Limits and Liberation: The Next Steps of the Climate Movement

The recent youth organizing around national climate politics represents a serious step forward for the climate justice movement. Until now, there had not been a sustained, movement-driven push for federal climate legislation. These efforts have signaled activists’ desire for action at the scale of the crisis we face. But we should remain aware that the Green New Deal (GND) resolution is not legislation, and any climate policies discussed by political figures are just words until they are enacted and implemented. Whether we ultimately take action at the appropriate scale will be determined by how the movement continues to progress.

Attempting to look ahead towards the ways in which the movement must develop is not only useful, it’s vital. Activists recognize that even as we are pushing forward, time is not on our side. The more complete our plan for addressing climate change, the faster we may be able to implement it. In addition, let’s keep in mind that we’re proposing an unprecedented transformation involving every layer of society. Just as important, if not more so, are attempts to foresee and avoid major obstacles that could threaten to derail the transition to a sustainable society. The better we plan for the transition, the more likely it is to be completed.

Of the variables in our control, humanity’s ability to prevent climate catastrophe will be determined by two things: the ideas that shape our understanding of needed solutions and the type of movement we build to implement them.

Let’s first talk about the ideas.

Limits to Growth

What kind of a problem is climate change? Activists have described it as an issue of economic justice, racial justice, or intergenerational equity. Some call it a technological issue while others insist it’s a matter of political will. A solid case can be made for these descriptions and countless more, suggesting that climate change is humanity’s all-encompassing problem. It doesn’t seem to get any bigger picture. But even after incorporating the idea that economic and racial justice must accompany all attempts to address the crisis, it remains, in the mainstream analysis, an energy problem requiring a transition from a society powered by fossil fuels to one powered by renewable energy. That task is understood to be unprecedented and massive, one that requires a social movement to break the political power of the fossil fuel industry to enable governments to commit to the transition. The end result will be a society largely resembling the one we live in today, except more just and powered completely by renewables.

However, there is another perspective that is quite revealing, though it has received much less attention: that climate change is perhaps the direst symptom of ecological overshoot—of human activity expanding beyond ecological limits. Leading a group of interconnected emergencies including mass species extinction, freshwater depletion, topsoil erosion, and others, the climate crisis could and should be recognized as an expression of limits to growth. This understanding brings into view essential ideas that would expand the mainstream analysis of what solutions to this crisis must look like.

What may be the most consequential question about climate change was raised over 10 years ago. In 2008, climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Larkin published a paper warning that in order to limit warming to two degrees Celsius (2C), fossil fuel use would need to be reduced at rates that had previously only occurred in the context of economic recession. The paper noted that a planned economic contraction would seem to be necessary to reduce emissions fast enough. As time passed and emissions continued to rise, even keeping warming to 4C came to require rates of decarbonization said to be incompatible with continued economic growth. For context, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) described the likely impacts of 4C warming as “substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential restraints on common human activities [including growing food and working outdoors], and limited potential for adaptation in some cases”—truly an avoid-at-all-costs scenario. And yet attempting to understand and resolve this apparent contradiction between economic stability and serious climate action didn’t become a core matter for climate activists.

The GND envisions a transition to 100% renewable energy over 10 years, with the presumption that a massive buildout of renewables will sufficiently displace fossil fuel use. Rapidly ramping up the supply of renewable energy may seem like the same thing as rapidly reducing fossil fuel use, but it’s not. Historically, new sources of energy have usually layered on top of those already used, and this has been the case for wind and solar installations whose numbers have grown alongside increasing emissions. The finite amount of carbon we can emit to maintain a specific probability of keeping warming to a chosen level, say 2C—our finite carbon budget—must be the focus. Any plan to address the climate crisis must reduce emissions in line with our budget.

While science tells us the total carbon budget, a host of considerations based on our values determine how that budget is divided between and within countries. That’s why the public must have a basic understanding of how our national carbon budget would be derived, so that it is subject to both scientific and democratic influence. But these are topics for another article. Let’s say that a fair budget was established and a plan committed to adhering to it—we already know that the rates of emissions reductions needed are so high as to make the prospect of continued economic growth unthinkable and contraction necessary.

