While the world is burning, the rulers of this capitalist hellscape continue to carry out, support and enable the ongoing genocides against the Palestinians — with ever new levels of horror and cruelty — and in Sudan.
They sacrifice countless lives and the needs of working-class and oppressed people for their geopolitical interests. Not just in Palestine, but in the wider Middle East, in Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They use particularly anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism and attacks on trans people as a battering ram for their reactionary authoritarian turn, which also fuels more broader racism, sexism and queerphobia.
At the same time, the limited climate protection measures that the ruling classes have been forced to adopt due to pressure from the climate movement are under attack in many places. Fossil fuel capital is dropping its greenwashing masks, replacing alleged net-zero emission goals and previously planned investments in renewable energy by increasing oil and gas spending. Investments into nuclear energy are also rising significantly with more than 40 countries planning to increase nuclear energy production.
Trump’s right-wing policies echoed by European leaders
Trump, Musk and the U.S. tech “broligarchy” — who have followed Palantir and joined “the battle for American military supremacy” with tech executives being enlisted as uniformed officers — are the epitomization and at the helm of the reactionary and authoritarian turning point. Large layers of the ruling class and their political representatives internationally, particularly in Western imperialist countries, have embarked on this qualitative and historic shift.
However liberal green capitalism is no ally to the climate movement either. While everyone is legitimately scared of Trumpism, the supposedly more rational, progressive and democratic European Union has entered militarization overdrive.
Trying to exploit people’s security fears in this period of seemingly never ending multi-crises to justify slashing welfare to build warfare states, it has also cut back on environmental and climate protection, favoring competitiveness and deregulation. The European Green Deal has basically been replaced by the “Clean Industrial Deal” that aims to boost economic growth and to re-industrialize Europe. In keeping with the increasing levels of insanity under this system, negotiations on the EU’s 2040 climate target will be led by the far-right Patriots for Europe group and the EU Commission proposes to include carbon offsets to “meet” the target.
The backlash against climate action is interlinked with the general reactionary backlash and one cannot be fought without fighting the other. In this period, which is marked by increasingly naked imperialism west and east, militarization, and more authoritarianism and oppression, it is more urgent than ever that the climate movement builds intersectional, militant struggles hand-in-hand with the entire working class.
That means fighting unconditionally alongside working masses and its most oppressed layers for liberation and against exploitation on an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist basis. Like Greta Thunberg said in October 2024 at a climate march in Milan, Italy: ”If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist“.
Taking a chainsaw to the climate and environment
Together with their declaration of war against migrants and the most oppressed layers of the working class, Trump and the MAGA camp are also leading a full-frontal assault on all climate and environmental protection. The notorious “drill baby drill”, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and terminating Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump referred to as Green New Deal and dubbed “Green New Scam”, were only the opening salvos.
With shocking news on an almost daily basis, Trump has been carrying out what far-right climate deniers and fossil fuel capital have been thirsting for for a long-time. He has smashed climate and environmental regulations left and right, fast-tracked the construction of fossil fuel projects, and frozen funds for clean energy projects.
He has fired thousands of workers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration — whose close to $6 billion budget he also plans to cut by almost 40% putting weather forecasts in peril. He has attacked the EPA’s landmark finding “which classifies greenhouse gases as a public health threat and allows for climate regulations”.
In April, Trump signed executive orders instructing “the Justice Department to “block states from enforcing climate laws” and others “to boost U.S. coal production and consumption”, which, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), makes “no economic sense“.
Trump is advancing the interests of his fossil fuel capital donors also abroad, “using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world”.
Data centres’ energy greed
Their priorities are clearly converging with those of Big Tech. This is evidenced by the list of key donors to Trump’s campaign and “a boom in gas power plant construction in the US to facilitate data centre energy usage” who in return provide AI for fossil fuel exploration.
The fossil fuel company Energy Transfer “received requests to power 70 new data centers” — the very same company sued Greenpeace, claiming the NGO orchestrated the Standing Rock protests, who now has to pay $660m in “damages”.
According to the International Energy Agency, “global electricity consumption from data centers is projected to more than double”, with the U.S. and China expected to drive 80% of this growth. PJM, the largest energy grid in the US, has trouble meeting demand and is expected to ramp up prices, in some areas by more than 20%.
This is a reflection of the currently accelerating New Cold War between the two superpowers fighting for world hegemony and the crucial importance of AI and the tech-sector within that. Alongside enormous demands on electricity, data centers also need huge amounts of water. “One large data center can consume as much as 5m gallons [~19m liters] of water each day, the equivalent to a town of up to 50,000 people.”
More cuts mean more deaths
Trump’s policies will not only exacerbate and accelerate the climate crisis and environmental destruction, they will also leave the working class, especially its most oppressed layers, even more vulnerable to extreme weather events and catastrophic wildfires by purging and attacking the funding of those very organizations that are meant to warn and protect people.
The devastating Texas flash floods in early July, which at the time of writing are known to have killed over 130 people, are a horrible case in point. While in the past, rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would have arrived within hours at the emergency location, this time it took three days! Why? Because of the cost control measures implemented by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — she has to personally sign off any expenditures above $100,000 .
Moreover, at times only 16% (!) of emergency calls were answered because hundreds of call center workers had been fired earlier. And Scientific American revealed that Texas had failed to spend hundreds of millions in federal aid for “flood protection, tornado safety and the type of warning systems that could have saved some of the 129 people killed in Texas’ recent flash flooding”.
“New normal” under disaster capitalism
It is another tragic irony that at the same time as Trump began his spate of climate attacks, the devastating Los Angeles fires that killed at least 25 people were raging.
Meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus wrote at the time in the Guardian “the ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.” In the same article, Holthaus warned that in the following weeks Los Angeles will face an elevated risk for catastrophic flooding through atmospheric rivers, which has unfortunately proven accurate with more than 20 million people in southern California under flood watches in early March.
This is just one of the countless brutal examples of an apocalyptic “new normal” under disaster capitalism: 2024 was with 1.60°C above pre-industrial levels yet another “hottest year on record”. The last 10 years were also the hottest decade on record, marking the first crossing of the 1.5°C threshold on an annual basis.
For the first time there is the risk that the world could even experience a year above 2°C before 2030. And 2025 has continued the trend — of the first six months this year, three were the hottest, two the second hottest and one the third hottest compared to the same months in previous years since records began.
Accelerating climate and environmental breakdown
These phenomena are in line with findings of a recent study led by renowned climate scientist James Hansen. It documents how “the rate of global warming since 2010 has increased by more than 50 percent over the rate of warming in the preceding four decades. The rapid meltdown of polar ice could shut down a key ocean current by 2050, triggering catastrophic surges of sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast and dangerous climate shifts in northwestern Europe.”
On the other side of the globe, “fresh water from melting Antarctic ice is projected to weaken the world’s most powerful ocean current [the Antarctic Circumpolar Current] by 20 percent in the next quarter century”. This would not only intensify extreme weather conditions in particular regions, but also accelerate global warming itself and possibly contribute to further sea level rise.
Moreover, global heating has for the first time in millenia caused a third of the Arctic tundra to turn from a carbon sink (which removes CO2 from the atmosphere) to a carbon source fuelling global heating, as CO2 stored in permafrost is released when the soil thaws. And a landmark study found that across the globe, earth’s carbon sinks have, at least temporarily, collapsed in 2023 and basically not absorbed any carbon emission, while the capacity of oceans to take up carbon shows also signs of decreasing. These findings have not been factored in by climate models, meaning the real climate heating dynamic might very well be even above the models’ projected temperature increases.
While even more apocalyptic scenarios are on the horizon if the accelerating train of disaster capitalism is not derailed by revolutionary action of the working class and oppressed internationally, runaway climate and environmental crises have been and are producing large-scale devastation and catastrophes on a daily basis across the globe.
An escalating human cost
A report by Climate Center and World Weather Attribution finds that in 2024 alone, millions were displaced due to extreme weather events and estimates that tens or hundreds of thousands have been killed. And according to the WHO, between 2030–2050, the climate crisis will “cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone”.
Climate disasters hit oppressed and poor people hardest, particularly in the Global South where 99.7% of the two billion people who will be exposed to extreme heat live and the 10 countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are all located. “Heat inequality is causing thousands of unreported deaths in poor countries and communities across the world”, as Friederike Otto (who wrote about the cruel inequality of the climate crisis in her book Climate Injustice) points out.
In Gaza, a 2024 heatwave brought scorching temperatures on top of Israel’s genocide, which is interlinked with the ecocide in Gaza, a result of “Israel’s Deliberate and Systematic Environmental Destruction in Gaza”.
