We have a triple crisis: environmental damage escalating faster than predicted, capitalist governments retreating from even weak emissions-reduction aims, eco-activism on the back foot.

Last year was the hottest year on record and the first to breach 1.5°C warming. The last ten years were the ten hottest since records began 200 years ago. We have exceeded 420ppm CO2 and are adding to that at ever increasing rate.

The UN’s World Metereological Organisation observed a record 150 “unprecedented” climate impacts from floods and wildfires to supercharged hurricanes: crops destroyed, built infrastructure in ruins, 800,000 people displaced. Climate related disasters in the US alone have, since the start of 2024, have cost nearly $500 billion (over half attributable to the Los Angeles wildfires).

Climate records are being broken faster than scientists predicted. In 2022 they thought that the world might breach 1.5°C warming by 2026. That record was broken last year. Until recently scientists thought that irreversible tipping points were a problem for the distant future. A new 2023 assessment, involving the collaboration of over 200 scientists, found eight tipping points could be triggered within the next decade and five of them could happen “right now”.

We are entering a new phase of sudden lurches in the climate regime.

At the very same time, capitalist governments are regressing towards the absolute denialism of the 1980s. The Trump administration has made production of cheap oil and gas a central plank, hoping that will counterbalance the inflationary effects of Trump’s tariffs. Despite lack of evidence that this strategy will work even on its own terms, Trump’s support for fossil capital has boosted expansion and deregulation around the world.

The dominant capitalist approach to climate change for the past three decades has been energy transition and a goal of net zero by 2050. Governments around the world are now ditching those commitments.

The energy transition and all mention of fossil fuels were missing from the final statement from the 2024 COP29 climate talks. Around the world, governments are licensing expanded fossil-fuel production, where they used to talk of reducing CO2 emissions by 45% by 2030.

In fact, the four decades of net zero rhetoric have failed to address the climate crisis. As the UK representative of the “ditch net zero” lobby, Kemi Badenoch has argued that government has “fallen between two stools — too high cost, too little progress”. Her claim that net zero is “impossible without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us” is true as long as we understand that by “us” she is referring to the capitalist class. As Naomi Klein argued many years ago, effective action to address the climate crisis is incompatible with unceasing capitalist growth.

Trump’s enormous cuts to US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading weather and climate monitoring institutions, will put out the world’s eyes as the crisis escalates. The NOAA operates 13 weather satellites and over 200 deep water buoys, and gathers information from 10,600 governmental and scientific institutions. It has recorded and processed climate data from these sources for decades.

And yet the climate movement has been very muted since the international school strikes collapsed in the Covid-19 lockdowns. More people must be alarmed by the climate crisis than they were in August 2018 when Greta Thunberg started her protest outside the Swedish parliament, but action is less.

The climate movement has tried street protests, it has tried blocking roads and mines and heavy polluters, it has tried spray painting Stonehenge and chucking soup on the glass security screens of expensive artworks. With each failed political strategy, promising movements collapse like XR and JSO back in despair.

There is a political strategy that has not been tried: a strategy based on international workers’ solidarity and revolutionary socialism. Organised labour is the only social force that has power for and interest in seizing capitalist property, placing it under common ownership and democratic control, halting its reckless ecocide.

The climate crisis has already repeatedly shown mass international movements developing quickly from initiatives from small activist groups. The task now is to build a force so that the next big wave of climate activism has its sights firmly set on abolishing capitalist property and developing the working-class organisation that can make that happen.