Why is that? It has to do with falling energy use. Economic activity and energy use are intertwined—without energy, all the parts of the production chain grind to a halt. There are a couple reasons why energy use would decrease in the course of reducing emissions in line with our carbon budget. The first is that historically, the large-scale integration of new energy sources has taken 40 to 60 years. Even with a concerted effort to deploy renewable technology, we may not be able to displace fossil fuel plants one-to-one. To avoid catastrophic climate change, fossil fuel use may need to drop faster than it can be replaced with renewables, and this would entail a drop in energy use. Second, if we are able to deploy renewables as fast as we hope to, it will be because the process is driven largely by fossil fuels. Currently, renewables’ whole production and deployment process depends on fossil fuels—we haven’t seen renewables bootstrap their own rapid expansion, and energy analysts have raised doubts about whether renewables’ power (ability to deliver energy per unit of time) is sufficient to do so. Thus in order to keep to our carbon budget, as fossil fuel use is directed towards the energy transition it will need to be diverted from other economic activities.

A major reason these challenges haven’t been highlighted is because any suggestion of limits to growth or the need to reduce energy demand and consumption are met with assumptions that technology will always provide a solution. The savior technology in the IPCC’s scenarios that see humanity keeping warming to 2C is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)—burning plant matter (which is assumed to be carbon-neutral), capturing the resulting carbon emissions, and storing it permanently underground—which is expected to enable us to remove carbon from the atmosphere while becoming society’s new major energy source. However, BECCS does not exist and both bioenergy and CCS have overwhelming obstacles to their development at scale—not least of which is that cultivating plants to burn for energy is not inherently carbon neutral. In the course of learning about the reality of ecological limits, one also becomes aware of the limits of technology in putting off our need to adapt to them. There are no serious prospects for addressing climate change while maintaining economic growth.

Under the current economic structure, reducing energy use and the consumption it enables causes economic distress. We need to cap fossil fuel use and reduce it in line with our carbon budget, but we also need to ensure that the population is taken care of and the economy doesn’t fall apart in the process. Thankfully, the discipline of ecological economics has been developing over the last several decades to determine how to organize the economy in light of our finite planet. Activists have thus far experienced economics as a marginalizing force, as those defending the status quo argue again and again why the sustainability transition (or any form of economic intervention aiming to help the public) is economically infeasible. Ecological economics, however, is the only branch of economic thinking to take seriously the reality of limits, which in fact forms its analytical basis as the defining condition to which humans must adapt.

While allocative efficiency—directing resource use to the highest-value uses—is considered the primary goal of mainstream (neoclassical) economics, ecological economics has it as a third goal. Of higher priority is achieving a just distribution of resources among the current population, and between future generations and other species. This is in part accomplished by the first goal: to maintain an economy of sustainable scale relative to the global ecosystem that contains and sustains it. Such an economy is called a “steady state economy,” which neither grows nor shrinks and maintains a near-constant level of consumption. This non-growing economy is an essential solution to all of humanity’s ecological crises, which have overconsumption at their root, though as a “necessary but not sufficient” achievement. The climate crisis requires a rapid transition to renewable energy, but that can only come about if the economy is structured to operate without growth and avoid collapsing in the course of the transition.

Articles about the GND and statements from activists often contain the phrase “transform the economy,” but it largely refers to the energy transition and not to establishing a steady state economy. If activists don’t recognize climate change as a limits issue, and continue to assert the mainstream view that economic growth is an absolute good—even arguing that the GND is “fiscally responsible” because it could boost growth—then we will reinforce the very ideas we must be questioning. If we continue to talk about a “sustainable economy” and the word “scale” never comes up, we’re missing the core of the discussion.