Next to the inequality between countries, working class people, especially the most oppressed and poor who additionally make up the large majority of essential workers, are hit hardest by disasters within regions. Moreover, the climate crisis itself exacerbates oppression, genocide, war and conflict; all of which are interlinked.
Trump’s cutting of USAID will have murderous effects in this regard. “Research indicates that women and girls are up to 14 times more likely to be harmed during a disaster. For those who survive, climate-induced disasters can amplify gender inequalities, making them more vulnerable to GBV”. And indeed, several studies find that gender based violence (GBV) increases with rising temperatures, depending on the study and country, by 4.5-8% per 1°C. Also queer people are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis in a variety of ways such as discrimination in disaster relief or retributive religious violence.
Far-right Climate Lies
With their dark Orwellian newspeak, the far-right of course turn this reality on its head and try to cynically abuse people’s suffering to foster their reactionary agenda. Trump, Musk and MAGA acolytes blamed the LA fires on “wokeism”. They attacked the head of the L.A. firefighters Kristin Crowley with anti-LGBTQIA+ hatred and claimed that people died because investments in DEI programmes were a distraction and a waste of money. Following the same playbook, MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk blames DEI for the high death toll of the Texas floods.
In Valencia (Spain), where devastating flash floods killed at least 228 people in October 2024, the far-right party VOX and right-wing Popular Party (PP) had earlier shut down the Emergency Unit (UVE) meant to deal with climate change related emergency scenarios. They cut the budget of the Valencian Climate Change Agency by 99% leaving the region more vulnerable, as reported by Miguel Urban.
In the days after the disaster, the far-right then released “a storm of denialist mud and reactionary sludge”. They spread vicious racist and xenophobic poison, for example claiming that NGOs like the Red Cross would only help migrants or blaming the looting on migrant people. They fused climate denialism — ”there have always been floods in these areas” — with attacking environmentalists with lies that their pressure caused the removal of dams from the Franco era, which otherwise would have supposedly protected the people from the floods. VOX MP Pepa Millán said in parliament: “What kills is to have destroyed the dams out of pure climate fanaticism. That’s what kills, not climate change.” While some environmentalists even received death threats, the far-right presented their hero against the apocalypse: Franco.
And in Porto Alegre (Brazil), the far-right cynically abused the horrible floods in 2024 that killed over 180 people to peddle their climate denialist conspiracy theories. As Miguel Urban writes, “Influencers in the far-right ecosystem use similar fake news stories and even the same slogans. “The people for the people” was used in the tragedy of Porto Alegre, while “only the people save the people” could be heard in Valencia.”
The far-right try to reappropriate slogans emerging organically from the working class and link them to attacks on public disaster relief. After the floods in Valencia, far-right influencers have even urged “instagram users to vote which villages should receive relief”. Florent Marcellesi calls this “techno-libertarian solidarity: arbitrarily and where profits and the private law of the strongest and most popular prevail.”
This approach fits very neatly with their call for a strong(wo)man-leader. Whether with a narrative about a supposedly better past — “life was better with Franco” —, the FPÖ’s biblical promise of “5 good years” or Trump’s rhetoric about a “Golden Age”, the far-right weaponizes people’s insecurities and fears. As antidote they present the idea that a strong(wo)man savior-like figure is the only hope and force capable of salvaging the people and the country from multi-crises, accelerating decline of the once great nation, rising crime and insecurity, which they blame on migrants, oppressed people generally and climate fanaticism.
Climate denialism is a central ideological tool of rightwing populists and the far-right internationally, which they link with other reactionary ideology, especially anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, to advance their racist, sexist and queerphobic agenda. With this poisonous combination, they aim to divert attention from and hide the class and oppression dynamics that are causing poor and oppressed people to bear the brunt of the extreme weather events and their knock-on effects — sometimes even actively blaming oppressed people and those trying to mitigate the climate crisis for the suffering caused — as well as to obfuscate the fundamental cause driving and accelerating the climate crisis itself: capitalism.
Capitalism, a threat to life, health, and safety
Again the L.A. fires give plenty of examples to make it abundantly clear what counts in this system based on private ownership of the means of production. Under capitalism, the private profits of a small ruling class are by design put over the needs and livelihoods of the vast majority of humanity and force is used to secure those profits and the system itself, especially in the recent period where the hegemony of the ruling class and their institutions are increasingly undermined.
Although “wildfires in the western U.S. have become larger, more intense and more destructive”, money has been invested into beefing up the police (part of the “special body of armed men”, as Lenin called the police and military whose role is to protect the capitalist state and its class relations) instead of the fire department. The L.A. police department received budget increases last and this year of $125.9 million (7%) and $160.5 million (8.1%) respectively. In contrast the L.A. fire department “has been underfunded, under-resourced, and understaffed for many, many years” according to Barneveld-Taylor, a LAFD veteran who supported women and people of color to get hired. This picture is confirmed by L.A. fire chief Crowley herself, who said in a memo from December 2024 that a $7 million reduction in overtime had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires”.
Modern day slavery
The holes left through the lack of investment are plugged by incarcerated firefighters, who with minimal training and for almost no pay — they earn “$5.80 and $10.24 a day and an additional $1 per hour when responding to active emergencies” — risk their lives under semi-slave work conditions.
Under §13 of the U.S. constitution, slavery in a more “legal” form basically continues today. A 2022 joint report from the ACLU and The University of Chicago’s Global Human Rights Clinic revealed that across the U.S., “incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused”.
This is of course highly racialized. The same report shows that Black people are imprisoned almost five times as often than white people, but represent only 13% of the U.S. population. In her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, Michelle Alexander lays bare that “the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa at the height of Apartheid.” In California, incarcerated firefighters make up as much as 30% of the state’s total wildfire forces, which is “estimated to save California tens of millions of dollars a year”.
Privatisation fuels inequality
At the other extreme, the lack of underfunding for public firefighting services has facilitated the development of private ones into a booming industry in California. Next to city governments contracting them, which is thereby partially privatizing public safety and turning it into a for-profit business, they are hired by insurance companies to increase their profits by reducing the premiums they would need to pay out or by the super-rich directly to protect their homes and properties.
Some private firefighters were hired for prices up to $2000/hour, laying bare the disgusting inequalities that capitalism produces. The Palisades Village shopping center of billionaire Rick Caruso stood almost unscathed while the surrounding neighborhood was largely burnt to the ground.
For the large majority of people in the area, the fires have exacerbated an already serious housing crisis. Despite anti-gouging rules, property owners on average increased rents by 20% in L.A. county two weeks after the fires and in some places by even over 200%. Moreover, insurance rate hikes of up to 20% in insurance rates will also displace lower-income families from fire-hazardous areas; the “very high” fire hazard areas have increased by 30% compared to 2011. These knock-on effects hit poor and oppressed people yet again harder. Under capitalism, extreme weather events generally increase existing inequalities even further.
All this shows that the rules of capitalism seriously exacerbate so-called “natural” disasters: funds to protect private property and the capitalist system are increased, those to meet the needs of the working class are reduced, and services including those responsible for public safety partially privatized.
More fossil fuels is the markets’ command
The prime example that shows the complete irrationality and hellish madness of capitalism is fossil fuel capital’s expansion of oil, gas and coal production, accelerated through the right-wing backlash, in the midst of the climate crisis spiralling out of control.
According to a Deutsche Welle article from December 2024, “an estimated 96% of oil and gas companies are exploring and developing new reserves across 129 countries [and] only five countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom — are responsible for over half of new oil and gas extraction planned by 2050, with the US alone accounting for a third”.
Moreover, investments into fossil fuel projects from the world’s 65 largest banks in 2024 have increased by 23% compared to 2023, amounting to $7.9 trillion over the last 10 years, the $5 trillion hedge fund industry is betting against green and in favor of fossil energy and while the S&P Global Clean Energy Index dropped almost by 60% since 2021, the S&P Global Oil Index increased by over 50%.
One might wonder why fossil fuel companies and investors consciously decide to risk more stranded assets at a time when renewables have already become cost competitive. The simple answer is that in the end, it’s not prices that matter but profits. The average expected profit rate for fossil fuel production is still significantly higher than for renewable energies. “Internal rates of return (IRRs) – the standard commercial measure of an investment’s profitability – are around 15% to 20% on hydrocarbons, or higher. Typical IRRs on renewables today are around 5% to 6%.”
