The Limits of DSA’s Climate Action Framework

Humanity stands at the precipice of a global ecological catastrophe. As both reactionary and liberal forces in the United States retreat from the necessity of collective action, the possibility that technocratic, welfare-state models can address the deepening crisis becomes increasingly remote. The present political system in the U.S., whether in overtly fascistic red states or in nominally pro-environmental blue states, has snuffed out any pretense of viability for the Green New Deal. These conditions require us, in climate advocacy groups, frontline communities, and DSA in general, to progress beyond these ineffective political solutions and re-evaluate our ecosocialist strategy. To do this, we must develop modes of analysis and strategic interventions that, while predicated on the lessons of the Green New Deal, including the partially-stalled campaigns by DSA’s Green New Deal Campaign Committee (GNDCC) to implement it, allow us to move beyond its limitations as a political and organizing roadmap. This will require the GNDCC to again operate democratically, as envisioned by CR03-A01: “For a Radical and Resurgent Ecosocialist Working Group”, and for DSA to adopt bottom-up, popular campaigns for climate and social justice. The latter will bolster broad social power that can confront and overcome state cooptation and intransigence. Real ecological and social liberation requires a radical break from the industrial-capitalist model — one centered on Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, degrowth, and ecological reciprocity.

The Incomplete Ecology of the Green New Deal

Science shows we have now breached six of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for Earth: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and novel chemical pollution, with the total amount of plastics on the planet exceeding twice the mass of all living mammals. Beyond just carbon emissions, the current rates of material extraction and pollution of all types are overshooting the Earth’s regenerative capacities, risking irreversible damage to the vital circular systems which sustain life. The timeline for action is shockingly short: the latest IPCC reports underscore that any further delay will slam shut our “brief and rapidly closing window” to secure a livable future. At current emission rates, only about six years’ worth of CO₂ emissions remain before the world exhausts the remaining carbon budget for a 1.5 °C warming limit.

It is crucial to understand that our ecological problems cannot be solved merely by way of transitioning to renewable sources of energy. The predicament we find ourselves in today is a predictable culmination of the capitalist system, which thirsts for indefinite growth on a finite planet. The “green growthism” and underlying productivist attitude at the base of the Green New Deal are informed by an unexamined and obsolete belief in material scarcity. The world already produces far more than enough to meet human needs. Global food production provides nearly 3,000 calories per person per day, more than enough to eliminate hunger. Yet hunger persists due to poverty, food waste, and unequal access—not lack of supply. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 17 million vacant homes, while only around 600,000 individuals are experiencing homelessness. What’s more, studies by Julia Steinberger and others in the “Living Well Within Limits” project show that decent living standards (nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education, mobility) can be achieved at a fraction of the energy currently used in rich countries. It is not for a lack of resources that the working people of the world are immiserated by scarcity; that is entirely the consequence of the unequal distribution of resources in our stratified society. If we fail to abolish this imperial mode of production, not only will we never eliminate poverty, but the very Earth which we call home, which for eons has generously provided us with all the means to live and to prosper, will soon become the final victim of capitalist exploitation.

Now let us turn our attention to the pertinent political realities. Since returning to power, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have launched a sweeping assault on environmental stewardship - gutting climate regulations, slashing research funding, expanding fossil fuel extraction, and dismantling protections for air, water, and wildlife in favor of corporate interests. Our enemies have shown their hand. They are willing to condemn all life on Earth to destruction, for the sake of accelerating profits for a few more years. We are witnessing the death throes of a system crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.

At this stage, the ascendant forces of reaction have abandoned all pretenses of benevolence. The Republican Party's leaders are no longer merely espousing conspiracies about progressives to fuel their base; they are now pursuing direct punitive attacks on egalitarian policy and perceived opponents in both education and the administrative state. GOP legislators are acting with impunity, cutting Medicaid and SNAP to the tune of tens of millions potentially losing coverage, all to fund gargantuan tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It must be inferred from their actions that they no longer expect to be held accountable by their constituents. And given the unprecedented and virtually uncontested steps the White House has taken to undermine election integrity, including demanding voter rolls and voting-machine access in multiple states, pushing an executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship, and consolidating partisan control over the FEC, there can be no doubt that the stage is being set for sabotage against electoral opposition.

The Illusion of Climate Governance

Buoyed by a sense that the political firmament had broken, in the 2010s progressives and socialists alike embraced a maximalist, often technical policy agenda. This agenda was supported by academic think tanks and non-profit organizations best suited for prior social struggles and which, often lacking internal mechanisms for deliberation or a mass social base, were unable to adjust to deteriorating political conditions. Even as they accrued incremental or partial gains, these formations were forced to align with imperial, industrial, and extractive forces inimical to a vision of ecological and social transformation, and encountered reversals by reactionary and corporatist forces both inside and outside of the state.

