In Decem­ber 2012, Brad Wern­er — a com­plex sys­tems researcher with pink hair and a seri­ous expres­sion — made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space sci­en­tists at the fall meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Geo­phys­i­cal Union in San Fran­cis­co. But it was Werner’s ses­sion that was attract­ing much of the buzz. It was titled ​“Is Earth F**ked?” (Full title: ​“Is Earth F**ked? Dynam­i­cal Futil­i­ty of Glob­al Envi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment and Pos­si­bil­i­ties for Sus­tain­abil­i­ty via Direct Action Activism”).

we should be clear about the nature of the challenge: It is not that “we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is.

Stand­ing at the front of the con­fer­ence room, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego pro­fes­sor took the crowd through the advanced com­put­er mod­el he was using to answer that rather direct ques­tion. He talked about a whole bunch of oth­er stuff large­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to those of us unini­ti­at­ed in com­plex sys­tems the­o­ry. But the bot­tom line was clear enough: Glob­al cap­i­tal­ism has made the deple­tion of resources so rapid, con­ve­nient and bar­ri­er-free that ​“earth-human sys­tems” are becom­ing dan­ger­ous­ly unsta­ble in response. When a jour­nal­ist pressed Wern­er for a clear answer on the ​“Is earth fucked?” ques­tion, he set the jar­gon aside and replied, ​“More or less.”

There was one dynam­ic in the mod­el, how­ev­er, that offered some hope. Wern­er described it as ​“resis­tance” — move­ments of ​“peo­ple or groups of peo­ple” who ​“adopt a cer­tain set of dynam­ics that does not fit with­in the cap­i­tal­ist cul­ture.” Accord­ing to the abstract for his pre­sen­ta­tion, this includes ​“envi­ron­men­tal direct action, resis­tance tak­en from out­side the dom­i­nant cul­ture, as in protests, block­ades and sab­o­tage by Indige­nous peo­ples, work­ers, anar­chists and oth­er activist groups.” Such mass upris­ings of peo­ple — along the lines of the abo­li­tion move­ment and the Civ­il Rights Move­ment — rep­re­sent the like­li­est source of ​“fric­tion” to slow down an eco­nom­ic machine that is careen­ing out of control.

This, he argued, is clear from his­to­ry, which tells us that past social move­ments have ​“had tremen­dous influ­ence on … how the dom­i­nant cul­ture evolved.” It stands to rea­son, there­fore, that ​“if we’re think­ing about the future of the earth, and the future of our cou­pling to the envi­ron­ment, we have to include resis­tance as part of that dynam­ic.” And that, Wern­er said, is not a mat­ter of opin­ion, but ​“real­ly a geo­physics prob­lem.” Put anoth­er way, only mass social move­ments can save us now. Because we know where the cur­rent sys­tem, left unchecked, is head­ed. We also know, I would add, how that sys­tem will deal with the real­i­ty of ser­i­al cli­mate-relat­ed dis­as­ters: with prof­i­teer­ing, and esca­lat­ing bar­barism to seg­re­gate the losers from the win­ners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep bar­rel­ing down the road we are on. The only remain­ing vari­able is whether some coun­ter­vail­ing pow­er will emerge to block the road, and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly clear some alter­nate path­ways to des­ti­na­tions that are safer. If that hap­pens, well, it changes everything.

Social move­ments, such as the fos­sil fuel divestment/​reinvestment move­ment, local laws bar­ring high-risk extrac­tion, bold court chal­lenges by Indige­nous groups and oth­ers, are ear­ly man­i­fes­ta­tions of this resis­tance. They have not only locat­ed var­i­ous choke points to slow the expan­sion plans of the fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies, but the eco­nom­ic alter­na­tives these move­ments are propos­ing and build­ing are map­ping ways of liv­ing with­in plan­e­tary bound­aries, ones based on intri­cate rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships rather than brute extrac­tion. This is the ​“fric­tion” to which Wern­er referred, the kind that is need­ed to put the brakes on the forces of destruc­tion and destabilization.