When BP tried to pivot more towards renewables, in an attempt to ride the greenwashing wave following the 2018-2019 climate movement, its stock market value dropped by 10% from January 2020 to December 2022, whereas the stocks of competitors investing more in fossil fuels like Chevron and ExxonMobil soared by 46% and 57% respectively. In February 2023, BP “announced it would slow down the switch to renewables and put more money in oil and gas”. Further driven by the accelerating fossil backlash, the company recently announced in February 2025 to increase its annual fossil fuel investments by 20% to $10bn and cut planned investments into renewables by over $5bn to $1.5-2bn/year.
Since 2022 alone, fossil fuel companies have paid out an unprecedented $111bn to shareholders, “158 times more than the amount pledged to vulnerable nations at last year’s UN climate summit.” Those profits have been generously supported by fossil fuel subsidies, which reached a staggering $616.35bn in 2023 on a global level (explicit consumption subsidies), the highest since at least 2010 (except for 2022, when energy prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
All of this shows that it is capitalism itself that is the root cause and the working class and oppressed don’t even stand a chance to stop the accelerating climate and environmental crises unless we overcome this violent system through militant struggle.
Fossil vs. “green” capitalism – uneven and combined destruction
The capital side is of course not one homogenous bloc, different factions are competing for more favorable, meaning more profitable, conditions.
The wing representing so-called “green” capitalism for example, seized on the 2018-2019 climate movement and used it to its advantage, temporarily strengthening green capitalism’s position, reflected in the passing of the European Green Deal or Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
However, much has changed since. After the Covid pandemic largely cut across the climate movement, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered developments that allowed for the politics of fossil fuel capital to become increasingly dominant among the ruling class, which has included a strengthening of more overt and blunt climate scepticism and denialism.
The fossil backlash has been further strengthened by increasing militarization and turbo-charged by Trumpism and the international rise of the far-right, who are holy warriors of climate denialism and propagating politics in favor of fossil fuel capital from whom they often receive generous financial backing. In the US for example, fossil fuel capital has spent a staggering $96 million alone on Trump’s re-election and a total of “$445m throughout the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and Congress.”
Right-wing ideology strengthens climate denialism
Climate and environment journalist at Le Monde Nabil Wakim reviewed the politics of far-right governments and identified five major trends: 1: Total support for fossil fuels; 2: Fighting against renewable energy; 3: Weakening environmental regulations; 4: Acting against climate diplomacy; 5: Encouraging climate skepticism and denying scientific facts.
Using the momentum of Trump’s election, the Heartland Institute, a rightwing climate-denial and fossil-fuel funded think-tank that advised “Project 2025”, established a UK-EU branch at the beginning of 2025, strengthening their cooperation with European far-right parties with a foothold among MEPs via Austrian FPÖ MEPs Harald Vilimsky and Roman Haider in 2023. The Heartland Institute also seizes on reactionary politics of trade union bureaucracies. They have signed a partnership agreement with the Polish trade union Solidarność (Solidarity) — who in the recent presidential elections endorsed the far-right candidate and now president Karol Nawrocki — together, they have committed to fight the “United Nations’ oppressive climate change agenda” and the European Green Deal in order to protect the country’s coal industry.
Aptly, the book “White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism” points out that far-right parties have been changing from fear to relief parties when it comes to the climate crisis and migration, “freeing” the people from the need to fight for change and offering relief through “defending” the borders and the current mode of living in western capitalist countries.
But of course, this is nothing new: Fossil fuel capital has always opposed the energy transition. All the way from 1977 onwards when ExxonMobil started covering-up internal scientific evidence on the climate crisis, which proved to be extremely accurate, fossil fuel capital has engaged in campaigns of denial, sowing doubts, and greenwashing. Different tactics, but the same purpose: continue business as usual.
Fossil fuel capital has maintained connections to the far-right. While it was opportune for them to temporarily adapt their official rhetoric during “more liberal” times, today they can use the far-right to push their climate denialism again in a completely open way. All this strengthens the balance of forces for fossil fuel capital and gives them the confidence that they can expect the political conditions to guarantee very profitable conditions for fossil fuels to remain in place.
Nuclear provides no answers
There are clear parallels with the nuclear industry. They have also built strong ties with and received support from far-right and rightwing parties and their lobbying is focussed on exploiting legitimate fears around energy security and the climate crisis to promote nuclear energy as a supposedly clean, green and secure energy source.
They have been quite successful in this. There has been a massive shift back to nuclear underway for some years, which has not unlike the fossil fuel backlash been further accelerated through Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine, generally increasing inter-imperialist tensions and open conflicts and wars.
In 2021 the EU revealed plans, implemented in 2022, to include nuclear power (alongside natural gas) as a sustainable energy resource in their finance taxonomy and over the last years several countries have reversed or put in question their nuclear phase-out plans. At the COP28 in Dubai, 22 countries including France, the UK and the US have launched a declaration to triple nuclear energy production by 2050, which has been signed by six more countries since. While Russia and China are not among the signatories, they are also heavily expanding their nuclear energy sectors.
Despite the ongoing war, Rosatom (State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom) has been involved in building and operating 57 nuclear power plants abroad, with new projects in Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Egypt, Hungary, India, Iran, and Turkey and agreements with other Asian, African and Latin American countries, including Zimbabwe, Mali, Burkina Faso, Brazil and Uzbekistan.
Reflecting and pushing further those developments, the International Energy Agency published in January this year a report titled “The Path to a New Era for Nuclear Energy”.
Contrary to the image presented however, nuclear power is everything but clean, green and secure. Significant risks from nuclear radiation persist. A safe long term solution for nuclear waste does not exist yet and the risk for a Chernobyl and Fukushima type meltdowns is far higher than previously assumed. An article from our archives details the real suffering caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe.
One study finds that “at 99.5% [individual] reactor safety, the probability of another Chernobyl- or Fukushima-sized event is 49% for the global fleet, and that safety would have to be 99.96% in order to bring that probability below 5%”. Another study states that “such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) — some 200 times more often than estimated in the past”. Moreover, nuclear energy production is also much more carbon intensive than renewable energy sources. A study that compares the carbon emissions per kilowatt-hour based on a life cycle assessment, finds that nuclear energy is 3.5 times more carbon intensive than photovoltaic, 13 times more than onshore wind power and 29 times more than hydropower.
In our period of endless crises and horrors, with even darker clouds on the horizon, it is understandable that liberal green capitalism can once again appear like a hopeful lesser evilism, particularly for oppressed people that are in the crosshairs of far-right attacks. And although there are some real differences between far-right and more center forces with regard to their climate politics or attacks on oppressed people, we need to be clear that the latter does in no way mean an end to oppression or climate destruction, but rather a slower increase of them. Next to those party’s fundamental allegiance to capitalism, this is also due to the ruling class’s general shift to the right (and partially far-right) and towards a more authoritarian form of capitalist rule, a trend also present among more center or liberal parties.
The underlying reasons and drivers for all the increasing oppression, destruction and suffering are the growing contradictions and deep crises of capitalism, in which different superpowers in decline are fighting for world hegemony, and neither far-right nor liberal forces can overcome those contradictions.
Instead of hoping for a return of more “rational and reasonable” forces or tying oneself to them in alliances against far-right forces that would require concessions to stay within the straightjacket of capitalism, we need to build a relentless struggle against all oppression, exploitation and climate and environmental destruction from the bottom-up, a united front of of the working class with its young and most oppressed layers at the forefront. Before taking a closer look at inspiring examples of struggles and discussing ideas on how we can try to organize tactically and strategically in the most efficient ways, we will discuss green capitalism, imperialism and colonialism.
Green capitalism and imperialism
Green capitalism is the attempt by a section of capital to adapt to and profit from the climate and environmental crises. While in no way able to overcome these fundamental contradictions of capitalism, which itself are the underlying cause of these crises, it actually serves to protect the system of private profit accumulation against them.
The greening of production in capitalist core countries is fundamentally interlinked with and dependent on green imperialism, which only means that the massive suffering that imperialism (western and eastern) causes in Global South countries is cloaked in a poorly fitting “sustainable veil”.
On the ideological level, green capitalism and imperialism serve the function of manufacturing consent, to incorporate, deflect and blunt anti-system critique and thereby protect the core premises of capitalism. This happens through institutions and discourses, supported and built by a myriad of liberal climate and environmental organizations as well as for example the annual UN Climate Change Conferences, also known as the Conference of the Parties (COP).
At the same time it has to be noted, that those play a contradictory role, as they also raise consciousness around and support struggles (in the case of climate and environmental NGOs like Greenpeace for example) against climate and environmental destruction.
COPs are not our friends and helpers
The development of international discourse on climate and environmental protection is a case in point — particularly in relation to the UN conferences on the environment and the subsequent UN COP (Conference of Parties) climate conferences that started in 1995.