Progressive forces in Europe achieved a liberal-social democratic vision of social spending and industrial renewal in the form of a European Green Deal. While not without its problems, including an ostensible right-populist critique of its role in driving up costs, this marked a transition from the prior neoliberal model of carbon pricing and the structural austerity program imposed on the European Union. But in the U.S., environmentalists only were able to prevail over hostile actors within the Democratic Party to secure a partial vision of a national GND (the Inflation Reduction Act), that failed to deliver on even the modest social welfare state (an expansive list that included a higher minimum wage, childcare, healthcare, housing, and conservation corps) that green progressives had long promised. Worse, party leaders and economic elites sidelined activists in the IRA’s drafting, won an expansion of the military-industrial complex, and tethered the rollout of renewable energy projects on public lands and waters to mandatory oil and gas lease sales in an unconscionable compromise with fossil fuel barons.

This program, along with the companion Chips Act, was justified in insalubrious if not overtly contradictory terms as a means to combat a Chinese state that had already delivered on a technocratic climate agenda. These ill-conceived (and ultimately compromised) “green growth” initiatives have since been rendered dead in their tracks as a result of the subsequent power transfer in Washington, and the overarching legacy of the Biden-era climate initiatives has actually been to the detriment of the planet. Under the new administration, the bill’s subsidy-driven approach and concessions to fossil fuel industrialists have been weaponized to accelerate the very emissions it sought to curb. Finally, even if the IRA’s policy package had been seen through to completion as intended, its utter lack of binding regulations would have done little to slow ecological breakdown, while its green-tech incentives would have led to an explosive expansion of mining for lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth metals, threatening devastating effects on deep sea ecosystems and Indigenous communities in the global south.

The state-level fights in places like New York for public power and free transit, by contrast, won clear victories that were nevertheless often stalled by political leadership in the regulatory process and in the courts. The GNDCC and the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group, principally, were able to pass the Build Public Renewables Act [BPRA] through the NYS legislature during the 2023 legislative session after liberals and leftists, in response to the first election of Donald Trump, won permanent control of the gerrymandered State Senate for the first time since the Second Red Scare. This victory reflected overwhelming Democratic registration and a broad opposition among the party base to the 7-member Independent Democrats Committee, which maintained effective Republican control and a blockade of progressive legislation. NYC-DSA and other chapters throughout the state helped pass legislation to protect tenants among other reforms that appeared decisive in the context of persistent and inarguably irrational political obstruction. The BPRA, for its part, represented a significant intervention within a complex policy environment to replace fossil-fuel power generation with green energy through state ownership and regulatory vehicles left as relics of the New Deal era.

But under Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, state appointed regulators associated with the power utilities and Republican Party, like the NY Power Authority's Justin Driscoll, who received a recess appointment after encountering legislative opposition, worked to stymie and sabotage the implementation of the BPRA, effectively killing the legislation’s impact. As a result, the BPRA delivered on neither its promises of affordability nor a comprehensive strategy of wind and hydropower energy for an energy transition. Although this represented a limited advance, DSA was reduced to lobbying for basic regulatory compliance in accordance with the law around annual budgets rather than pursuing the promised transformation it had fought for. Despite being widely regarded as the incompetent successor who took control of the state following pressure from DSA electeds after the scandals that led Cuomo to resign, Governor Hochul reestablished the dominance of the corporate class in New York politics. While climate advocates continue to fight, the second Trump administration's illegal and politicized reversal of clean energy permits has further intensified the barriers to even incremental progress.

To be clear, these green energy policy initiatives were not unreasonable, even where they lacked a deeper analysis. Yet, they have neglected and failed to contend with increasingly hostile and reactionary forces within the capitalist state. Those forces, as every socialist practitioner since the First International has recognized, are unevenly distributed among unelected courts, executives, and corrupt state bureaucrats, making electoral success at the state level inadequate for establishing statewide power. In effect, those institutional actors are able to subvert popular forces and the types of legislative pressure campaigns that may have been more effective in a prior regulatory era, as the history of the Clean Air Act demonstrates. In response to external opposition and internal demands for more democracy and radical strategy, leaders within groups like the GNDCC and Sunrise Movement doubled down on the top-down NGO model and chased an opportunistic, ad-hoc program of intervening in legislative and budgetary fights as well as electoral battles. These were often properly the domain of other DSA working groups and organizations, however, resulting in reduplication, inefficiency, and fights for factional control.

The GNDCC of 2025 has been left crippled by burnout and a hollowed-out membership core after endless mobilization and repeated impasses from its reformist political strategy. The GNDCC asserted early on that they had won electoral and legislative fights through an overarching strategy, but their subsequent defeats demonstrated an inability for that strategy to adapt, and for the leadership to understand the nature of the particular states, industries, and political conditions that they repeatedly confronted. Without a democratic structure or system of accountability within the group, there was no ability to address the theoretical or practical problems that had arisen from their failures, nor was there a mechanism to transform the factional leadership cadre in power during this period.