Climate activists ought to take some direction from ecological economics, which outlines the policies that would define a sustainable economy. The foundation is a cap on resource consumption (called throughput), which climate activists would largely achieve by establishing a binding carbon budget at the national and ultimately international levels. Limits on other resources could follow. These conditions could in part be met by implementing Tradable Energy Quotas, a policy that has undergone rigorous review by the British government, which would cap carbon and ensure all have access to energy as the cap shrinks. In reducing consumption, this cap would produce a recession under the current economic structure, so certain institutional changes would also need to take place to maintain economic stability and the well-being of the public. Establishing a democratically directed federal job guarantee (JG) and a democratized monetary and financial system would accomplish those goals. We must also dampen the forces pushing the economy to grow. We could transform corporations into cooperatives, changing their legal purpose from profit- and consumption-maximization to meeting community needs. And we could stabilize the population size by addressing drivers of growth like women’s lack of economic opportunity and voice in reproductive decisions and by instilling a more ecologically minded culture. In my reading of ecological economics, these four changes are the institutional pillars of a steady state economy. Other policies—including reforming trade deals and international monetary structures to prevent corporations and other countries from escaping steady state policies, and minimum and maximum incomes to limit inequality—would also be important, but the aforementioned pillars along with a cap on throughput would seem to establish a stable and democratic steady state economy.

A limits perspective shows why a JG (mentioned among the GND resolution’s “goals and projects”) and a democratized monetary system (one possible version of “public financing”) are not simply aspirational but essential. The JG not only ensures that each citizen will have an occupation that advances the renewables transition, but the private sector’s control over employment means that job prospects are currently tied to continued economic growth. If growth ceases and consumption shrinks, which must happen, businesses would cut their expenses by laying off the workforce and reducing wages—forcing the population to demand we restart growth to obtain a job. The JG could decouple employment from growth and eliminate the fear of joblessness. And with popular control over what jobs we create, we can reorient economic activity towards less resource-intensive tasks like restoration of ecosystems, education, and caring for others.

In the GND resolution several options for financing the energy transition are mentioned: “community grants, public banks, and other public financing.” Popular education about where money comes from, who controls it, and how it is created is sorely needed. The public must understand that there is a private channel of money creation which injects new money into the economy as private banks make loans (and accounts for 95% of new money creation, which drives economic activity) and a public channel provided by central banks whose existence is obscured. During the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve and other central banks created trillions of dollars to bail out the private banks that caused the collapse, while populations were told that there wasn’t enough money to finance public goods. I think that gaining popular control over the Fed is vital, not just because the public could then decide to generate all needed financing for the transition, but because the current privatized system of money creation creates unrepayable debts and leaves the financial system unstable. It isn’t difficult to imagine a financial crisis equal to or larger than 2008, produced by the same unbalanced privatized system, disrupting the transition as it unfolds over many years. There are books dedicated to educating readers about how money is created and how that investment power could be made to serve the public interest, and a thorough explanation cannot be provided here. But with public control over money creation, private banks and businesses that oppose the transition won’t be able to block it by starving the country of needed investment funds. The financial instability threatened by the carbon bubble will also be better managed by publicly accountable monetary institutions forced by movements to take the climate crisis seriously and ensure public well-being. And like the JG, a democratized monetary system can decouple the link between working class interests and growth, since continued corporate growth is currently necessary in order to have sufficient retirement savings, whereas public money can simply ensure a sufficient pension without growth.

A focus on limits helps climate activists recognize that we must be planning to maintain economic stability. If the economy begins to falter, with growing numbers of people without work and a loss of the savings they need to retire, then the population won’t be able to support the transition even though no future is possible without it. And limits analysis reminds us that not only is excess pollution a cause of collapse on a finite planet, but so is the depletion of the resources our economy relies on. In the present fossil-fueled economy, oil is used everywhere. It is a key input to industrial agriculture—generating fertilizers, powering the cultivating machines, and fueling the trucks that carry produce all over the country. It is involved in producing both coal and gas, and in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels. But conventional oil production has stagnated since 2005, and the “unconventional” sources like fracking that are keeping production rising are of dwindling supply, according to independent geologists. Without prospects for continued increases in oil production, economic growth is poised to end soon anyway—not on our terms, but in some form of collapse. This suggests that an economic crisis driven by oil depletion—another obstacle that could derail the renewable energy transition—must be accounted for in our planning.