In the early phase, general critique of the economic system and its inherent growth imperative (in terms of GDP not human well-being) were an important feature. This was an expression of the growing environmental consciousness during the 1960s and influenced by the 1972 Club of Rome Report “Limits to Growth”, which argued that endless economic growth in terms of GDP was detrimental to the environment and social justice.
GDP is a measure of the total value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a certain time, even if those are harmful for humans or the environment. So an increase in the production of private cars would be positive, but a reduction in favour of public transport would be negative for GDP.
Since the 1970s, official language and discourse around climate and environmental protection has changed drastically. The 1987 United Nations Brundtland Report, presented growth again as the solution for environmental and social problems, also for industrial countries, and wrongly claiming that poverty was the actual cause of the problem. With terminology like “sustainable development” or “green economy”, the UN conferences increasingly pushed the idea that there could be a harmonious coexistence between capitalist economic growth, equity and the environment.
The embodied emissions fraud
However, genuinely green economic growth — decoupled from energy use and material throughput in absolute terms — is of course a blatant lie. While the EU for example boasts to have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 37% between 1990-2023 despite GDP growth of 68% during the same period, this has largely been achieved by outsourcing emission intensive production to countries with lower wages and social and environmental standards. When looking at embodied emissions in trade, you can see a clear line of demarcation between Global North and Global South countries: “China is the largest net exporter of carbon emissions, followed by Russia, South Africa, and other developing economies. The U.S.on the other hand, is the largest net importer of emissions, followed by several high-income countries such as the UK, France, Italy, and Germany.”
However, countries like China and Russia, both capitalist and imperialist, are of course no examples to follow either when it comes to climate protection or other matters, despite some on the left unfortunately praising particularly China as an inspiration for ecology and development.
Although it’s true that China has invested in and expanded renewable energy production at a far faster rate than the western capitalist countries, “clean energy is being layered on top of an entrenched reliance on fossil fuels” instead of replacing them. In 2024, construction of coal-fired power plants in China reached a 10-year high and the regime plans to build more coal plants through 2027. Moreover, China also continues to back overseas coal, oil and gas plants, particularly in countries that newly joined the BRICS coalition, as part of its imperialist strategy and “its “green” programmes bear the marks of many colonial projects”.
COPs – greenwashing and fossil & nuclear lobbying festivals
Notwithstanding the fact that Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement is of course negative for the struggle against the climate crisis, as it helps to strengthen climate denialism generally, the annual UN COP climate conferences are certainly not part of the solution either. Just like the cops in blue, ultimately they are at the heart of the problem and part of the defense of the system we need to dismantle.
Each year the COPs show, in a temporary and geographical concentrated form, the close interlinkages of green, nuclear and fossil fuel capitalism. They are the “place to be” to seal deals for the exploitation of critical minerals and rare earth elements for renewable energies as well as when it comes to expanding oil and gas as well as nuclear energy production. Being fully part of imperialist capitalism, the COPs are of course bound to fail time and time again when it comes to its central promises of limiting global heating 1.5°C or the provision of sufficient climate finance to Global South countries.
The attempt by western industrialised nations to shame and blame solely petro-states, Azerbaijan or China for the failure of the 2024 COP29 could hardly be surpassed in hypocritical cynicism. The EU brought more than 120 out of the almost 1800 fossil fuel lobbyists to the COP29 in Baku — the nuclear lobby did of course not miss the party either — and these lobbyists and governments of western imperialist powers are preparing and providing the conditions for their corporations to amass huge profits through exploitation and environmental destruction.
For this there are endless examples, but just some concrete ones: Five western fossil fuel companies BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and TotalEnergies are forecasted “to use 1/8 of World’s Carbon Budget by 2050”; six western fossil fuel corporations are responsible for 35% of Israel’s oil supply (Chevron 8%, BP 8%, ExxonMobil 6%, Shell 5%, Eni 4%, and TotalEnergies 5%) and thereby complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid and genocide against Palestinians. Shell is responsible for major crimes in the Niger Delta and TotalEnergies is, together with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) a central driver of the carbon bomb project East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, which “will produce 25 times host nations’ combined annual emissions”. Through a deal with Sudan’s former dictator Omar al-Bashir, Sweden’s Lundin Oil and Austria’s OMV have as part of an oil consortium encouraged and accepted violence to secure their oil explorations in South Sudan (1997–2003), which killed an estimated 12,000 and forced around 160,000 to flee. Still today, 60 major European banks and investors have invested over $700 million in two fossil fuel companies in South Sudan that are directly linked to and fuel extreme violence against civilians.
Green accumulation regimes
In the years following the explosion of the global climate movement in 2018-2019, liberal supposedly more progressive capital factions pushed green capitalist policy proposals like the European Green Deal in 2020 and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. This happened against the backdrop of the failure of the COPs and the increasing exposure of their nature — the COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 was dubbed “Global North greenwash festival” by Greta Thunberg — and in the context where growing layers of the climate movement had started drawing anti-capitalist conclusions.
That those green initiatives were of course not meant to genuinely address the climate crisis is clear: global emissions kept rising, repression of climate protests, more and more often dubbed “climate terrorism”, increased drastically and the subsequent COPs were held in countries with autocratic and dictatorial regimes — Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Azerbaijan — making genuine counter protests more difficult and reducing the risk of embarrassing clashes with climate protesters in western imperialist countries.
The fundamental purpose of those green industrial plans (European Green Deal, IRA) is to adjust the capital accumulation regime to the period of accelerating climate crisis and generally increasing inter-imperialist tensions in the context of the unfolding new Cold War between the US and China.
This paper for example states that “the European Green Deal reproduces a colonial and capitalist ecology by deepening the hegemony of resource imperialism and in greening a historically Euro-centered empire.” Ecological crises are turned into profitable opportunities; vehicles such as the European Green Deal Investment Plan (EGDIP) have the purpose that global financial capital can profit from the “green” transition through “[capturing] the value of untapped or underutilized wealth”.
And Pedregal and Lukic write in their essay “Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism: An Overview”, that green imperialism, which is inseparable from green capitalism, “appears as a new mode of accumulation aimed at preserving the imperial mode of living in the core” [on which the hegemony of the ruling class is (partially) built in those countries] legitimized by supposedly environmentally beneficial policies and discourses.”
The EU’s emission reductions have been largely achieved through “emission outsourcing”. In turn, Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and “green” protectionist measures like the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) — which imposes import taxes on carbon intensive industrial and agricultural products and thus makes many products from Global South countries less or not competitive — are tools for the EU to reassert their hegemony and maintain “control over new and emerging markets by disadvantaging emerging economies for their incapacity to be as “green” as the EU”.
Another key goal of FTAs and the CBAM, together with the Critical Raw Materials Act, is to ensure access to cheap raw materials as well as to hinder countries that export critical raw materials. It does this by limiting their ability to build up their own clean-energy industries by restricting them from adding value to raw materials, as for example the case with the EU’s recent free trade agreement with Chile.
Blood minerals for the “green” economy and imperialist games
Critical minerals (e.g. lithium, copper, cobalt) and rare earth elements (REEs) are absolutely essential for green accumulation regimes. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that to reach “net-zero” by 2050 globally, average demand for critical minerals would increase sixfold by 2040, with demand for selected resources exploding even more (lithium 42x, graphite 25x, cobalt 21x, nickel 19x, rare earth elements 7x). However, critical minerals are also crucial for technology in other sectors such as AI and the chip or arms industry, which is why the reactionary climate backlash will in no way slow down the skyrocketing demand.
Competition between different imperialist countries — whether the US, the EU, China, Russia or others — and geo-political blocs, fueled by the growing inter-imperialist rivalries, has ignited a neo-colonial 21st century “gold-rush” across many countries in Africa and in other regions of the Global South to the detriment of people and the environment.
Attempts to increase domestic production and recycling of critical minerals, such as through the EU Critical Raw Materials Act or Trump’s recent executive order on “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production” are not even exceptions to the rule, but part of the goal to de-risk their supply chains of critical minerals and reduce China’s enormous hegemony.
China largely controls mining (69%) of REEs and strongly dominates refining and processing of REEs (92%) and of many other crucial metals and minerals. Recent reports about possible production halts in the car industry as a consequence of China’s export ban on several REEs, used as a leverage in the continuing trade and tariffs war, underline the above points.
The local working class, particularly oppressed and young people, are brutally exploited and bear the brunt by paying with their health and often lives to barely make a living. A report from 2024 “highlights more than 400 allegations against mining companies operating in Eastern Europe and Central Asia”.