Just as many cli­mate change deniers I met fear, mak­ing swift progress on cli­mate change requires break­ing fos­silized free mar­ket rules. That is why, if we are to col­lec­tive­ly meet the enor­mous chal­lenges of this cri­sis, a robust social move­ment will need to demand (and cre­ate) polit­i­cal lead­er­ship that is not only com­mit­ted to mak­ing pol­luters pay for a cli­mate-ready pub­lic sphere, but will­ing to revive two lost arts: longterm pub­lic plan­ning, and say­ing no to pow­er­ful corporations.

There are many impor­tant debates to be had about the best way to respond to cli­mate change — stormwalls or ecosys­tem restora­tion? Decen­tral­ized renew­ables, indus­tri­al scale wind pow­er com­bined with nat­ur­al gas, or nuclear pow­er? Small-scale organ­ic farms or indus­tri­al food sys­tems? There is, how­ev­er, no sce­nario in which we can avoid wartime lev­els of spend­ing in the pub­lic sec­tor — not if we are seri­ous about pre­vent­ing cat­a­stroph­ic lev­els of warm­ing, and min­i­miz­ing the destruc­tive poten­tial of the com­ing storms.

Pub­lic mon­ey needs to be spent on ambi­tious emis­sion-reduc­ing projects — the smart grids, the light rail, the city­wide com­post­ing sys­tems, the build­ing retro­fits, the vision­ary tran­sit sys­tems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spend­ing half our lives in traf­fic jams. The pri­vate sec­tor is ill-suit­ed to tak­ing on most of these large infra­struc­ture invest­ments. If the ser­vices are to be acces­si­ble, which they must be in order to be effec­tive, the prof­it mar­gins that attract pri­vate play­ers sim­ply aren’t there.

The pol­luter pays

So how on earth are we going to pay for all this? In North Amer­i­ca and Europe, the eco­nom­ic cri­sis that began in 2008 is still being used as a pre­text to slash aid abroad and cut cli­mate pro­grams at home. All over South­ern Europe, envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies and reg­u­la­tions have been clawed back, most trag­i­cal­ly in Spain, which, fac­ing fierce aus­ter­i­ty pres­sure, dras­ti­cal­ly cut sub­si­dies for renew­ables projects, send­ing solar projects and wind farms spi­ral­ing toward default and clo­sure. The U.K. under David Cameron has also cut sup­ports for renew­able energy.

If we accept that gov­ern­ments are broke, and they’re not like­ly to intro­duce ​“quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing” (aka print­ing mon­ey) for the cli­mate sys­tem as they have for the banks, where is the mon­ey sup­posed to come from? Since we have only a few short years to dra­mat­i­cal­ly low­er our emis­sions, the only ratio­nal way for­ward is to ful­ly embrace the prin­ci­ple already well estab­lished in West­ern law: the pol­luter pays.

Oil and gas com­pa­nies remain some of the most prof­itable cor­po­ra­tions in his­to­ry, with the top five oil com­pa­nies pulling in $900 bil­lion in prof­its from 2001 to 2010. These com­pa­nies are rich, quite sim­ply, because they have dumped the cost of clean­ing up their mess onto reg­u­lar peo­ple around the world. It is this sit­u­a­tion that, most fun­da­men­tal­ly, needs to change.

And it will not change with­out strong action. For well over a decade, sev­er­al of the oil majors have claimed to be vol­un­tar­i­ly using their prof­its to invest in a shift to renew­able ener­gy. But accord­ing to a study by the Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress, just 4 per­cent of the Big Five’s $100 bil­lion in com­bined prof­its in 2008 went to ​“renew­able and alter­na­tive ener­gy ven­tures.” Instead, they con­tin­ue to pour their prof­its into share­hold­er pock­ets, out­ra­geous ex- ecu­tive pay (Exxon CEO Rex Tiller­son makes more than $100,000 a day), and new tech­nolo­gies designed to extract even dirt­i­er and more dan­ger­ous fos­sil fuels. As oil indus­try watch­er Anto­nia Juhasz has observed, ​“You wouldn’t know it from their adver­tis­ing, but the world’s major oil com­pa­nies have either entire­ly divest­ed from alter­na­tive ener­gy or sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced their invest­ments in favor of dou­bling down on ever-more risky and destruc­tive sources of oil and nat­ur­al gas.”

