The Key to Climate Action Is Building Working-Class Power
We can’t address climate change without the working class. Matt Huber argues that an explicit political or rhetorical focus on the climate crisis itself may not be helpful in that effort.
Democrats’ explicit focus on climate change has led back to Donald Trump and reversed what marginal climate progress Joe Biden achieved. A more promising approach: pursue pro-worker policies that benefit the climate without centering it. (Jeyhun Abdulla / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
All of us can agree the climate situation is bad and getting worse. After a sustained period of decline, US emissions increased in 2025. The second Trump administration has rolled back the Inflation Reduction Act and is using state power to keep uneconomical coal plants open and deregulate oil and gas production.
No amount of knowledge of science or moral concern about our children will, on its own, reverse this. Given the civilizational scale of the transformation required, replacing an entire global infrastructure system that still depends on fossil fuel for 80 percent of its needs, we need large-scale political power.
In line with traditional socialist theory, I have argued there is no plausible force in society capable of this power other than the working class. Historically, only the organized working class has shown the capacity to accomplish the scale of what is required to solve climate change: erode the power of capital; build the kind of mass coalition that could catalyze a program of public investment and planning; and wield the leverage of the very workers whose skills and knowledge are required to transform our energy economy.
So for me, the key question for climate politics is how to build working-class power. As I argued in my recent New York Times essay, I’ve become less convinced that a political or rhetorical focus on the climate crisis itself is helpful in that effort.
I base this on the fact we’ve just experienced a roughly six-year period (2018–2024) where the climate issue was front and center in Democratic Party politics: a top issue in the 2020 campaign and clear priority in the subsequent Biden administration. While many point out that Democrats already don’t talk about climate change much (Kamala Harris, for example, chose not to campaign on it), the Biden administration very much chose to prioritize climate goals in its signature legislative achievements and executive actions.
But all this has only led back to Donald Trump and reversed what marginal climate progress Joe Biden achieved. All the while, the Democrats continued to hemorrhage working-class support.
Despite the lack of success of climate-focused politics, the nongovernmental organization (NGO)–led climate movement insists we should simply focus harder on the climate crisis in subsequent political struggle. That is the gist of Aaron Regunberg and Jamie Henn’s article, “Climate Action Can Win Majorities.” But while they cite lots of polls showing majorities care about climate change, this does not automatically mean working-class people see the climate issue as core to their material interests. Zohran Mamdani’s lack of explicit climate focus while campaigning on policies that benefit workers and reduce carbon emissions in his successful mayoral campaign demonstrates another model.
Our Crisis Is Class Dealignment. Will a Focus on Climate Reverse It?
All this focus on climate in the Biden years only seemed to exacerbate the main crisis facing the Left of class dealignment — that is, parties formerly anchored in the working class shifting their base toward more affluent and educated voters, while working-class voters shift rightward or drop out of politics altogether.
In 2024, for the first time in decades, a Republican, Trump, won voters making less than $50,000 a year (in 2012, Barack Obama won that demographic by 28 points). Trump also won voters without a college degree by a whopping 14 points in 2024, a margin that just keeps going up: he won this group by 8 points in 2020, and 7 in 2016.
How can we reverse this? The main inspiration for my New York Times article was the most successful and exciting socialist political campaign of my lifetime, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election. Despite making his way as a “proud ecosocialist” and fierce activist for public power, Zohran barely mentioned climate change in his 2025 campaign, deciding instead to voice a “laser focus” on cost-of-living concerns. If climate is such a winning agenda, Regunberg and Henn should interrogate why Mamdani’s winning campaign avoided it.
To be clear, as Regunberg and Henn advise, Mamdani could have “linked” his affordability agenda to the climate crisis. As I said in the Times piece, his pledge for “fast, free buses” is transparently linked to decarbonization. But he did not.
If we were to link affordability to climate change, we should at least be honest about it. Unfortunately, Regunberg and Henn’s simplistic point — increasingly a Democratic Party talking point — that “expanding clean energy is the fastest way to produce cheap electricity needed to lower utility rates” is at best misleading. It downplays the very costly investments and political battles — transmission, backup/storage, siting struggles, clean-firm generation and more — that would actually be required for a “clean energy” transition.