One of the most horrific examples in this context is the modern slavery and child labor, land grabbing, displacement and brutal violence that are the result of the coltan and cobalt mining in the DRC. Critical minerals are also at the heart of the recent flare up of the brutal conflict in the eastern provinces of DRC that has already killed over 7,000 since January this year and forced more than 7 million people to flee.
After the US and other western countries have supported Rwanda for a long time, thereby actively fanning instability and violence, the US now cynically exploits the peoples’ suffering with the peace-for-minerals deal between DRC and neighboring Rwanda who back the M23 rebels. Essentially, the US gets cheap access to $2 trillion worth of minerals as a reward for security support to stop a conflict they themselves have supported.
A 2024 study found that the “EU’s energy goals might expose 15–89,000 African miners to modern slavery risks [and] will consume up to 73 million cubic metres of water in water-scarce areas”. The same study also highlights that next to local environmental damage such as chemical pollution, including water and soil contamination, on a global level “the extraction and processing of critical minerals [have accounted] for 10% of GHG emissions in 2018 — a proportion expected to rise due to increasing demand and dwindling ore quality.”
Growing resource nationalism
A Global Witness report from 2024 states that “between 71% and 81% of mining production is controlled by companies from countries with advanced economies and major consumer countries”, which, together with growing demand, has in turn strengthened an increasing “resource nationalism”.
Governments and ruling classes of mineral-rich countries have increased their efforts to “maintain control over their critical mineral assets, ranging from export controls to complete nationalization of mining operations”, with 72 having adopted protectionist policies according to the same article.
Research by the China Global South Project gives concrete details: In 2020 Indonesia banned exports of unprocessed nickel; in 2022 raw lithium exports were banned in Zimbabwe and Namibia banned the export of unprocessed lithium, graphite, cobalt, manganese, and rare earth elements in 2023. Also in 2023, Mexico nationalized their lithium reserves and Chile revealed a public-private national lithium strategy.
More recently, Niger has nationalized the uranium mine Somair operated formerly by the French company Orano, moving further away from its former colonial ruler, while strengthening ties with Russia. And of course, rare earth minerals are also a central point of contention in the trade war between the US and China.
While as socialists we of course stand staunchly opposed to any form of neo-colonial exploitation, it is important to state that these protectionist measures will generally not be to the benefit of the working masses living in those countries nor the environment. Instead, they are an attempt of these countries’ ruling classes to strengthen national control and profit shares against international corporations. Instead, what would be needed and what socialists should campaign for is to take all natural resources and the means of processing them into public ownership democratically controlled by the working class. This would allow to democratically decide whether to leave the resources in the ground if the impact on the environment or local population is too detrimental, or utilize them in such a way that the benefits go to the people and not the corporations and their corrupted politicians.
Green colonialism
The guise of “sustainability” is also used to justify the imperialist exploitation of Global South countries for renewable energies. The recent EU-Namibia partnership for example, aims to massively export so-called green hydrogen produced with renewable energy to the EU, while in rural areas of Namibia two-thirds of the population have no access to electricity.
In return, local people often get water scarcity, forced resettlement and land-use conflicts. Meanwhile, Germany refuses Namibian calls for reparation payments and justice for the colonial genocide (1904-1908) of almost 100,000 people, most from the Ovaherero and Nama communities, genocide as collective punishment for resistance against colonialism.
In fact, (neo-)colonial land grabbing is a regular feature of emission offsetting projects (for example REDD+ projects) or resource and energy exploitation; ironically and tellingly fossil fuel companies are involved in both.
When done under the cloak of climate and environmental protection this has been termed “green grabbing”, which today represents around 20% of total land grabs. Land grabbing and extreme land inequality have generally intensified significantly since the 2007-2008 financial crash, with global land prices doubling over the past 15 years; 70% of global farmland is now being controlled by 1% of farms. Continued and intensified primitive accumulation — Marx used the term to describe the “brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists” — as a means to increase profitability.
The results of a 2024 Nature Sustainability study show for example, that in Brazil during the observation period 2001-2021, international investors have held direct or indirect stakes in 96% of solar parks and 78% of wind farms. The increased usage and privatization of previously (undesignated) public and common lands for renewable energies strengthens the concentration of and competition for land ownership, which generally benefits local elites and international corporations to the detriment of traditional communities, small-scale farmers and Indigenous Peoples.
New attacks on Indigenous Peoples
Another Nature Sustainability study from 2022 revealed that 69% of the close to 5,100 globally sampled energy transition mineral projects are located on or nearby Indigenous Peoples’ or peasant lands.
While “green colonialism” primarily affects Global South countries, renewable energy production and critical mineral mining also drives attacks on Indigenous Peoples, their rights and lands in the Global North such as in the United States, Canada, Australia or against the Sámi People in Sweden, Norway and Finland, as well as in Russia as exploitation of the Arctic increases.
In the US, Trump’s push to restore national “energy dominance” accelerates these attacks. Following the blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the Navajo Nation for example is today again targeted for its resources. Already in 1973, in the context of the oil crisis, Nixon had turned the Indigenous’ land into an “energy sacrifice zone”, giving extractive industries a free pass to cast environmental and social rights aside.
In “This Changes Everything”, Naomi Klein defined “sacrifice zones” generally, as “places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained or otherwise destroyed for the purpose of greater economic progress.” More recently, the term “green sacrifice zone” has often come up, usually in the context of critical mineral mining and energy transition, which specifically “refers to the destruction of ecosystems and communities to decarbonize the global economy”.
So whether to dig up coal, oil, uranium, or lithium for the sake of sustainability, the general playbook is that disadvantaged communities and their needs in the periphery — within the EU, prominent examples are the plans to build lithium mines in Portugal and Serbia, which have both sparked fierce opposition from the local population — are pushed aside, as they stand in the way of capital and geo-political interests whatever their colors.
Green justification for settler colonialism
Green arguments are even used to justify and strengthen outright settler colonialism. With a level of hypocrisy, cynicism and cruelty that is hard to imagine or put in words, the zionist Israeli regime has claimed environmental reasons to legitimize settler colonialism.
“Sadly, Israel has confiscated land from Palestinians under the guise of preventing damage to nature. For example, the Palestinian village of Ras Imweis and six adjacent areas were initially confiscated under such an excuse then turned into the settlement of Nahal Shilo. In other instances, Israeli authorities claimed certain stretches of land as “green areas,” and then turned them into Jewish settlements two to three years later.”
Morocco also uses “green transition” to support its settler colonial occupation of Western Sahara against the Indigenous Saharawi People. This occupation has been officially sanctioned by the US and Israel in exchange for Morocco signing the U.S. sponsored Abraham Accords (Bahrain, UAE and Sudan have also signed), which include the de-facto recognition of Israel’s territorial claims over the Occupied Palestinian Territories (through normalizing diplomatic relations without addressing the Occupied Territories). Several EU countries including France and Spain have also officially sided with Morocco.
Via renewable energy projects in Western Sahara, Morocco aims to further strengthen its illegal occupation. EU companies co-own (Enel Green Power) and supply (Siemens Gamesa) five wind farms. The energy is planned to be exported to Western African countries that traditionally support Saharawi independence as well as to the EU. Under the guise of sustainability, energy and profits are exchanged for the recognition of an illegal occupation that includes settler colonialism.
Transition under capitalism means more of the same
Under capitalism, a “green” transition is neither green nor social. Despite any such rhetoric, the fundamental ruthless and brutal (neo-)colonial dynamics remain the same: imperialist countries in the Global North exploit countries in the Global South for land, energy, resources and labor while outsourcing and externalizing emissions, waste and ecological costs.
While the Trump administration has been the most blunt with their imperialist claims (Greenland, Panama, Canada, Ukraine, DRC), pushing a more overt and naked form of imperialism, “green” liberalism does not differ fundamentally, as shown through the various examples how a green sugar coating is used to legitimize imperialist and colonial practices.
In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, MP Hofreiter of the Green party in Germany even came close to Trump’s brazenness. Without explicitly naming countries, he made clear how western imperialism could leverage Ukraine’s wheat exports against China: “If a country were to withhold rare earths from us, we could reply: ‘What do you actually want to eat?’”
Whether we look at western imperialist countries, China or Russia, whether bluntly stated or enforced through “soft power”, whether from climate denying Trump or “green” liberalism, capitalism cannot exist without imperialism and (neo-)colonial practices. That these different shades of the system ultimately serve the same ruling class and are paid for by people and the planet, is also poignantly shown with the changes and shifts following Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.