Giv­en this track record, it’s safe to assume that if fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies are going to help pay for the shift to renew- able ener­gy, and for the broad­er costs of a cli­mate desta­bi­lized by their pol­lu­tion, it will be because they are forced to do so by law.

It is high time for the indus­try to at least split the bill for the cli­mate cri­sis. And there is mount­ing evi­dence that the finan­cial world under­stands that this is com­ing. In its 2013 annu­al report on ​“Glob­al Risks,” the World Eco­nom­ic Forum (host of the annu­al super-elite gath­er­ing in Davos, Switzer­land), stat­ed plain­ly, ​“Although the Alaskan vil­lage of Kivali­na — which faces being ​‘wiped out’ by the chang­ing cli­mate— was unsuc­cess­ful in its attempts to file a $400 mil­lion law­suit against oil and coal com­pa­nies, future plain­tiffs may be more successful.”

The ques­tion is: How do we stop fos­sil fuel prof­its from con­tin­u­ing to hem­or­rhage into exec­u­tive pay­checks and share­hold­er pock­ets — and how do we do it soon, before the com­pa­nies are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less prof­itable or out of busi­ness because we have moved to a new ener­gy sys­tem? A steep car­bon tax would be a straight­for­ward way to get a piece of the prof­its, as long as it con­tained a gen­er­ous redis­trib­u­tive mech­a­nism — a tax cut or income cred­it — that com­pen­sat­ed poor and mid­dle-class con­sumers for increased fuel and heat­ing prices. As Cana­di­an econ­o­mist Marc Lee points out, designed prop­er­ly, ​“It is pos­si­ble to have a pro­gres­sive car­bon tax sys­tem that reduces inequal­i­ty as it rais­es the price of emit­ting green­house gas­es.” An even more direct route to get­ting a piece of those pol­lu­tion prof­its would be for gov­ern­ments to nego­ti­ate much high­er roy­al­ty rates on oil, gas and coal extrac­tion, with the rev­enues going to ​“her­itage trust funds” that would be ded­i­cat­ed to build­ing the post – fos­sil fuel future, as well as to help­ing com­mu­ni­ties and work­ers adapt to these new realities.

Fos­sil fuel cor­po­ra­tions can be count­ed on to resist any new rules that cut into their prof­its, so harsh penal­ties, includ­ing revok­ing cor­po­rate char­ters, would need to be on the table. But the extrac­tive indus­tries shouldn’t be the only tar­gets of the ​“pol­luter pays” prin­ci­ple. The car com­pa­nies have plen­ty to answer for, too, as do the ship­ping indus­try and the airlines.

More­over, there is a sim­ple, direct cor­re­la­tion between wealth and emis­sions — more mon­ey gen­er­al­ly means more fly­ing, dri­ving, boat­ing and pow­er­ing of mul­ti­ple homes. One case study of Ger­man con­sumers indi­cates that the trav­el habits of the most afflu­ent class have an impact on cli­mate 250 per­cent greater than that of their low­est-earn­ing neighbors.

That means any attempt to tax the extra­or­di­nary con­cen­tra­tion of wealth at the very top of the eco­nom­ic pyra­mid would — if par­tial­ly chan­neled into cli­mate financ­ing — effec­tive­ly make the pol­luters pay. Jour­nal­ist and cli­mate and ener­gy pol­i­cy expert Gar Lipow puts it this way: ​“We should tax the rich more because it is the fair thing to do, and because it will pro­vide a bet­ter life for most of us, and a more pros­per­ous econ­o­my. How­ev­er, pro­vid­ing mon­ey to save civ­i­liza­tion and reduce the risk of human extinc­tion is anoth­er good rea­son to bill the rich for their fair share of taxes.”

