Is it Really Too Late? On Recent Debates About the Climate Crisis, Capitalism, and the Question of Transition
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction2024 was the warmest year ever recorded with a 1.6°C global average temperature increase while emissions are still rising.Compared to the first Trump presidency, the second feels like a tectonic shift with regards to how the unfolding climate crisis is portrayed in Western political discourse and politically dealt with under heavy influence of almost a decade of Trumpism and the rise of the far right.The liberal political agenda of 'green growth' has been watered down under nationalist pressures to encompass energy security and autonomy-as in the EU-or even completely abandoned-as in the US.Yet, it would be misleading to read this shift as the ascent of 'climate denialism' into the echelons of power.It rather resembles a situation of intentional neglect of the ruling classes with regards to climate mitigation.In fact, despite the 'anti-climate science rhetoric' of Trump, the unfolding climate crisis has increasingly moved to the heart of his nationalist agenda; it is just read through the racist articulations of immigration swarms, bordering, and militarism.Recall that one of the main reasons behind Trump's obsession with Greenland was that the melting arctic would open frozen sea corridors with Russia and new sites for mineral extraction.This agenda is backed by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the US American Tech-Finance-nexus within the core of global capitalism, where a small fraction of the capitalist classes holds significant control over unimaginable financial resources and the digital communication infrastructures spanning the planet.In other words, we find ourselves in the unstable world of escalating wealth inequalities and capitalist competition where proposals of 'green growth'-style climate mitigation are increasingly sidelined against the backdrop of military expansion and nationalist rivalries.Against this backdrop, another approach has taken centre stage: 'adaptation'.This essay discusses two books that speak to the question of whether 'it is too late already' to do anything about the climate crisis, albeit from very different perspectives.Both books foreground the need for a realistic political outlook by grappling with 'the question of what makes up meaningful politics when catastrophe is already a fact' (Malm and Carton 2024, 52).While the authors agree that what remains of effective mitigation would require a revolutionary overhaul of capitalism and that 'green growth' is an impossibility (in line with a large body of work in fields such as in eco-Marxism, e.g., Burkett 1999; Foster 2000), they identify different causes of the problem and come to very different conclusions of what is to be done.However, this review argues that the question of whether 'it is too late already' for climate mitigation is distracting because both possible answers can be used to justify almost any political agenda (revolutionary or reactionary) from maintaining to overthrowing capitalism.It is a co-opted question that represents defeatism disguised as 'scientific' debate.Part of the problem is that the political implications that follow from both answers are often justified by reference to the (im-)possibility of the 'revolution'.When we ask 'if it is too late' and answer with
Source: British Journal of Sociology
Author: David Kampmann
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,840
OpenAlex ID: W4415412836