To compensate for halted Russian coal imports due to the import ban, the EU massively increased their coal imports from the Global South. Coal imports from South Africa rose eightfold in the first six months of 2022 compared to the year before, which exacerbated serious social and environmental problems.
At the same time, the EU has continued importing Russian oil and gas, even increasing their gas imports by 18% in 2024 compared to 2023. Financially, the EU’s import of Russian fossil fuels surpassed the level of financial aid (excluding military aid) they sent to Ukraine in 2024, EUR 21.9 bn compared to EUR 18.7 bn.
The EU’s ban on Russian coal and compensation through increased imports from Global South countries combined with the EU’s continued import of Russian fossil fuels, particularly gas, had a double effect: It directly subsidized Putin’s war chest and contributed strongly to increases in the cost of electricity for ordinary people (in South Africa and Europe), while energy corporations made windfall profits.
The high energy costs have in return been used as arguments by industrial bosses to push for more state subsidies and weaker regulations to boost competitiveness of European industry vis à vis the US and China; they sent their wish list in the Antwerp Declaration.
The European Union tried to satisfy industry’s demands with the Clean Industrial Deal. Although presented as an addition to and building on the European Green Deal, it means more public money will be used to support private profits in industry and renewable energy production while climate, environmental and social regulations are undermined and rolled back.
However, many of Europe’s industry bosses are still not happy and push for more, including stronger protectionist measures in the light of the impacts of Trump’s tariff war. ArcelorMittal scrapped its green conversion plans in Germany due to high energy costs despite EUR 1.3 bn in subsidies. The steel and automotive sectors keep slashing jobs left and right.
The protection of the climate and environment as well as of jobs, wages and working conditions will of course not be achieved through more subsidies to corporations or higher import tariffs. Instead we need militant struggle from below that links one with the other and gives a perspective to win concrete improvements and popularize more far-reaching demands such as nationalization and conversion of production under democratic workers’ control, which pose a concrete challenge to the capitalist system.
Protests, resistance and democratic self-organizing
The accelerating climate and environmental crises are ultimately caused and accelerated by capitalism and cannot be solved within it as they are fundamental systemic contradictions. Working-class people overall bear the brunt of the increasingly apocalyptic consequences and the ruling class’s indifferent responses to the crises. It is the oppressed and poor people, particularly those in the Global South, who are hit hardest, a consequence of imperialism, (neo-)colonialism and different forms of oppression without which capitalism cannot exist.
Therefore our struggle for climate justice must also genuinely be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and against all forms of oppression — one cannot exist without the other.
The following part is meant to highlight some examples of struggle that can hopefully serve as inspiration for how to make those political necessities a lived and militant reality and thereby help us going forward to rebuild a powerful climate movement that can play an effective role in the collective endeavour to win a just world for everyone.
No climate justice on occupied land
This slogan captures the crucial necessity for the climate movement to be explicitly anti-colonial, which means of course first and foremost in this period to stand and fight in solidarity with our Palestinian siblings for their liberation and against the ongoing and intensifying genocide in Gaza of which ecocide has been a central feature. The Israeli regime has deliberately and systematically used environmental destruction to attack and destroy the very foundation on which the lives of Palestinians in Gaza depend.
It’s extremely positive that for the most part, except for the liberal parts of the climate movement in Germany and Austria, the international climate movement has come out in strong support for Palestine with Greta Thunberg playing a very important role.
The Freedom Flotilla as well as the “Global March to Gaza” and the “Soumoud Convoy” (Steadfastness Convoy), the latter started in Tunisia and involved working class people, activists, trade unions and NGOs, have reinforced international attention on the genocide in Gaza, exposed the corrupt Arab regimes in the region — who have blocked and repressed the convoys such as the regimes in Libya and Egypt — and been a beacon of hope in dark times, showing that it is international working class and oppressed people who are standing up to end the unspeakable suffering.
Earlier, Thunberg had participated in a mass direct action and blockade against shipping company Maersk as part of the “Masks of Maersk” campaign aimed against the company’s weapons deliveries to Israel. The tactics deployed by the activists mirror those of mass direct action climate groups like Ende Gelände (Germany) or Code Rouge (Belgium). The former group expressed their solidarity with the action in Copenhagen and the latter has co-organized with “stoparmingisrael.be” a mass action against arms deliveries to Israel.
The struggle for Palestinian liberation as well as the struggle for genuine climate justice are ultimately a threat to the capitalist ruling class and their system based on exploitation and oppression. Hence the extreme levels of repression deployed against them, with the Palestine solidarity movement clearly being the “most wanted” of state repression internationally.
Particularly since the surge of the global climate movement in 2018-2019, repression by state authorities and private actors has been ramped up in response internationally, a trend captured in a recent report. The repression ranges from police brutality, lengthy prison sentences, branding climate activists as “climate terrorists” and prosecuting them under laws designed against terrorism or organised crime all the way to killings and disappearances, which are “increasingly common in countries including Peru, Brazil, Philippines, Peru and India”.
Mass direct action and struggle against mining and fossil projects
On May 28, Palestine solidarity activists, trade unionists and mining affected communities demonstrated in South Africa, Colombia, Peru, Germany, and Switzerland against international mining giant Glencore that is fueling Israel’s genocide with its coal shipments. Climate and Palestine solidarity groups have also organized actions against BP, which is the largest shareholder in the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that provides Israel with 28% of its oil. BP and other western corporations are therefore directly powering Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and have been rewarded handsomely for their services through gas exploration licences in occupied Palestinian waters.
Across the globe, environmentally destructive and exploitative mining as well as fossil infrastructure projects (construction plans for new or extension of existing highways, airports, pipelines, fossil fuel power plants, and recently also data centers) regularly lead to protest and resistance. Those are usually led by affected communities and environmental and climate activists. While mass direct actions where people block mines and construction sites with their bodies can be extremely powerful, they are even stronger when they involve economic strikes by workers.
One of the most inspiring and powerful examples recently is the struggle against a copper mine in Panama that has recently flared up again and become part of a wider struggle. After Indigenous people, youth, trade unions and the wider working class had won the closure of a Canadian-owned copper mine through weeks of road blockades, strikes and protests in autumn 2023, in what became Panama’s largest protest movement in decades, the potential re-opening of the mine has sparked renewed protests recently.
Those have merged with a nationwide struggle against the hated social security and pension reform of President Mulino, which is a frontal attack on the entire working class. After the teachers’ union called for an indefinite strike on April 23, the struggle has escalated and developed into an “indefinite national strike”, also involving workers and unions from other sectors including the powerful construction union, students, peasant and Indigenous communities as well as environmentalists.
The movement has lasted already almost two months at the time of writing and through protests, strikes and roadblocks the people fight for their demands: the repeal of the social security law, the elimination of the memorandum signed between Panama and the United States, the non-reopening of an environmentally-destructive mine, and the fight for environmental defense against the reservoir on the Río Indio.
The strike of the banana workers at Chiquita has become a focal point of the struggle: on the one hand through their power and courageous struggle that has brought the region’s banana industry to a halt and cost the company over $75 million in profit, and on the other through the brutal repression by the bosses, who responded by firing all 6,500 workers, while management has left the country.
The state has declared the strike illegal, in the best “comprador bourgeois” manner, announced a state of emergency in the banana-growing region Bocas del Toro and cracked down with police and military against the wider social movement with a level of violence and brutality unseen in decades, targeting especially Indigenous women and children.
The movement has responded to the attacks with escalation and new rounds of mobilizations; protests intensified further in several regions in mid-June.
The brutality of the state’s repression is reminiscent of Thatcher and Reagan crushing the miners and air traffic controller strikes in the 1980s and underlines the threat the movement — which is inherently intersectional: against environmental destruction and attacks on social rights, for self-determination and against imperialist meddling and neo-colonial exploitation — poses to the interests of the Panamanian ruling class and imperialism.
A united front for climate action, conversion and against job cuts
Forming a united front between the climate and environmental movement and workers and unions is also key to fight for improvements such as the expansion of public transport and higher wages and better working conditions for workers within that sector, as well as against factory closures and job losses in industry.
The most prominent struggle regarding the latter has developed over the last years around former GKN workers in northern Italy who have occupied their factory since July 2021 and formed the GKN Factory Collective.
Initially, their goal was to win nationalization of the company with democratic workers’ control. Nationalization would guarantee that the conversion process and future production is publicly financed and that it can therefore be based on what is socially and ecologically useful instead of what can be sold profitably under capitalist competition.
Democratic workers’ control over the whole process and future production is the second crucial component. Without it, nationalization from the top would mean that it would simply be turned into another state-owned company where production ultimately serves the interests of the Italian ruling class and be oriented on cutting costs to increase surplus/profits.