Limits of Renewables

If climate change was understood as perhaps the direst manifestation of the limits to growth on our finite planet, it would reinforce the need to create a non-growing, steady state economy. But even when viewing climate change as an energy problem, activists have yet to incorporate analyses that argue there are fundamental differences between fossil fuels and renewables, with important implications for the energy transition and the feasibility of continued growth.

Before the 18^th century, humanity’s primary sources of energy were wood combustion and a combination of human and animal muscle, and most people were farmers. As coal came to replace these energy sources it transformed society, enabling the Industrial Revolution. Followed decades later by oil and then gas, these cheap, highly energy-dense fossil fuels led to the mass production society we know today, with a seemingly endless supply of material goods, an array of electric appliances that save countless hours on time-consuming tasks, and the ability to travel incredible distances in short periods of time. Fossil fuels come from ancient sunlight stored in plant matter that was trapped underground and converted into concentrated energy by intense heat and pressure over millions of years. We’ve lived our entire lives in the midst of an energy surplus produced by these long-term processes and have come to regard the resulting lifestyles as normal. As we transition away from these energy sources to forms generated by sunlight and wind in real time, our lifestyles and modes of organizing society will likely change again.

We are accustomed to using energy whenever we want, with the flip of a switch. However, renewables like solar and wind provide energy intermittently, only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. We can install batteries to store energy for use when it can’t be collected, long-distance transmission lines to transport energy from sunny and windy areas to overcast and calm locations, and redundant generating capacity aimed at collecting far more than our total energy demand to address intermittency and make renewables act like controllable fossil fuels. We tend to focus on the financial costs of new infrastructure, but the most fundamental and important costs are physical, like the energy required to build out these strategies. As we commit more energy to the infrastructure needed to make renewables controllable, less is available for the things we actually want energy for—making goods, renovating buildings, educating students. As the energy cost of our energy system increases, we may find that there are limits to how much renewables can become “on demand” before too much energy is exchanged for control. Instead, we may have to restructure how and when we work to utilize energy when it’s available.

Replacing oil is also likely to present a challenge. Oil currently powers 95% of transportation because it is uniquely suited to propel cars, trucks, ships, and planes. It is a liquid at room temperature, making it easy to store, and is extremely energy-dense. There are about 45 Megajoules of energy per kilogram (MJ/kg)—a single barrel contains the energy equivalent of over 10 years of human labor. Renewables like solar and wind produce electricity, which must be stored in batteries for use in our vehicles. However, current batteries have a fraction of the energy density that oil has, 0.5Mj/kg, and even the best theoretical battery would max out around 5MJ/kg. This means that for large or long-distance vehicles that require more energy, the necessary battery would be very big and heavy. Powering large vehicles like tractor trailer trucks with batteries will be impractical, while electrifying commercial planes is likely to be impossible. Crucially, heavy trucks carry most of our goods, including food, across long distances over the highway system to the communities where they’re consumed. This means that we urgently need to relocalize agriculture. And with energy costs in mind, we’ll need to cut down on cars, live closer to our places of work, and expand public transportation. In general, we’re likely to have less mobility in an all-renewable society and relocalizing much of our economic activity will become vital.

Having alluded to the importance of energy costs, we should understand that it always takes energy to gather or generate energy we can use. Energy analysts have developed a ratio called “energy returned on energy invested” (EROEI or EROI) which tells us the relative amount of energy available for economic activity from different sources. When we first discovered oil, it would flow from wells under its own pressure and had an EROEI of 100:1—for every barrel of oil we invested, we would get 100 back. This immense energy surplus allowed us to create amazing societal complexity and the marvels mentioned earlier. But after using the most easily available sites, we’ve had to move towards “unconventional” sources of oil like deep-sea drilling and fracking, which have a much higher energy cost. Today, the net energy of oil is around 20:1 worldwide. Though establishing this net energy ratio is inexact, much can be learned from looking at the relative EROEI of different energy sources. Studies suggest that on average, wind provides somewhere around 19:1 while solar provides 10:1, and these numbers would decrease as we account for the energy costs of other infrastructure that will be necessary, like batteries or other forms of storage. These findings suggest that we’ll likely have less energy in an all-renewable world and thus a smaller economy. That’s right—both carbon budget analysis and energy analysis suggest that we’ll need an economy that can thrive with reduced consumption.

