The push for net zero has become a new arena for class conflict, where the powerful profit and the rest suffer. Nicholas Beuret's incisive critique and actionable strategies empower us to fight for a truly sustainable and equitable future.
Or Something Worse exposes the bleak realities of the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Greening the economy has become a one-sided war, as governments and businesses squeeze the living standards of ordinary people. We need to seize control of the transition in order to reshape it to equitable ends.
Existing policies won’t limit global heating to anything close to a safe level. Claims of sustainability disguise a zero-sum battle where the powerful profit and everyone else foots the bill. Green growth was supposed to bring increased wealth for all. Instead, work has been degraded, energy bills have soared, and the most basic necessities have become expensive and scarce.
We need to disrupt green capitalism. Nicholas Beuret follows those already fighting back through ‘don’t pay’ campaigns, blockades of fossil-fuel infrastructure, and community counter-planning. He shows we have the tools not only to stop climate change but to build a fairer future.
I was completely taken by surprise by Or Something Worse. I picked it up off an interesting title, yet in may just be the best book on climate praxis and progressive action more broadly I have yet read. In this work I can see the ideas from many other great authors like Vincent Bevins, Grace Blakeley, Mark Fischer, Jason Hickel, and more informing and advancing his own.
From Bevins’ latest work, he takes that political action can’t risk creating a void to be filled by reactionaries, from Fischer he takes the idea of capitalist realism, and how to avoid the trap of political realism, and from Blakely he takes the success of municipal political action.
Or Something Worse is the ideal handbook for understanding what is happening, and what we must do about it. Despite covering a wide breadth of problems and solutions, Beuret manages to pack it all into a short 200 page read. This makes it a fantastic book to recommend as an entry point (but still well worth it for long time followers of the authors mentioned above).
Beuret brings new angles to many issues, and is particularly uninterested in moralising about personal guilt in the face of climate change. Beuret takes a sober, and material approach to examining the climate crisis. He frames climate anxiety and doomerism, not as a personal failing that must be overcome, but a natural consequence of our material realities. Even increased political apathy or inaction he sees as a consequence of climate change and suppressed political futures. This view of human behaviour is more grounded and easier to comprehend and address than the usual spiel about how we must all not be so gloomy.
Beuret also deconstructs the myth of choice that underpins neoliberal markets. People can only be failures in a model that presents no good choices and scolds people for making them. Beuret does not dodge global north complicity in their consumption but acknowledges limitations to the presumption of choice.
Beuret’s analysis of hope is also quite sobering. He does not mince words as he describes the way climate change and rising authoritarian capitalism will cause hope to contract, and with it possible futures. A simple cause and effect on reality. What we can achieve is limited by what we can hope, and what we can hope is limited by our material conditions. He sees this contraction of hope as serious and measurable.
His exploration of unions and their role in leftist organising addresses a long held question of mine. Many progressives see Unions as the be all and end all of leftist potential. Here, Beauret sees unions not as an inherently successful or even progressive force, but merely a way of organising with potential for both reactionary and radical applications. Unions can not be expected to mobilise to disrupt their own industries, and are not a de facto ally in climate struggles or the working class. Climate change has radically changed existing frameworks where many of the strongest unions are unable to be representative of the needs of the working class more generally. Beauret makes a strong case that people need to organise not simply as part of a workforce, but as part of a community, and the most successful outcomes for unions in the past have been a consequence of a whole community response, not unions exclusively. This broader kind of community organising is what he champions.
I found also his descriptions on how landlords and farmers are impacted by the transition economy and why they form the base of fascist anti-climate movements enlightening.
Another useful insight is his articulation of the difference between militant stunts and direct action. Beauret clarifies why actions such as those famous from Extinction Rebellion have not seen much success, and what targeted, sustained (being the most important word) disruption can actually achieve. You can’t just blockade a pipeline, you have to keep blockading them. The consistency is more influential than the scale.
One of the more terrifying ideas the book raises is that collapse is not coming to save us. We might in some dark part of our planning for the future, be counting on finally hitting the wall, so we can start to rebuild. But the more likely dystopia is not a collapse, but a continuation. A survival in a hateful crushing authoritarian net zero world.
“Climate catastrophe will not do to the state and to capital what the Left has singularly failed to do. Climate catastrophe won’t do the political work of revolution for us”
The book describes a grim future not of fascism, or climate collapse, but simply of the continuation and consolidation of captitaliam and neoliberalism, as harsh and cruel a possible future as anything brought by rapid collapse.