However the official trade unions, or rather their bureaucratic leaderships, did not support the struggle. This significantly weakened the hand of the GKN Factory Collective and forced them to replace their initial demand with the plan to establish a cooperative through a popular shareholding campaign.
While a cooperative model could allow for democratic workers control, production would still be subject to the constraints of the capitalist market and forced to operate profitably. This structurally introduces a tendency and risk to re-create capitalist production conditions — for example pressure to cut costs, divisions between the workforce including re-establishing wage-labor for those not coop members, hierarchical structures etc. — which would undermine democratic workers control and could in the end even lead to a deterioration of the economic situation of the workers, as they bear the full economic risk.
The example of Mondragón offers crucial lessons in this regard. Despite those risks, the courageous struggle of the GKN Factory Collective should of course be supported wholeheartedly. It has offered a space for organizing and resistance, strengthened connections between movements and struggles and given hope and inspiration to many. In contrast to the trade unions, feminist, queer, climate and Palestine solidarity groups supported the struggle in various ways including with several large demonstrations of up to 25,000 in Florence.
It is thus no surprise that the former GKN workers have also joined climate marches in Florence, which was probably inspiration for workers from other Italian automotive supply chain companies in crisis like Marelli or FIAT to do the same.
Other inspiring examples are the support of climate activists in Switzerland for workers in the steel industry fighting against job loss or the joint call in France launched by the CGT trade union at Total Grandpuits, Les soulèvements de la Terre, Extinction Rébellion, and Les Amis de la Terre to unite the struggles of workers and the environmental movement against layoffs and the bosses.
Such an approach is needed to fight back against the massive job cuts announced in the steel, automotive and petro-chemical industries across several European countries, cuts that come on top of over 850.000 manufacturing jobs already lost in the EU between 2019-2023.
A militant answer against such attacks is also a crucial necessity to fight back against the far-right who try to profit from mass layoffs to foster their poisonous agenda. In the absence of a strong left response that can organize a struggle worth fighting for with a perspective to win, the legitimate anger, frustration and misery of hundreds of thousands can be fertile ground for the hateful and divisive ideas of the far-right.
Climate crisis compounded by militarisation
The mass layoffs in industry and the deepening economic crisis in Europe are connected to the historical militarization drive in the EU. Starmer has announced “military Keynesianism” and various weapon and military manufacturers are directly recruiting from car and automotive companies, especially in Germany. The most prominent example is probably the deal signed between German automotive company Continental and arms manufacturer Rheinmetall in June 2024 for that purpose.
This deal has been supported by the IG Metall, Germany’s trade union of metal workers, who together with the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) and other sectoral unions also strongly welcomed the government’s special fund of EUR 500 billion that contains unprecedented investments in militarization.
Since 2022, stocks of European arms suppliers have gone through the roof, many have increased around five times in value and Rheinmetall’s stocks increased a mind-boggling 11-fold (1106% on March 3 2025), while the company’s operating profit increased by 61% in 2024.
The fact that an Alstom streetcar plant in the German town Görlitz threatened by closure was not taken into public ownership to continue producing train carriages and streetcars urgently needed to expand public transport and decarbonize traffic, but taken over by the German-French arms company KNDS to produce tanks, says everything about where priorities lie under capitalism.
The absurdity of this is further underlined if we look at the huge climate and environmental impact of the military. Researchers estimate that globally the military is causing 5.5% of greenhouse gases with everyday activity.
However the real figure is higher for two reasons. Firstly, because emissions from military aircraft are often excluded from national climate targets and not reported. However, it is clear that military aviation is far more damaging than civil aviation, a one hour flight by an F35 jet for example produces almost three times the amount of GHG than the average car in one year.
Secondly, the 5.5% do not include emissions from active conflicts. Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine and the following war have caused 230 MtCO2e until February 2025, equivalent to the level of annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. Warfare (36%) and reconstruction (27%) are the biggest emission sources. And the NATO militarization plans could increase emissions by 200m tonnes per year. The subheadline of a Guardian article that reported on that summarizes the madness “researchers say defence spending boosts across world will worsen climate crisis which in turn will cause more conflict”.
Conversion of military to socially-useful production
In this context, the powerful struggles for the conversion of the arms industries in the 1970s at Lucas Aerospace in Britain and in the 1980s at over 40 West German companies deserve renewed attention as they contain crucial lessons and can serve as inspiration for struggles today. At Lucas Aerospace, workers and various unions organized a shop stewards combine committee against layoffs and for the conversion of production, to produce socially useful products for human need not war.
Based on the workers’ skills and possibilities at the production site, they put forward the Lucas Plan for alternative production, which contained no fewer than 150 ideas for products including heat pumps, wind turbines and alternative transport systems such as vehicles that would operate on both road and rail.
Another goal of the workers’ struggle for conversion at Lucas Aerospace as well as in Germany was to win democratic control over the development of the productive forces. While giving initial support to the struggles, trade union leaderships in both cases unfortunately eventually focused on corporatist approaches that marginalized workers’ grassroots initiatives and stifled the struggles for conversion and radical workplace democracy.
Whether sellouts like these, Italian trade unions not supporting the struggle of the former GKN workers, the Polish union Solidarity making a deal with the Heritage Foundation to defend coal production, or German trade union leaderships welcoming increased investments and job growth in the arms industry: Winning back the trade unions through militant grass-roots organizing and turning them into political fighting organizations against climate crisis, militarization, genocide, oppression and exploitation, that can overcome the reformist and often class conciliatory approach of bureaucratic leaderships, remains a key task.
Organizing precarious and oppressed workers and those active in social movements will be a crucial step in that process. This would lay the basis for serious struggles for nationalization of companies or entire sectors under democratic workers’ control, which, especially if victorious, would be an immense inspiration for workers and oppressed internationally and give a positive impetus to class struggle generally.
“Only the people can save the people”
A consistent phenomenon in the aftermath of devastating climate and environmental disasters, that are everything but natural, has been the immediate and tremendous solidarity and self-organized relief efforts from working class people and their organizations.
After the floods in the Spanish State in autumn 2024 that killed at least 228 people, 45,000-50,000 people from across the country and Europe travelled to Valencia and other affected areas to join local people organizing help and disaster relief, defying Carlos Mazon’s (president of the autonomous community of Valencia) call to stay at home and wait for official help.
From clearing streets of debris to donating and distributing food and other necessities or giving free psychological consultations, workers and young people offered whatever they could to support; a group of refugees even set up a soup kitchen for neighbors in need despite their own reception center having been flooded. No wonder the slogan “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (only the people can save the people) became popular, reflecting the distrust and anger towards the ruling class as well as the understanding that the working class can only help itself.
The disaster relief, donations and volunteers were organized and coordinated through spontaneous solidarity networks like the DANA Valencia Mutual Support Network, social media and neighborhood groups as well as leftwing political and social organizations and trade unions.
They also organized and mobilized for a mass demonstration of over 130,000 that channeled the peoples’ pain and rage against the ruling class for their criminal inaction and mismanagement — which was seemingly influenced by climate scepticism and put businesses’ interests to stay open and make profits before the life and health of workers — demanding Mazón’s resignation and adequate public measures that actually meet the needs of people.
This show of force also pushed back against the far-right’s attempt to profit from the disaster. While they spread a torrent of hate, climate change denying and racist fake news online, they could mobilize barely 200 people in the streets. However, in the months since, reports have indicated that the far-right VOX party could actually increase its electoral support by cynically exploiting people’s anger against the mismanagement, attacking the regional and national government.
VOX, other far-right and neo-nazi groups like Núcleo Nacional and the youth group Revuelta, the latter with ties to VOX, also sent some “volunteers”. By making a public campaign around their “help” reserved for Spanish people only, they have tried to reappropriate the slogan “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (only the people can save the people) and give it a far-right connotation. A VOX MP said in January: “When the failed regional government and a negligent [central] government abandoned Valencians, then the nation appeared, the best Spain, a selfless one, represented especially by young people. This is the Spain we defend.”
This makes it all the more important that the left takes up the issue in a strong way and continues to do so because the anger has far from settled. Demonstrations demanding the resignation of Valencia’s regional government and faster reconstruction and relief have been ongoing and worker-led reconstruction committees have formed around Valencia demanding oversight of the reconstruction process and allocation of funds. Due to the mood in and pressure from below, local governments had to accept and recognize those committees.
To avoid them being turned into apolitical technocratic planning bodies that do the job of city administrations, while being controlled by them, it is crucial that leftwing forces politicize the committees based on an independent class position. By linking the reconstruction process via the ongoing demonstrations to wider working class struggles and demands, a balance of forces could be built to ensure that the money is fully used according to the needs of the region’s working class and win further improvements, but not for profit motives or to line the corrupt pockets of politicians.
