Climate Change: What Role For Reform?
April 1, 2014
It was an honor to have my essay "A Radical Approach to the Climate Crisis," from the summer 2013 issue of Dissent, "read with interest" by the editors of Monthly Review, even if the editors took issue with my argument that the timeframe of climate science indicates that getting off fossil fuels must happen starting immediately and be completed in only a few decades.… As Marxists, the editors of MR should be as radical as reality itself, even when that offends intellectual sensibilities and requires a new flexibility. Anyone literate in climate science must admit that the short-term struggle to mitigate carbon emissions is an essential precondition for achieving any other larger, longer-term goal. The science on this is clear: there is no time left to wait, carbon emissions must come down as soon as possible and as fast as possible.