‘Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming’

––David Bowie

‘Crash through, or crash’

––Gough Whitlam

‘We can be whatever we have the courage to see’

––Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

In the face of crisis, we cannot afford smallness of ambition. The institutions, infrastructure, and ways of life of the carbon age must be rapidly and radically transformed in little more than a decade to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. We must make relics of much of the present if we are to flourish in the future. This is a daunting political project, one of deep creation, of radical, hopeful natality, that must be negotiated together with great care. Yet given the scale of violent disruption hurtling toward us, we cannot avoid radical change. It is inevitable; the key question is in which direction, at what pace, cost, and to whose benefit.

Across the world, an ethno-nationalist Right is mobilising for their vision of climate eschatology: a potent mix of denialism, the reckless defence of the commanding heights of the carbon economy, the aggressive maintenance of the inequalities of global capitalism, and the ever-more violent policing of borders and bodies, where those with the least responsibility for the gathering crisis bear the highest cost. In the face of this, a politics of incrementalism is worse than complacent; it is actively dangerous.

Tinkering at the margins cannot address the challenges we face or build a broad enough political coalition to drive change. Nor can a reliance on the same old tools and approaches that got us here. Our response instead must be a collective and democratic project to build a net zero-carbon society, justly and swiftly, one that centres the needs and voices of those who have borne the brunt of economic and environmental extractivism, that reimagines public affluence, the commons, the household economy and the market for the 21st century, and which sustainably meets the needs of human and non-human life alike. There really is no alternative.