It is not clear why focusing on the direct material concerns of affordability is not enough on its own and why climate must be linked at all. I think there is something to be said for what Benjamin Fong calls a “socialist minimalism,” narrowing our political agenda to only the issues that matter most to working-class people..
Beliefs vs. Material Interests
Regunberg and Henn do not explicitly lay out any strategic orientation toward working-class agency. They speak of winning “majorities” including MAGA solar enthusiasts and MAHA gurus paranoid about fossil fuel pollution, but they also argue a climate message centered on “affordability” could appeal to working-class concerns. To make the case that it is logical to attach the climate issue to this agenda, they cite lots of polling data showing that climate change is a concern for large majorities of the American public (I acknowledge this in my original piece).
But just showing large majorities are concerned about climate change does not mean it would rise to the level of political salience in trying to build a real political base. The question for socialists should be: Can the climate issue be mobilized to appeal to the specific material interests of working-class people? I agree with Regunberg and Henn that focusing on “affordability” is in those material interests, but I depart from the necessity to center climate in that political agenda.
I do not want to get into a battle of polls — anyone can usually find a poll that backs the argument they’re trying to make. But I think the Yale Climate Opinion surveys are some of the most respected. For me, when it comes to ascertaining material interests, the most significant question they ask year after year is: “Estimated % of adults who think global warming will harm them personally a moderate amount or a great deal.” This question shows whether or not Americans see the climate issue as having a direct material impact on their actual lives.
In 2025, the percent who answered yes was 44. Put another way, this means 56 percent of Americans do not think climate change will harm them personally at all. So, while many more Americans are worried about climate change itself, a large majority doesn’t seem to think it is something related to their own material situation.
Regunberg and Henn do suggest there are more direct material reasons for voters to be concerned about climate change: “climate shows up in people’s lives not as an issue unto itself but in the form of rising insurance costs, the health impacts from heat waves, or a need for greater disaster preparedness.” But this conceit admits these material impacts do not register to most voters as a “climate” issue but rather is related to the more majoritarian concern with the cost of living.
Regunberg and Henn do cite a Data for Progress poll suggesting a majority do think climate change will have a financial impact on them, but I’d put more faith in the Yale figure which has asked the same question since 2008 and never risen to a majority. The number has actually declined since 2021 when it peaked at 48 percent (precisely when Biden made climate central to his administration).
Regunberg and Henn also cite polls showing black, Latino, and low-income voters say climate change is important (more so than rich voters). But again, the issue is how they rank climate in relation to other priorities. For me, the Pew Research Survey is most useful for showing how consistently Americans rank climate as a lower priority compared to the cost of living, jobs, and more (in 2024, only 36 percent ranked climate as their top priority).
Pew asks another pointed question on how Americans view climate policies impact on the economy — a stark 64 percent say climate policies either “hurt” (34 percent) or “make no difference” (30 percent) to the economy. This is damning for those who think the “link” between climate and economic concerns will be easy.
Working-Class Politics vs. NGOism
For decades, working-class politics has declined, and NGOism has taken its place. Mass membership and democratic organizations have been replaced by undemocratic, top-down institutions funded by wealthy philanthropists. The climate and environmental nonprofit world is surely a big part of this story, and one of the most well-funded parts.
A report by ClimateWorks “estimates that nonprofits based in the United States spend between USD $7.8 and $9.2 billion annually on work that addresses climate change.” While one can argue what tangible success this has yielded, it ensures there will always be a well-funded bloc whose existence depends on climate being a central political issue for the Democratic Party.
Zooming out, much of the reaction to my piece boils down to the conviction that because climate change is an existential crisis for humanity (I agree), we have a moral duty to elevate the issue in our politics. But socialists know that moralism is not a strategy and certainly not a substitute for real class power.
The fact is we can’t do anything about climate change without what Kate Aronoff calls “durable, hegemonic majorities” (particularly in our retrograde US constitutional system where you need a supermajority to even pass major legislation). The path to those majorities is through working-class politics based on real material interests. Zohran Mamdani shows us the way to build it: a laser-focused agenda on the more immediate material cost-of-living concerns of working-class people who can actually wield power for broader action on climate and other issues. Only with this power can we actually start to dig ourselves out of the coal-filled hole Trump is currently digging.