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The climate movement has long concerned itself – with some justification – with having a positive message to pitch to the public. The most obvious manifestation of this is the claim that there is still time to save ourselves: that action by or before some given future date will result in climate stability and the implicit preservation of the status quo. More recently the promise has been that a social democratic injection of Keynesian investment into the green economy will result in growth, jobs and prosperity.
Nicholas Beuret has no interest in preserving the comforting narratives of what he calls “professional optimists” – and takes particular aim at this rose-tinted characterisation. “The transition economy must be understood to be a transition into a worse version of the present,” he writes. “It won’t end stagnation, nor reverse deindustrialisation or the drain of wealth from the global south to the global north. It won’t make for good jobs or better living standards.”
The climate crisis and energy transition are both well under way, he argues. But both are being managed in service of capital rather than people or planet, with ordinary people paying the price of the transition to preserve private profits. The promise of job creation is overstated, and where it occurs will take the form of insecure, transitory service jobs rather than permanent, secure manufacturing jobs. More unpaid labour will be pushed onto women. And we’ll be battling uphill against the impact of climate disaster.
His analysis is too rigidly fatalistic – consider, for example, the simple fact that renewable energy is already cheaper than fossil fuel energy and has the capacity to, in principle, eradicate scarcity. But he is right to point to the limitations of the vision of the sunlit uplands into which we were being ushered under the unrecognisable economic conditions of a decade ago. In reality, cascading climate impacts will stifle growth, raise prices, and pump up inflation. This is a simple fact of climate adaptation that any plan for transition must take seriously.
His prescription to disrupt the pro-capital transition takes the form of three specific imperatives. The first is to simply blockade fossil infrastructure. The second is to draw attention to the price mechanism as a political construct, by mobilising popular campaigns of refusal to pay for extortionate energy and transport costs. The third is to engage upon a project of deep community organising to create something like a network of citizens’ assemblies to wrest control of the transition.
Given that Beuret’s analysis of the current transition rests upon the claim that the working class is already suspicious of (if not outrightly hostile towards) the climate movement, all three of these goals seem extraordinarily ambitious. It is extremely difficult to see how we get from the current moment to a mass refusal of bill paying and quasi-permanent blockades of oil refineries. Still, the moment unquestionably requires ambition. And he is right to say that holistic planning for the transition – with a complete upending of the profit motive – is required.
Ultimately, Beuret is too pessimistic in his analysis. There is still much to be gained by a well-planned transition to a lowercarbon economy, and, in my view, something to be said for one that we stumble through imperfectly, if it keeps the temperature down a bit. Nonetheless, his stark realism acts as a useful corrective to the blind optimism of a climate movement that refuses to face up to the situation in which we find ourselves. “All politics is now a politics of adaptation,” he writes, and he is correct. The question is whether he is too optimistic in his hopes for political transformation.
Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition by Nicholas Beuret. Verso Books, 2025. ISBN: 9781804299852
