There is a widespread and not completely unjustified perception on the left that movements that struggle for socially just solutions to the climate crisis have a disproportionately middle-class base. To the extent that this perception has been accurate, it has perhaps reflected the fact that climate change has been approached as a crisis in the making and a “cause,” without sufficient attention to the devastating class-differential impacts of a changing climate and its exacerbation of social and economic inequality.
This view of things, however, is being decisively superseded by events. We have clearly entered a period when global heating poses immediate threats, even if the unfolding climate disaster is still at a relatively early stage, with plenty of room to deteriorate.
Incontrovertible evidence
Powerful and irrefutable evidence of the enormity of the climate crisis confronts us at every turn. The online journal Climate and Capitalism reports that the University of Exeter in the UK recently hosted the first ever Global Tipping Points Conference. Participants discussed a number of irreversible shifts occurring across the planet and concluded that “every fraction of additional warming dramatically increases the risk of triggering further damaging tipping points.”
Among the dangerous transformations that the conference considered were the “collapse of deep-water formation in the Labrador-Irminger Seas triggering abrupt climate changes that reduce food and water security in northwest Europe and West Africa.” They warned that the possible collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) “would plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters, while radically undermining global food and water security.” They also raised the alarm about the Amazon rainforest, which is in danger of “widespread dieback from the combined effects of climate change and deforestation.”
A final statement noted, “Global warming is projected to exceed 1.5°C within a few years, placing humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people.” In this desperate context, “global greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, requiring an unprecedented acceleration in decarbonisation.” Climate change has gone from being a dire prediction to a pressing reality, with people coughing and wheezing as the cities in which they live are shrouded in wildfire smoke, suffering through heat waves and droughts, and facing catastrophic extreme weather episodes.
The significance of these searing impacts can hardly be exaggerated. In 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated flatly that “climate change is out of control” and asserted that “we are moving into a catastrophic situation,” in response to what was then the hottest week on record.
I write this in the wake of devastating and lethal flash floods in Texas that have left the climate-denying Trump administration scrambling to formulate a coherent response to charges that it has undermined, as an article on the Center for American Progress website puts it, “critical research aimed at making precipitation forecasting more accurate and timely.” We have reached the point where even the loyalist servants of fossil fuel capitalism must reckon with the terrible consequences of their actions.
However, those consequences will not be borne by the people responsible, at least not in the short and medium term. Climate impacts that people across the planet are facing run along the fault lines of social, racial and global inequality that the present world order generates. During the pandemic, a Canadian government statement acknowledged, “The burden of COVID-19 isn’t shared equally among Canadians. Some people are more likely to get sick or die because of their social and economic conditions.” These same determinants apply to climate change to an even greater degree on a global scale.
The intensifying depredations of the changing climate, coupled with their disproportionate effects on poor and working class people, have very major implications when it comes to the shape and directions of the class struggle. Climate change requires that workers and working class communities respond, to a much greater degree than in the past, with demands and forms of action on a scale that corresponds to the threat of climate collapse and the certainty that the dominant class will abandon poor and working class people to their fate in the face of it.
Last year, I co-authored a booklet with Sarah Glynn entitled Climate Change is a Class Issue. In the first chapter, Sarah argued for the central role of working class struggle in challenging fossil fuel interests and winning both the immediate measures and transformational changes that the climate crisis demands.
She stressed that today,
survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change.
Moreover,
the urgency of our current predicament should fuel the forces of change, which will not come from sleep-inducing mission statements but from the pressure of workers en masse. The power of organised labour can force changes from both industry and government.
In the third chapter, I pointed out that “a social and economic system that wilfully compounds a planetary climate disaster is unlikely to place any more emphasis on keeping the mass of people safe in the face of that disaster than it is compelled to do. All that lies between us and social abandonment is our ability to challenge those in power with sufficient strength and determination to ensure our demands are met.”
I also argued that “the class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival.” This must mean linking practical struggles to ensure communities are protected in the face of climate impacts to the goal of transition to a just and sustainable society. I concluded that “in the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.”
Climate denial
In 2025, it has become even clearer that climate change is a pressing working class issue and that those responsible for its intensification must be challenged in the streets and on the picket lines. The second Trump administration has signalled a strategic shift on the part of the fossil fuel companies and their political enablers so that nods to “green capitalism” are now giving way to a renewed and reckless climate change denial.
Mother Jones reported in March on a speech that Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, delivered to a gathering of “oil and gas bigwigs.” He assured his audience, “We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less.” He also told them that “the Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world. Everything in life involves trade-off.”
The preliminary effects of that “trade-off” have just been seen in the catastrophic flooding in Texas. That disaster has exposed not only the refusal of the Trump administration to take global warming seriously but also its readiness to gut the systems that are needed to protect communities in the face of extreme weather and other climate impacts. As Associated Press journalists Michael Biesecker and Brian Slodysko noted,
Former federal officials and outside experts have warned for months that President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service could endanger lives.
But it’s not just the crude climate deniers around the Trump administration who are propelling the drive to maximize fossil fuel extraction regardless of its destructive consequences. In Canada, former UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, Prime Minister Mark Carney, is leading the charge.
Last month, the Ecology Action Centre issued a statement in response to the Liberal’s Building Canada Act (Bill C-5). It noted that this legislation “would give the Government of Canada the power to bypass crucial checks and balances contained in the Impact Assessment Act (Bill-69) for projects deemed to be ‘nation-building projects.’” This “could fast-track risky energy and resource extraction infrastructure, undermine Canada’s duty to consult with First Nations and give government the power to avoid necessary impact assessments for potentially harmful projects.” The centre reasonably concluded that the “consensus is absolutely clear: with devastating wildfires, biodiversity loss and more frequent and severe storms already at our doorstep, we simply cannot afford the fast-tracking of environmentally disastrous, short-sighted projects.”
Yet the Carney government, supported by a virtual consensus among the provinces, has clearly decided that the response to U.S. protectionism must be the removal of whatever limited constraints on fossil fuel and mining interests exist. In effect, the federal and provincial governments, including those headed by the NDP, are taking an approach that is little different from the one proposed by Trump’s energy secretary.
Clearly, political directions are now being set that will make capitalism’s broken relationship with the natural world even more irreparable. At the same time, climate breakdown is affecting poor and working class people more and more severely. This is true even in the historically privileged countries, but more catastrophically throughout the Global South.
As the effects of global heating disrupt our working lives and threaten our communities with devastating incidents of extreme weather, the fight for climate justice has become a vital component of the class struggle. Our unions, social movements and community organizations need to incorporate the immediate task of ensuring that populations aren’t abandoned in the face of intensifying climate impacts and the longer term objective of a just and sustainable society into their perspectives and plans. Our very survival requires nothing less.