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.
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