We all want to see climate change halted at any cost, but Beuret makes a clear picture of the world we are building when we accept any cost. Jobs created by green transition will include much private security and police to protect new lithium mines required for battery technologies, more hazardous and unreliable work, and less teachers and care workers.
By about halfway through this book, I thought it might be the most miserable book I would read this year. Beuret turns this around into something more materially hopeful than anything verbose and unsubstantial that usually closes out books like these: a clear plan of action.
Beuret thoroughly examines tactics like price refusal and blockades, and finds battlegrounds in prices and pipelines. In contrast to the more online-left, Beuret puts into serious question the underlying logic that seizing the state would accomplish anything of itself. The state is no more a magical solution than ‘future technologies’. Here he compels leftists to build municipal level movements. It’s small, it will be too late to stop everything, but it’s what it will take. His sober, clear-eyed honesty, attached to a plan, provides more to hope from than a radical optimism that falters time and time again.
“Ecological catastrophe compresses our lives, reduces the space for action and drains the colour and richness from existence, making the remaining possibilities thinner and more brittle.
This is the squeeze.
The reality of having to choose who eats and who doesn’t diminishes us.
It is the material reality of the catastrophe itself. Politics, like everyday life, is shaped by what we can imagine, and is bound to the material world. As material possibilities contract, and disruption and crisis come to characterise daily life, political action itself becomes a casualty of the climate crisis, degraded along with wheat yields and freshwater supplies.
The squeeze enables us to name and take hold of the new terrain of political action.
Everything - from the price of eggs to which essential service will be closed - will for the foreseeable future be shaped by the squeeze.
The squeeze is a specific historical moment where the strategy of never-ending expansion has become exhausted, terminating in both the climate crisis and the transition to another kind of ‘green’ economy.
The transition to a green economy is returning us to a state of economic nationalism and neo-mercantile politics, underpinned by the shadow of ‘security interventions’ and a renewed round of resource colonialism and outright war.
The squeeze is not only a problem of prices and shortages. It is a question of deteriorating physical and mental health as social and health services are pushed to breaking point, amid constant disruptions.
Resist the squeeze!
2. Limits.
The Imperial Mode of Living in the North is the principal cause of climate change, and it is production and consumption in the Gobal North that must be radically changed if there is to be any hope of preserving a liveable climate. It is an economy built on borrowed parts, many of them neoliberal. It is an economy that ruthlessly punishes the poor, enables the continued assent of asset managers and monopolists, encourages rentierism and calls for the relentless draining of resources from the Global South to build a shiny green high-tech future for all.
Just scrolling on our phones uses enough electricity to destabilise the atmosphere.
What technology can be implemented to save jobs? None. For most manufacturing, green means less labour. There is no teleology bound to green frontier industries and technologies. There is no technological fix.
We already see the shape of the green economy. Broken promises and lost communities rub up against an escalation of the gig economy. Contract work proliferates in the Global North, while few manufacturing jobs are created. Instead they stay in Asia, where working conditions remain poor, and workers must fight just to be paid. So far, what the green transition looks like is an installation economy. From IT to construction to manufacturing, an under appreciated amount of what we think of as manufacturing or industry consists of setting up things made elsewhere. Within green capitalism, the labour of assemblage has displaced manufacturing as the key sector of job and business growth.
In place of promised manufacturing jobs, the transition economy creates installation work. Precarious, semi-skilled and largely controlled by small businesses, this work is unlikely to revive shattered communities or provide a significant number of local supply chains. Instead, installation work deepens the trend towards an increasingly fragmented working class, and the total dominance of the service sector in the Global North.
Rounds of automation in services does not lead to productivity gains but to more fragmented and deskilled work, contributing to rising precarity and stagnant wages. AI is more likely to contribute to a deskilling of installation work than to increase work productivity, substituting for labour instead of enhancing it.
Newer factories rely heavily on automation, leading to fewer manufacturing jobs. This shift exacerbates job precarity and undermines efforts to secure stable industrial employment.
There is no transition or alternative without the ‘green’ resources and the growth of the extraction business. It is an illusion. The extractive frontier is often a warzone. Digging, blasting, mining; hidden from view, it is the dirty work of the green economy.
