to shoulder the burdens: workers, consumers, renters, patients, caregivers, women, children, elders, disabled persons, tuition-payers, communities of color, refugees, the Global South as a whole. Far-right members of the elite will escalate their demagogic attacks on the victims of climate violence and will attract mass followings in affluent countries. Our solidarity is therefore more vital than ever. Building that solidarity means prioritizing both decarbonization and the concerns for equity that are central to the “climate justice” movement. I analyze two dimensions of climate justice, resistance to environmental racism and the struggle for worker rights, and offer some thoughts on why, and how, communities of color and the labor movement must be central to the climate fight. This is not only the morally right approach, it’s strategically imperative for our movement.