Climate change can seem ill-suited to mass politics. It’s complicated and hard to understand. Its causes are so embedded in everyday life that it can be hard to see until disaster strikes. It encompasses the entire planet: decisions made on one side of the world wreak havoc with people’s lives on the other. Meanwhile the rich and powerful corporations and people responsible for the problem run the institutions tasked with solving it.

In fact, it sounds a lot like capitalism.

But for as long as climate change has been on the political agenda, neoliberalism has been ascendant. Which means the discussion among elites today is filled with pseudo-solutions to the problem: guilt-laden appeals to individuals to take personal responsibility for their consumption; green technologies developed with public funds by private companies that hold the patents; market mechanisms designed by the industries they ought to be demolishing; executive orders that propose to keep the tides at bay without causing too much of a fuss. Meanwhile, austerity measures are starving public goods and services just when we should be expanding them and resurgent nationalist movements are closing borders as we should be reaching across them.