Climate breakdown continues at pace despite unprecedented levels of popular support for measures to address it. Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for more than 8 million premature deaths annually, while warming has heightened the likelihood of major hurricanes, as the world grapples with extraordinary heat waves, devastating droughts and deadly wildfires. Inherently linked to the inequality crisis, the causes and distributional impacts of the climate crisis are unevenly felt.  

These harms are not inevitable, however. They are determined by the distribution of power and ownership across societies. In other words, the harms of climate breakdown are to a large extent the consequence of how powerful actors have worked to organise our societies.

Popular understandings of climate breakdown unfortunately often portray it as an issue separate from the wider social and political context. This means that climate breakdown is seen as distinct from the related issues of migration-related harm, poverty, and inequality. In this way, capitalists have been able to present ‘solutions’ that do not require any fundamental shifts in forms of social organisation.  

In the global North, ‘Green New Deals’ (GNDs) have emerged as one of the most prominent policy frames for addressing climate breakdown. These have seen support from a range of unlikely political bedfellows, such as the US Democrats and the UK Conservatives. While environmentalists might take heart from this apparent support, the breadth of support suggests a need for greater scrutiny of the proposals flying under the GND banner. GNDs that fail to address the fundamental questions of power, ownership and control will also fail to adequately ameliorate the injustices of climate breakdown. This is because a preference for highly technical, emissions-focussed policies does nothing to address the forms of social organisation that have emerged from historical racialised patterns of ownership that cast a long shadow. These patterns have contributed to causing the crises we now face. Forms of social organisation will therefore need to be radically remade if we are to properly address climate breakdown as just one among several unfolding crises.  

Redistribution and repair are not just material or financial, but also about the transfer of power and the democratisation of ownership and control. The concept of racial capitalism helps us to better appreciate the connections between the neglect of lives of people of colour globally and the social relations of climate breakdown. Only by acknowledging these connections do we stand any chance of building the foundations for genuinely transformative Green New Deals.

For these reasons, the report recommends that GNDs must include: provisions for reparative justice to build efforts towards the global redistribution of power, wealth, and resources; target racial capitalism as the structuring logic of contemporary crises; policies and practices that move beyond imperial and colonial underpinnings, including provisions for reparative justice; and they must be globally and democratically oriented, harnessing grassroots power and scaling power building.