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Malcolm Harris’ latest book, What’s Left, presents a stark assessment of the climate crisis and a serious consideration of what political options have the potential to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. While the Harris’ focused proposals—marketcraft, public ownership of utilities, and communism— are not options American leaders currently take seriously, Harris makes the case these alternatives will become all the more vital as climate catastrophes intensify. What’s Left reimagines what climate discourse could be if by identifying steps must be taken to decarbonize and working backwards to see how these solutions may come about. In face of serious climate proposals continuing to be discarded. salvaging What’s Left of our environment is the guiding force trying to motivate action along whatever method will achieve these aims.
In the months after it’s been written, What’s Left has already seemed prescient in foreseeing the failure of mainstream climate politics. The Biden administration’s paradox of increasing and oil production alongside green investments and ESG disclosures has been quickly undone by the Trump administration as if the Democratic Party has been in any way restrictive to fossil fuels. California, despite facing more frequent wildfires, has responded by reducing environmental building standards in the disaster zones too dangerous even for insurers. Against these contradictions and failures, a realpolitik approach to achieving sustainability goals is refreshing. 
To make any meaningful progress, climate proposals need to start with confronting what Harris terms the “Oil-Value Life chain”—the system of production that maximizes profit at the expense of any other social goal. This is something Harris, who has spoken at Shell’s corporate retreat in the past, has more experience with than most. No matter how green consumption may be, dirty productive systems will continue to wreak damage unabated. Big change—big enough to dislodge our dependence on oil for our economic systems—will needed to address this. For Harris, the three options with the power to do replace the oil-value-life chain are 1) marketcraft — government regulating a green market into existence, 2) public power — collective ownership of the energy sector, and 3) Communism — where people seize the means of production. While the stated intent is to review what each option may look like, these economic questions naturally raise questions about what we owe to society and how we should relate to each other.
In his analysis of these movements, marketcraft draws the most contemporaneous practical examples—as well as downfalls. Because markets are social projects to achieve societal goals, these markets can often be the most expedient methods to deliver reform through green incentives, taxing polluters, and investing in long-term projects. While the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was the US’ most serious effort at green incentives, this also showed the incoherence of applying incentives to stimulate green production without reducing pollution to reduce emissions. For what good marketcraft looks like, we are still left looking at other countries such as China’s ability to continue investing in renewable energy generation and transmission.
Public power offers a second alternative where public ownership of power generation could invest in forms of energy generation to serve the public good. Instead of the current system where municipalities grant utility monopolies to extract rent for delivering power, communities could invest directly in power generation—both cutting out the middleman and empowering communities to make utility decisions aligned to their goals. When the US has invested in public utilities, such as the Tennessee Valley, the social advancement has been phenomenal despite the US refusing to back similar New Deal-style investments for several decades. Freed from the need to finance sustainable power profitably, China has been able to make significant increases in the last decades.
Lastly, communism is the final and most transformative option—to address not just the contradictions of the an economy undermining global livability but also addressing the core assumptions of capitalist resource distribution. Community-based uprisings against capitalism from the Zapatistas or other indigenous resistance movements have been some of the most effective ways to advance social planning that embeds their participants in their local environment. In a world where we can expect systems to continue to failing, this bulwark is something groups need to be prepared for.
Given the urgency of these challenges, no strategy alone can be expected to address these needs. Harris takes each vein of thought seriously, but thankfully not on its own terms. What’s Left presents a practical exploration of how these movements can work together to advance climate goals. This topical overview covers a wide range of productive methods to decarbonize industrial manufacturing and reduce carbon’s impact on the atmosphere. These tactics as well as their social ramifications, both successful and not, that have been attempted with the potential to leverage wider-scale change. While at this moment, as the any semblance of environmental consciousness is razed from federal government, lax environmental regulations are gutted, and milquetoast incentives are rolled back any of these options appear far fetched. However, this does not change the facts that these are the actions necessary to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. The climate fight will live on and we will win, because we must.