There are several other significant implications of establishing an all-renewable society described by energy analysts, and these analyses ought to be a central input to any energy transition plan. It’s understandable that climate activists wouldn’t have any interest in acknowledging what humanity has accomplished through fossil fuel use or suggesting that using only renewables may require changes to our lifestyles, since the fossil fuel industry has already pointed to these ideas to disparage the demand for a transition. We know, however, that whether the reason is peak oil or climate change, the transition must take place. Perhaps counterintuitively, I believe this information doesn’t threaten the transition but rather makes it more likely to be completed. The public must be made aware that an all-renewable society may be different in significant ways from the fossil-fueled one we know today. The structure of our society and our lifestyles are shaped by our main sources of energy, and adaptation may be necessary. There is danger in painting a picture of a straightforward energy transition that arrives at a society nearly identical to the current one, when evidence suggests that this may not be the case. We won’t have prepared ourselves and others for the challenges involved, and elites will seize upon any unforeseen obstacles to bolster their attempts to derail the transition. Most of all, we need to be consciously and forcefully advancing a culture that recognizes and respects ecological limits and thoroughly understands the innumerable shortcomings of a society ruled by elites, who’d prefer that citizens aspire to meet their needs through consumption.

Limits of Corporate Culture

Climate activists are well-aware of the efforts of the fossil fuel industry to create doubt within the public about the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis. However, there is a bigger picture here as well. Many of the ideas and habits we have received as authentic culture were at one time visions arising in corporate PR and advertising firms. Consumer culture was a necessity that arose as mass production developed in the 1920s, and corporations sought not only to turn a thrifty American population into one embracing constant consumption but to legitimize their own existence by defining this hierarchical, consumptive economy as a system of freedom in the public mind.

After a century of corporate PR and advertising campaigns, we have learned to have an outsized role for consumption in our lives. Citizens have come to define their identity through their consumption choices, searching for a sense of self through the offerings of the market rather than their own goals and actions and the relationships they share. Unable to meet basic needs like connection and meaning in this society oriented towards the empty goal of quantitative increase, consumption also serves as a form of self-medication—a replacement for the human desires that are left unfulfilled. Consumption choices have also become the primary means of political participation for some, who have been convinced that citizens only have enough power to change their individual behaviors and can’t imagine themselves joining in collective action to change the systems that shape the behavior of millions.

In addition to the propagation of certain cultural ideas by sustained, billion-dollar campaigns, the experience of living in a society in which citizens are so far removed from the decisions that concern them exerts its own pacifying force. It leads to a domesticated mindset and habits of passivity that keep the public from taking control of its own affairs. Faced with existential crises, we tend to make bystanders of ourselves.

The economy and the culture are connected. A population groomed for a spectatorship role seems paralyzed exactly when a mass mobilization to create a sustainable society is most needed, and consumer culture legitimizes the present economy, making transformation unthinkable for many. Leaving core cultural ideas unquestioned ensures this malaise remains undisturbed and allows elites to easily defend the status quo. Our ecological crises demand that we consume less, and this would seem to pit activists against citizens’ current means of identity formation, sense of well-being, and feelings of political empowerment. But this is only a problem if activists don’t forcefully articulate that these dependencies reflect how the consumptive society undermines authentic human development and relationships, and fosters isolation and hopelessness.

Perhaps most significantly, elites will argue that to reduce consumption is to destroy freedom. This is where activists must be most vocal in pointing out that the image of humanity as a consumer is an ugly distortion stifling the rich complexity of human nature. It is a caricature meant to cause the public to willingly conform to corporate interests. Elites have needed to monopolize the definition of freedom, equating it with limitless consumption, to distract the public from the fact that it has been denied the freedom to shape the economy.

