Future on Fire: A Review

Climate change is already affecting millions of people. Governments talk about taking action to limit global heating to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but the greenhouse gas emissions allowed by their policies have the Earth on track to heating far more than that by the end of the century—a level of heating that will have truly disastrous consequences. Visionary plans for how to slash emissions and make society better at the same time abound, including various Green New Deals. But how can we make the changes that are so urgently needed?

Future on Fire argues that a just transition from fossil fuels and other drivers of climate change will not be delivered by businesspeople or politicians that support the status quo. Nor will electing green left leaders be enough to overcome the opposition of capitalists and state bureaucrats. Only the power of disruptive mass social movements has the potential to force governments to make the changes we need, so supporters of climate justice should commit to building them. Confronting the question “what if heating above 2 degrees becomes unavoidable?” and refusing to despair, David Camfield argues that even a ravaged planet is worth fighting for—and that ultimately the only solution to the ecological crisis created by capitalism is a transition to ecosocialism.

East Bay Syndicalists || David Camfield’s Future on Fire is a clarion call for the application of an “emergency brake” to the uncontrolled global warming produced by the capitalist system (15). While the greenhouse effect was identified at least as early as 1824 by the mathematician Joseph Fourier, and the physicist Svante Arrhenius predicted in 1896 that carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions would greatly worsen this effect, the ineffectual Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been farcically meeting on an annual basis now for three decades. The COP began convening in the wake of the mainstream scientific acceptance of the risks posed by global heating, following climatologist James Hansen’s public testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988.

Yet, in reality, little to no progress has been made to date, given that CO₂ emissions are at record highs. As Dharna Noor notes in the foreword to Future on Fire, despite incontestable evidence of the risks that climate breakdown poses to humanity and many other species, “state actors have largely avoided imposing even moderate regulations” on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG’s) (xiii).

In this slim volume, Camfield traces the fatal dance between fossil-fuel interests and governments, whereby mega-capitalists from the hydrocarbon industry either capture the State directly or make it bend to their will by threatening disinvestment and capital strike. The bosses act this way, so that they can preempt national legislation aimed at curbing GHG’s and lobby against binding international climate treaties—even if such profit-maximizing strategies jeopardize the very future of humanity (8–13, 28–9). Environmental sociologist Allan Schnaiberg outlined this fatal dynamic back in 1980 through his proposed model of the “treadmill of production.”

Such sober and critically realistic analysis leads Camfield to conclude that only mass-movements can deliver a just transition away from fossil-fuel-driven climate chaos in the short timeframe that we appear to have left before runaway global warming takes effect (31–3). In this sense, the author acknowledges that “climate justice politics should be fundamentally extraparliamentary,” not directed toward electoral politics. At best, this reconstructive alternative would be based on egalitarianism, internationalism, and the self-emancipation of the working classes (44–59). Camfield discusses the survival of Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians, as providing possible inspiration for future human survival under scenarios in which GHG emissions are not mitigated (62–6).

The author concludes his book with a short chapter extolling eco-socialism, which he defines as “a self-governing society with a nondestructive relationship to the rest of nature” (67). He proposes a shift toward democratic workplaces as part of a devolution of power from the capitalists to the workers on the path to the “ecologically rational cooperative commonwealth” (72–4). Short of this, the author controversially affirms the relevance of eco-socialist politics even as harm reduction and palliative care (56, 74–5), assuming the bourgeoisie does “ruin the world” irreparably, in the knowing words of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Buenaventura Durruti.

In closing, we highly recommend Future on Fire. Like the cause of green syndicalism, Camfield confronts the urgency of the climate crisis head-on, proposing radical mass-movements as the proper remedy. While brief, this book will hopefully serve as an important catalyst for conversations and organizing campaigns aimed at fighting global warming, resisting capitalist authoritarianism, and bringing about the much-needed cooperative commonwealth.