There is no short­age of options for equi­tably com­ing up with the cash to pre­pare for the com­ing storms while rad­i­cal­ly low­er­ing our emis­sions to pre­vent cat­a­stroph­ic warm­ing. Con­sid­er the following:

A ​ “ low-rate” finan­cial trans­ac­tion tax — which would hit trades of stocks, deriv­a­tives and oth­er finan­cial instru­ments — could bring in near­ly $ 650 bil­lion at the glob­al lev­el each year, accord­ing to a 2011 res­o­lu­tion of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment (and it would have the added bonus of slow­ing down finan­cial speculation).

​ low-rate” finan­cial trans­ac­tion tax — which would hit trades of stocks, deriv­a­tives and oth­er finan­cial instru­ments — could bring in near­ly $ bil­lion at the glob­al lev­el each year, accord­ing to a res­o­lu­tion of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment (and it would have the added bonus of slow­ing down finan­cial speculation). Clos­ing tax havens would yield anoth­er wind­fall. The U.K.-based Tax Jus­tice Net­work esti­mates that in 2010 , the pri­vate finan­cial wealth of indi­vid­u­als stowed unre­port­ed in tax havens around the globe was some­where between $ 21 tril­lion and $ 32 tril­lion. If that mon­ey were brought into the light and its earn­ings taxed at a 30 per­cent rate, it would yield at least $ 190 bil­lion in income tax rev­enue each year.

, the pri­vate finan­cial wealth of indi­vid­u­als stowed unre­port­ed in tax havens around the globe was some­where between $ tril­lion and $ tril­lion. If that mon­ey were brought into the light and its earn­ings taxed at a per­cent rate, it would yield at least $ bil­lion in income tax rev­enue each year. A 1 per­cent ​ “ billionaire’s tax,” float­ed by the U.N., could raise $ 46 bil­lion annually.

per­cent ​ billionaire’s tax,” float­ed by the U.N., could raise $ bil­lion annually. A $ 50 tax per met­ric ton of CO 2 emit­ted in devel­oped coun­tries would raise an esti­mat­ed $ 450 bil­lion annu­al­ly, while a more mod­est $ 25 car­bon tax would still yield $ 250 bil­lion per year, accord­ing to a 2011 report by the World Bank, the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, and the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-oper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment (OECD), among others.

tax per met­ric ton of CO emit­ted in devel­oped coun­tries would raise an esti­mat­ed $ bil­lion annu­al­ly, while a more mod­est $ car­bon tax would still yield $ bil­lion per year, accord­ing to a report by the World Bank, the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, and the Organ­i­sa­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-oper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment (OECD), among others. Phas­ing out fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies glob­al­ly would con­ser­v­a­tive­ly save gov­ern­ments a total $ 775 bil­lion in a sin­gle year, accord­ing to a 2012 esti­mate by Oil Change Inter­na­tion­al and the Nat­ur­al Resources Defense Council.

These var­i­ous mea­sures, tak­en togeth­er, would cer­tain­ly raise enough for a very healthy start to finance a Great Tran­si­tion (and avoid a Great Depres­sion). Of course, for any of these tax crack­downs to work, key gov­ern­ments would have to coor­di­nate their respons­es so that cor­po­ra­tions had nowhere to hide — a dif­fi­cult task, though far from impos­si­ble, and one fre­quent­ly bandied about at G20 summits.

To state the obvi­ous: it would be incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to per­suade gov­ern­ments in almost every coun­try in the world to imple­ment the kinds of redis­trib­u­tive cli­mate mech­a­nisms I have out­lined. But we should be clear about the nature of the chal­lenge: It is not that ​“we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our polit­i­cal class is utter­ly unwill­ing to go where the mon­ey is (unless it’s for a cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion), and the cor­po­rate class is dead set against pay­ing its fair share.