A sustainable economy can only be brought about in the midst of a supportive culture that aligns with and champions its values. Foremost among these values is an ecologically compatible definition of freedom that activists and the public need to cultivate. I think this definition should emphasize the right of citizens to collectively participate in the most fundamental economic and political decisions that shape their fate and include a thorough recognition of the importance and benefits of limits. Unbridled freedom to consume has driven humanity to the brink of societal collapse, demonstrating that freedom without limits destroys both freedom and survival. When maximizing consumption is no longer the goal, humanity is encouraged to prioritize intellectual and moral progress and develop aspects of human nature that are undermined by the consumer society.

We need to recognize that we live on a finite planet of interconnected webs of life and that our actions inevitably affect one another. No species can think itself so exceptional as to dominate the planet’s life-support systems, nor can any group of people; we must learn sufficiency—the meaning of enough consumption—and a moral skill parents try to teach us in childhood: how to share resources. The idea that a life defined by self-interest is most fulfilling or even possible must be exposed as a myth; society is only possible because we rely on one another, and freedom arises from these relationships of interdependence. We must be willing to navigate the challenges of living within limits, driven not just by necessity but by the recognition that we develop more authentic culture and liberate ourselves in the process.

An ecological culture must emerge, revealing the illegitimacy of the old economy and the legitimacy of the new one. A comprehensive sustainability transition will only be carried out if this cultural battle is being fought and won, and activists must be conscious of that. We cannot avoid these battles, and after learning of the extent to which elites have shaped culture in their preferred image we should be eager to fight them.

Limits of Our Current “Democracy”

A plan that is truly aimed at stopping climate change and our other ecological crises must establish a steady state economy with a fundamentally different goal: the fulfillment of basic human needs within ecological limits rather than the pursuit of short-term profit. However, an economy that functions without growth threatens not just the fossil fuel industry but all of private economic power. Economic growth has historically been used as a substitute for equality, allowing elites to claim that all are benefiting even as they capture nearly all of the financial gains of ongoing resource extraction. Redistribution of wealth and power would become a central discussion when society is no longer under the illusion of limitless growth, thus the owners and managers of the economy will fiercely oppose this plan. The sustainability transition is therefore only conceivable if we bring about a truly democratic society in which the public gains the freedom to restructure the economic institutions that shape our fate.

A basic impediment to creating a more democratic society is continued belief that the people are as free as they could ever hope to be. In reality, the ability to make economic and political decisions is constrained to a small percentage of the population, and decisions are made on the basis of elites’ financial self-interest. Activists must educate the public about the authoritarian foundations of our society. We must understand all the ways in which the public is marginalized from decision-making and the many obstacles that elites are likely to place in the movement’s path.

We should expect that the process will generate political tumult unlike any that we’ve witnessed. Corporations are familiar with their latest profit opportunity being opposed by the public, and respond with deception, character attacks, infiltration, and other tactics to break movements. These institutions are almost never forced to justify their existence itself, and we should expect corporate media to overheat with narratives about the illegality, immorality, and cataclysmic implications of activists’ program.

Taking single-issue campaigns as a model is inadequate for the task ahead. Elites face an existential threat to their power, thus after flooding national discourse with endless stories meant to delegitimize the movement they will use the only remaining option: force. Activists should thus recognize that this transition may more closely resemble those popular efforts throughout history which aimed to fundamentally change a government, which ultimately require the security forces called in to repress the movement to refuse their orders. This extreme solidarity, as with the rest of the transition, will only be achieved if the groundwork is laid in advance.

Because this effort requires that the public create means by which it can shape society, we must also be able to envision what a more robust democracy would look like and how it would work. First is the existence of a critically and independently informed public that understands its own interests and can evaluate paths forward. Next is a culture of regular participation, in which informing oneself with critical sources of information, having frequent discussions with others on important topics to refine our understanding, and building movements to champion our priorities are the norm. We also need institutions that facilitate participation—systems that make it easier to become informed, to gather with others, and to directly weigh in on major decisions. Not only should voting be encouraged and made easier, but increasing the number of referenda in which the public can vote directly on issues following a thorough education and discussion process would be a step towards increasing democracy. Maintaining powerful movements outside of the formal political system is also important, so that the public has an accountability mechanism for the decisions it makes. And finally, instilling a spirit of equality within the population is perhaps most fundamental. Belief in inherent human hierarchies gives rise to and justifies systems of domination; the principle that all people are equal and deserve to be treated equally by society is a defining justification for democracy in the first place. Advancing all of these elements of democracy should be recognized as climate activism.