None of the policies or technologies that underpin the transition tackle the persistent crisis of social reproduction across the Global North, nor the issue of demographic change. The transition continues the tradition of ‘trickle-down’ economics, leaving inequality unaddressed. It leans into the monopoly power of existing industrial and tech corporate behemoths.
The International Energy Association (IEA) has estimated that nearly half of all future carbon emission reductions must come from technologies either in development now, or that are yet to be developed. That is, half of the technologies needed to ensure the planet remains habitable haven't been invented yet.
Big Tech and the rise of platform capitalism have created a situation ‘beyond capitalism,’ one verging on a feudal system, because they tend towards rentierism (ownership and income from scarce resources rather than from productive activity).
Ultimately, the hope embedded in government transition programmes is that these incentives will spur a surge in investment in new productive capacities, green industries and the application of novel technologies to existing industries including the service sector, to boost productivity and cut emissions. But there are serious doubts as to whether or not this will, in fact, lead to growth-creating innovations. It's also not clear, given the failures of many of the new technologies that have been declared essential to the transition such as carbon capture and storage and modular nuclear reactors, whether they will even deliver on carbon reduction goals.
3. Inequalities.
All the sectors with government support and investment pouring in are predominantly male. What we find in discussions of the transition is a political emphasis on what men stand to gain or lose, making the legitimacy of the green transition subject to broader misogynistic questions of the ‘decline of men’. Men occupy the vast majority of ‘green’ jobs, from offshore wind industry jobs to climate finance roles.
Climate change is also intensifying the work of care. Service industries focused on social reproduction, such as health, care, and education, are growing rapidly in most Global North countries. In part this is a demographic issue. Many are ageing, and there are a number of intersecting health crisis, including mental health crisis, that call for more care and health workers.
The climate squeeze will continue to accentuate the gender division of unwaged care work. Unlike manufacturing and other heavy industries, there is little government support forthcoming for care, health, and education work. In fact, all three have faced severe cuts and lack of investment. All three sectors employ far more women than men. Green capitalism is no different in its eagerness to exploit the cheap labour of women. Clearly, to matter politically in the transition, you have to matter financially to capitalism.
Job growth doesn’t mean job improvement or wage rises. So increasing the number of jobs in these sectors without reforming existing conditions will merely make women work harder for less in the green transition. More unpaid labour will be expected from them, while they continue to occupy the majority of poorly paid roles within the care industries. In sum, the need for care will increase along with the stress of providing it.”
In the end, besides aiming to refuse the price of the transition, holding the villains accountable, and planning sabotage of choke points in the extraction industries, a blockade needs to be one of permanent conflict, sustained by community support that drive both disruptive action and behavioral change.
An excellent intervention into the discussions of transitions which is prevalent in climate organising and discourses. Rather than arguing 'for a transition' in the abstract, Beuret analyses the grim realities of the capitalist transition which is already taking place.
The first half of the book lays out the details of this transition, giving a well-written, depressing account of how markets and modern states are chaotically pursuing 'green' policies for the sake of profit, at the expense of the working class. This is all really well researched and explained- as somebody who's been in this area for a while, the bits I already knew about were usefully articulated, and the bits I didn't were very helpful additions to my understanding.
Following from this, the third quarter continues to give these details, but starts to think about how these transitions can be proactively refused. Here, a potted history of types of political refusal is really nicely given, providing a useful context for thinking through how that might be done now. I found both these sections worthwhile, but hope everybody is willing to persevere through an intense barrage of harsh realities. I don't say this to suggest that these shouldn't be exposed to a wide audience, but that a bit more signposting to the final section could've been useful to keep laying breadcrumbs towards the less crushing bit of the book.
For me, the last section is the most politically valuable. In refusal of the actually existing capitalist transition, the author begins a vision of 'counter-planning'. This process would allow workers and communities to be the agents within the changes which need to take place, finding what path they want to follow and the priorities they want for their society. As somebody who's part of an organisation just starting on this process of 'counter-planning', these chapters will be a precious resource for grounding people in our efforts. They lay out the concept in an accessible and exciting way, as well as hinting at possible tensions to be aware of. The author does not go into a huge amount of detail on what transition counter-planning may look like in it's specifics, but this may be because it's meant as a step towards starting to do it, rather than an experienced manual.
Highly recommend and will be returning to this book in the future.