Bat­tle for the planet

Seen in this light, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that our lead­ers have so far failed to act to avert cli­mate chaos. Indeed, even if aggres­sive ​“pol­luter pays” mea­sures were intro­duced, it isn’t at all clear that the cur­rent polit­i­cal class would know what to do with the mon­ey. After all, chang­ing the build­ing blocks of our soci­eties — the ener­gy that pow­ers our economies, how we move around, the designs of our major cities — is not about writ­ing a few checks. It requires bold long-term plan­ning at every lev­el of gov­ern­ment, and a will­ing­ness to stand up to pol­luters whose actions put us all in dan­ger. And that won’t hap­pen until the cor­po­rate lib­er­a­tion project that has shaped our polit­i­cal cul­ture for three and a half decades is buried for good.

All of this is why any attempt to rise to the cli­mate chal­lenge will be fruit­less unless it is under­stood as part of a much broad­er bat­tle of world­views, a process of rebuild­ing and rein­vent­ing the very idea of the col­lec­tive, the com­mu­nal, the com­mons, the civ­il, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect. Because what is over­whelm­ing about the cli­mate chal­lenge is that it requires break­ing so many rules at once — rules emerged out of the same, coher­ent world­view. If that world­view is dele­git­imized, then all of the rules with­in it become much weak­er and more vul­ner­a­ble. This is anoth­er les­son from social move­ment his­to­ry across the polit­i­cal spec­trum: When fun­da­men­tal change does come, it’s gen­er­al­ly not in leg­isla­tive dribs and drabs spread out even­ly over decades. Rather it comes in spasms of rapid-fire law­mak­ing, with one break­through after anoth­er. The Right calls this ​“shock ther­a­py”; the Left calls it ​“pop­ulism” because it requires so much pop­u­lar sup­port and mobi­liza­tion to occur.

So how do you change a world­view, an unques­tioned ide­ol­o­gy? Part of it involves choos­ing the right ear­ly pol­i­cy bat­tles — game-chang­ing ones that don’t mere­ly aim to change laws but change pat­terns of thought. That means that a fight for a min­i­mal car­bon tax might do a lot less good than, for instance, form­ing a grand coali­tion to demand a guar­an­teed min­i­mum income. That’s not only because a min­i­mum income, as dis­cussed, makes it pos­si­ble for work­ers to say no to dirty ener­gy jobs but also because the very process of argu­ing for a uni­ver­sal social safe­ty net opens up a space for a full-throat­ed debate about val­ues— about what we owe to one anoth­er based on our shared human­i­ty, and what it is that we col­lec­tive­ly val­ue more than eco­nom­ic growth and cor­po­rate profits.

Indeed, a great deal of the work of deep social change involves hav­ing debates dur­ing which new sto­ries can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of mak­ing the kind of civ­i­liza­tion­al leap required of this fate­ful decade, we will need to start believ­ing, once again, that human­i­ty is not hope­less­ly self­ish and greedy — the image cease­less­ly sold to us by every­thing from real­i­ty shows to neo­clas­si­cal economics.

Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the task is to artic­u­late not just an alter­na­tive set of pol­i­cy pro­pos­als but an alter­na­tive world­view to rival the one at the heart of the eco­log­i­cal cri­sis. A world­view embed­ded in inter­de­pen­dence rather than hyper­indi­vid­u­al­ism, reci­procity rather than dom­i­nance, and coop­er­a­tion rather than hier­ar­chy. This is required not only to cre­ate a polit­i­cal con­text to dra­mat­i­cal­ly low­er emis­sions, but also to help us cope with the dis­as­ters we can no longer afford to avoid. Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emis­sions, an unshak­able belief in the equal rights of all peo­ple and a capac­i­ty for deep com­pas­sion will be the only things stand­ing between civ­i­liza­tion and barbarism.

This essay was adapt­ed from This Changes Every­thing: Cap­i­tal­ism vs. the Cli­mate by Nao­mi Klein. Copy­right © 2014 by Nao­mi Klein. Reprint­ed by per­mis­sion of Simon & Schus­ter, Inc.