Hello, welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jacobin managing editor Micah Utrich. We all know that

we are in a dire climate crisis right now, with the window for averting horrific climate

catastrophe narrowing by the day.

And the Green New Deal has totally reshaped the conversation about what kind of politics we need to fight climate change.

But the question of how we assemble the social forces to actually fight and win that green new deal is something that we don't talk about as much.

Matt Huber tackles this question in our journal Catalyst in his article, Ecological Politics for the

Working Class. I talked to him about that article

and what it means for socialist strategy and I'll put a link to our store where you can

buy a catalyst and read his article in it. Matt Huber is an associate professor of geography at Syracuse University.

He's a regular contributor to Jacobin and is the author of Lifeblood,

Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, and he's currently

working on a book on class and climate politics for Versa Books. Here's Matt. Matt, hello?

Hey.

So let's start with the beginning here, or maybe the most basic question.

What is wrong with how we think about environmentalism today?

Well at a basic level so much of environmentalism has a sort of focus on politics of less and consuming less and coming out of this real discomfort with the cultures of mass consumption that really grew out of, to be frank, that actually grew

out of massive labor and working class victories in the post-war era, this anxiety around consumerism and mass consumption has led to a kind of ecological

politics that basically traces all ecological problems and impacts back to consumers.

So the way in the article I talk about this is ecological footprint analysis.

Basically the whole premise of these footprint analyses is that it's consumers that are

driving the decisions in the larger economy and that should be held responsible for those impacts associated with consumption.

So if you're driving a car, the emissions coming out of your tailpipe are your emissions that you are responsible for and not to mention all the emissions embodied in the car that was produced say in 40 different countries around the world.

...