Militant unions and a strong working class movement generally have a key role to play in all of this. Through lived solidarity democratically organized from below and by linking the immediate disaster relief to the need for wider social change, grief and rage can be turned into resistance, cutting across the far-right’s demagogy and opening a path to more general working class struggle against the capitalist system and the myriad forms of violence and crises it produces.
Socialism or barbarism
In the absence of a militant mass workers’ response capable of challenging the rule of capital, the perspective points to fires, floods and misery for the masses and bunkers for the super-rich, to Rosa Luxemburg’s “socialism or barbarism” in the age of climate and environmental breakdown and multi-crises.
Albeit such a perspective might seem exaggerated or far-away, inequality regarding climate crisis and wealth is absolutely mind boggling and rising, while the rich are prepping for doomsday scenarios and against revolutionary movements, completely consciously choosing the continuation of the system (accumulation of private profit and capital) over the lives of billions.
Based on a conversation with tech executives that turned into pondering plans for apocalyptic scenarios, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff told VICE that “the billionaires understand that they’re playing a dangerous game, […] they are running out of room to externalize the damage of the way that their companies operate. Eventually, there’s going to be the social unrest that leads to your undoing.”
Bunker capitalism
Companies like SAFE offer modern-day fortresses for the elite to withstand social uprisings. A compound SAFE has planned in the Midwest of the US is “surrounded by a moat that can be lit on fire [and a tunnel system that can] generate heat through molecular friction like a giant microwave” to ward off “intruders”. Ron Hubbard, founder and CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters said “it’s safe to assume that most billionaires have some sort of shelter”, which have become a “new status symbol of the elite”. The global market for underground bunkers is estimated to grow from $23 billion in 2023 to $36 billion by 2030 with luxury bunkers making up the bulk of the market share.
Those who are killed by and suffer from climate and environmental disasters, however, are predominantly people in the Global South — which saw over 90% of deaths through extreme weather events during the last 51 years and where 99.7% of the two billion people who will be exposed to extreme heat live — and working class people in the Global North, with inequality and oppression generally exacerbating the impacts further.
Meanwhile causation is 100% inverted. The super-rich are causing and accelerating the climate crisis through their capital investments and lavish consumption. “In 2019, the super-rich 1% were responsible for as much carbon emissions as the poorest 66% of humanity (5 billion people)” — this unimaginable inequality and injustice will have increased further since. Looking at emissions from capital ownership, the picture gets even more extreme. “New analysis of the investments of 125 of the world’s richest billionaires shows that on average they are emitting 3 million tonnes a year, more than a million times the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity.”
Wealth and income inequality is similarly outrageous. Over the past 40 years, the richest 1% based on income have claimed 54% of total gains from GDP growth and the richest 5% captured 70%. In terms of wealth, the richest 1% and 5% control 42% and 69% respectively, while the poorest 50% control less than 1%. And the inequality is rising further. Data by Oxfam shows that in 2024 billionaire wealth rose three times faster than in 2023 and over the last ten years the top 1% have increased their wealth by over $33.9 trillion. Not surprisingly, 90% of people support that public services and climate action should be paid for by taxing the super-rich.
The ruling class is determined to respond to the growing contradictions and multi-crises of capitalism with measures that guarantee the upholding of their system and the defense of their privileges, measures that bring as a consequence increasing levels of barbarism for the masses. In light of all this, building bunkers to protect yourself from uprising masses seems like a very rational choice from the perspective of the super-rich.
Resort to authoritarian measures
However, this is only their last resort insurance. Above all, the ruling class tries to maintain their increasingly undermined rule through a combination of consent and coercion. This means consciously ramping up racism, especially against Muslim and Arab people, queerphobia, particularly against trans-people, sexism and other forms of oppression to divide and rule as well as, also by increasing authoritarian measures, to break the people’s will of resistance and scare them into submission.
In the context of the overall shift to the right and far-right, more and more among the ruling class try to lean on white, male and gender-confirming layers of the working class. The relative privileges that have been granted to those layers of the working class in relation to the oppressed are used to gain their consent to politics that aim at maintaining the hegemony of the capitalist class and thus their absolute privilege and control over the working class.
Calls for the defense of “our good life and civilization” against attacks and threats from the “Others” are getting louder, be it through invasion from outside — by non-white refugees and migrants — or corrosion from within — queer and especially trans-people are cynically portrayed as a threat to children, trans-men as a threat to women, and Arab and Muslim people are increasingly depicted as generally suspect. This course further strengthens far-right and fascistic forces.
It is not hard to imagine against whom extreme scapegoating, pogroms and possibly worse would be directed if accelerating climate and environmental breakdown creates situations of food, water or land scarcity.
The way out of such a doomsday scenario of climate apocalypse and ultra-libertarian authoritarian or even fascist regimes is militant mass struggle against all forms of oppression and exploitation and for democratic socialist change. The resources and technology exist, what is lacking and can only be won through struggle is democratic control and ownership by the working masses over them, which necessitates the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class.
A programme against climate apocalypse and for socialist change
In order to lay the foundations for a movement capable of that, we need to further strengthen the links between struggles, including through demands and program, and connect those with a perspective and the necessity for socialist change.
Extreme heat for example, is currently the deadliest aspect of the climate crisis and affects people in their entire lives, in their work and study places as well as their homes. Demands for heat protection at the job can be linked to further demands for improving health, safety and other working conditions.
As working in higher temperatures is generally more exhausting and stressful, heat protection would also include shorter working days. So the demand for working time reduction without loss of pay for workers exposed to extreme heat — because of the conditions at their workplace or when they work outside — could be connected to the demand for a general working time reduction without loss of pay for everyone, a key measure to fight rising unemployment.
After all, since the labor movement won the 8 hour workday and 40 hour workweek almost 100 years ago in most western capitalist countries, average labor productivity has multiplied (in the U.S. it quadrupled), while pay increases have massively lagged behind and the average working time has more or less stagnated. Yet the ruling class have been attacking this victory more heavily recently, pushing to further increase the working time (maximum hours per day/week, pension age, cutting holidays).
Next to working time reduction, cooling systems for homes are urgently needed. While some will have ACs at home or at work, this is not at all a suitable solution, as many cannot afford it and it is far too energy-consuming to be applicable for everyone. Instead, we need collective heating-and-cooling systems in all new houses and retrofitting old ones, which needs to be publicly financed.
As extreme heat impacts oppressed, old, young, disabled and poor people particularly, an intersectional approach to fighting extreme heat is mandatory and should be linked with demands against different forms of oppression that go beyond the climate aspect. Our struggle for climate justice cannot be separated from the fight for the liberation and emancipation of the whole of the working class, and must therefore be inherently anti-racist, feminist, for queer liberation as well as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
Disasters like flash floods and wildfires increase in frequency and intensity and require massive investments in forecasting, pre-warning, emergency response teams and permanent protection measures for high-risk areas and communities.
All of this could easily be paid for with the wealth of the super-rich and corporate profits. Through progressively higher taxes on them, the struggle for climate justice can be connected to the fight against wealth and income inequality, partially re-appropriating the wealth the working class has created through their labor in the first place.
Depending on the sector, the struggle against job loss can be connected to demands for conversion of production. This would allow to make production in carbon-intensive industries (e.g. steel, cement, etc.) as green as possible by using different production methods, stop climate and environmentally harmful production of socially unnecessary products and gear production towards collective instead of individual transport and mobility.
This necessitates the nationalization of companies and industries and the democratic control over and planning of production by the working class. For the latter to be possible in a real way — so that production possibilities and challenges on a company or sectoral level can be brought into constructive dialogue with the needs of the wider working class — sectoral and intersectoral councils are needed. Those typically form organically during revolutionary movements, pushed forward by socialist forces within them.
When this organizational form of the revolutionary struggle coincides with the necessary balance of forces — which necessitates a strong consciousness among the working class regarding the need to overthrow capitalism and replace it by democratic socialism as well as high levels of organization, both of which can develop and mature in struggle — a situation of dual power can emerge. During such periods, the rule of the bourgeois state is seriously challenged and can be smashed if the working class and oppressed take decisive action. For that, the formation of a mass revolutionary party and leadership, emerging organically from the struggles of the working masses, is needed.
Although the levels of power and control the ruling currently wield over production, wealth and resources, backed up by military and police violence to defend their rule if necessary, can seem insurmountable, they don’t determine history, that is up to us, workers, young and oppressed people the world over.