Building Autonomy

To this point I have touched upon many of the main ideas that I think must shape any comprehensive plan to construct a sustainable society. But this plan will remain a collection of ideas without a movement powerful enough to implement them.

The need for a rapid, national energy transition (that ultimately becomes international) seems fairly obvious. Though some started thinking about a large-scale climate mobilization a few years ago, activism has mainly been aimed at isolated local or state efforts (outside of a coordinated national or international vision) and sought change at the edges of “political possibility.” Why then, after several years of climate movement organizing, has the movement’s focus on this idea only emerged now? I think a primary reason is growing autonomy. Activists hadn’t been asking what the problem itself demands or may not have had the self-assurance to fight for an obviously necessary national transition plan. We may have been limiting ourselves. That the idea of this plan has been put forward and is being discussed is a sign of increased autonomy, a characteristic of a movement becoming more intellectually active and showing more political initiative—something that we must recognize and quickly cultivate further.

Affirming the need for a national plan is one thing, but what policies will it incorporate? For far too long, activists have demanded that people in positions of power develop a plan to address climate change. Implicit in that demand is the implausible assumption that political elites could or would do so, but perhaps most dangerous is the assumption that they should. Between the constant cultural grooming for highly self-interested, consumerist lifestyles and day-to-day exclusion from participating in decisions that shape our lives, we the people have internalized a sense of ourselves as passive spectators, a domesticated mindset that I think gets peeled away as one becomes more involved in a movement to change society. A thoroughly domesticated population makes no demands; this movement is beyond that stage. Activists, in consultation with the numerous thinkers whose work helps us envision how a sustainable society would operate, now need to develop this plan for ourselves.

Much has been made of politicians endorsing the GND, but it is mainly a slogan for now and doesn’t foreground the need to adapt to limits to growth. With this idea incorporated, no corporate political officials will support the plan. We should note that politicians expressing support for a vague populist idea they can later ignore or coopt is the rule in US political history. Activists’ power lies with an enlightened public. After developing its own platform, this movement will need to commit to the hard work of cultivating an independently thinking and politically active population, until the base for an authentically representative political system exists across the country.

As this plan develops, I envision activists consciously developing their own autonomy and involving millions of people in everyday movement-building. We should aim to enlist 3.5% of the population in this effort, a percentage that has never failed to achieve fundamental changes to governments in the last century of nonviolent revolts, which in the US would amount to about 11 million people. For context, 13 million people voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. One measure of movement autonomy will be the extent to which each participant and the broader public understand the transition plan and can clearly articulate its rationale to others, rather than a model in which the leadership knows the details while the rest follow. The public needs a thorough sense of what is necessary and possible, since elites will relentlessly argue that we don’t understand our own interests and that our ideas are infeasible. Preserving the movement’s clarity of thought is crucial.

Autonomy also means cleansing ourselves of guardianship, of the sense that those in power have some special ability to make the decisions that shape our fate, if we’re to successfully expand democracy and enable public control over these decisions. We must not hold ourselves back with unfounded deference to power systems that will tell the people they have no right to change society in fundamental ways. We must unlearn our tolerance for illegitimate economic institutions that force us to march towards collapse. The social transformation we need will only be implemented by a movement comprised of individuals who are ready and willing to take the reins of their society, which will require major collective self-confidence in the face of a media marginalization deluge.

As we expose the illegitimacy of our social institutions and reject the limits they impose, we also open political space in our society that could be filled by worse forms of authoritarianism. The more that each participant understands the society we’re working to create and the better organized our efforts, the better chance that the movement will maintain control of the process.