Towards an Anti-Fascist, Socialist Ecological Politics

Now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for those of us fighting on the front lines against ecological disaster to face reality. We are engaged in a struggle for survival against a nefarious private-public partnership that will not compromise with us. The institutional channels for reform have been utterly foreclosed, and it behooves us to evolve our strategic orientation accordingly. The question we must pose to ourselves is thus: “What does the potential crumbling of American democracy and a coherent administrative state mean for our struggle as socialists, and even more fundamentally as humans fighting for a future on this planet? And how can we even begin to progress towards the dream of a sustainable and ecological society while locked out of all the organs of state power?” To this question, we as revolutionary socialists aim to suggest that those state institutions never actually offered the hope they promised us in the first place. Which is to say, compromise was never an option.

Even insofar as the legislative pathway does offer the possibility of progress, that incremental form of progress will never restore balance between humanity and nature. Its only purpose is to buy us time before collapse sets in. And even those stalling tactics cannot be realized through a purely electoralist approach founded on campaigns and appeals to the entrenched power of incumbent officials. We simply do not have the luxury of time. We can no longer afford to continue concentrating all of our efforts on promoting inadequate reforms within corrupt, captured institutions; Not when the science is clear that we are already on pace to invoke a doomsday event within the coming decades.

As socialists, we must recognize the symmetry between the capitalist exploitation of human beings for our labor and the industrial plundering of nature for her “resources”. With fascism ascendant in the US, the time has come to acknowledge what Indigenous groups have been arguing for many decades, and what we, as revolutionaries, have known all along: extractivism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and capitalism are all cut from the same cloth. In each case, economic elites loot, pillage, and profit, inflicting untold suffering and destruction whilst claiming it was to the benefit of society broadly. For each injustice, salvation can never come from above. The movement for an ecological future can only be built from the bottom up, through grassroots organizing to create new community-based institutions and radicalize existing ones.

Liberals insistent on the “abundance” model will claim that the climate emergency is a technological problem that can be ameliorated by for-profit enterprise, if only the left would abandon its dusty regulatory frameworks in favor of policies that accelerate private-sector innovation. The contradiction inherent in entrusting corporations with the task of extinguishing the very fire they started and profiteered off of, is lost on the liberal mind. Social democrats and Marxists see through the naivete of this thinly-veiled market fundamentalism, understanding that the interests of the capitalists are misaligned with that of society at large. Yet they fail to extend their critique of class outward to a broader critique of the fundamental dynamic at play - hierarchy, and thus believe that state bureaucracies, nationalized industries, and even centralized communist parties are capable of transcending the essential nature of hierarchical power structures. But the injustices we seek to eliminate - ecological degradation, forced scarcity, and imperialism - are themselves imposed by the unequal power distribution characteristic of our hierarchical society. These authoritarian structures will be used to dominate the masses and facilitate exploitation as long as they are allowed to persist. If the solutions we devise recreate those same hierarchical systems, we will only reproduce the tools for oppression, to the detriment of every social and ecological end we strive towards.

Though the emergence of industrial machinery massively increased the destructive capacity of human civilization, the origins of the ecological crisis date back to long before the rise of capitalism in 16th century England. Therefore, confronting the problem in earnest requires challenging the notion that by simply arresting control over capital from the bourgeois and transferring it to a privileged class of political elites, we can usher in a utopia. By the same token, it requires looking beyond merely technocratic and economistic solutions rooted in the same antagonistic logic of domination, extraction, and accumulation that inflicts all social and ecological harms. It requires abandoning the futile paradigm of begging for concessions from a cynical, corrupt, and genocidal political class, who would sooner doom the whole of civilization to collapse than challenge the interests of their donors. Most importantly, it requires that we conceive of a radically egalitarian future in which hierarchies have been dissolved and the compulsion to dominate both our fellow humans and the natural world has been surpassed by the mutual solidarity between members of a democratic, self-organizing, and communitarian society.

In embracing transformation, elements within DSA and the broader environmental movement can move beyond the strategic impasses of the last decade. Projects which, despite their socialist content and objectives, were managed within the terrain and assumptions of hegemonic liberalism and non-profit intervention within the state, could only have succeeded under vastly different organizing conditions. Additionally, the intensifying climate and political conflicts we face in the present demand that we embrace a vision of ecology that finally leaves behind extractive and imperial modes of production and the social order that has been associated with them. Only by embracing the member-driven democracy critical to the success of working groups in DSA and climate initiatives more broadly can we prevail on this new terrain and in the struggles to come. We can’t fall back on the failures of the past. We need to draw new perspectives and strategies directly from our members in order to regroup, re-evaluate, and advance our ecological vision.

It’s time for DSA’s national ecosocialist organizing to join its membership on the front lines of the fight to end both human and ecological exploitation, once and for all.

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