Remember, for elites force is a secondary option. Ideas and information are the primary tools in the war for the future. A wide-reaching communications and self-monitoring/survey system and a sustained public education campaign are therefore foundations of an autonomous mass movement. These institutions would enable the movement to maintain constant touch with the population and be aware of the knowledge, attitudes, and mental state of its own participants. This would protect and insulate movement culture and allow the movement to speak for itself as the corporate culture machine ramps up. As the Sunrise Movement continues to inform the public about the GND, this program could be expanded to spread literacy in multiple areas that would allow ordinary citizens to develop a fairly comprehensive understanding of our problems. What would that curriculum look like? I think it would organize information into five broad areas:

• Ecological reality: An introduction to the severity and urgency of ecological overshoot; The limits of using technology to solve the problem; The need to establish a steady state economy (and why growth may end soon anyway)
• Energy reality: The differences between fossil fuels and renewables; How these differences are likely to require changes to how we live and organize society; The energy availability challenges we must overcome during the transition
• Institutional reality (political-economic platform): An introduction to ecological economics; The major institutional changes and policies needed to establish a steady state economy
• Reality of power: The extent to which our economic and political systems are undemocratic; How societies with concentrated decision-making power are pushed toward collapse; The history of corporate propaganda; How elites have historically repressed social movements
• Building autonomy: The need to establish a liberated culture that celebrates human development rather than increasing consumption; Ways to create a more authentically democratic society; Social movement strategy and history; Rapid community resilience development (relocalizing agriculture, public transportation, etc.)

For years I have been writing a book that attempts to tie these issues together into a broad, coherent narrative that can quickly deepen the political-economic understanding of new activists and create the autonomous mass movement I think we need. I was a fossil fuel divestment activist who stepped away to develop my own thoughts, always planning to return to the movement with an analysis encompassing the scale of the challenge. But after bringing these ideas to a handful of climate activist groups, I found that they had defined themselves too narrowly—these issues didn’t fit within existing movement narratives and appeared irrelevant to their work or seemed abstract in comparison to the local-scale action they were accustomed to. These experiences taught me that how the movement defines itself and the problem it’s attempting to solve is critical.

Climate change needs to be recognized as a manifestation of limits to growth, requiring that we establish a steady state economy alongside the energy transition—otherwise, that transition may be fatally disrupted by major obstacles before it is completed. In reality, it may never truly begin at the necessary scale if the movement isn’t prepared to develop an authentically democratic society and end corporate rule. And we’ll have overlooked the broader reality of ecological overshoot in the last few years that we can set a different path. Recognizing the need to develop a highly informed public, cap consumption and embed ecological principles into our economic institutions, expand our democratic institutions, and initiate a cultural rethink in light of ecological limits, the climate movement could quickly launch new campaigns in these areas. It could expand beyond the narrower vision of itself, claiming its full identity as a movement aiming to create a new society.

It’s fascinating to think about the forces that turn an idea into a social institution, a way of life, a revolution. Though other factors play a role, belief seems to be a key. The GND slogan was floating around for years until a small group of young activists seized upon the idea of a comprehensive, federal climate plan, believing it to be necessary and possible, and turned their belief into action. They then found their belief confirmed and supported by a representative elected by popular movements, further elevating the sense that it could be achieved. In the same way, the ideas presented here won’t impact the plan as they should unless people believe in them enough to act.

This moment also demands that we believe in ourselves. We must shed a domesticated mindset and develop a liberated identity, taking ourselves seriously enough to prepare for a social transformation that will only come about if we consciously lay the groundwork for it. To take control of society, the public needs some understanding of the physical reality—outside of our belief—to which we must conform. Belief in a straightforward energy transition won’t overcome the very likely physical obstacles to that straightforwardness. A self-governing citizenry would be thinking about topics like this, because they’re not technical ideas best left to others but the details of the transition we need to survive. There are ecological limits, and we must learn to live within them. Then there are man-made limits on democracy, which we can no longer continue to accept and must overcome. To all believers: let’s make a truly comprehensive transition plan and fight to take our rightful place as society’s collective self-governors.