The truth is stark: We are facing ecocide, the deliberate destruction of our natural environment. Sixty-nine percent of Canadians are concerned about climate change, according to a March 2025 Abacus poll. Yet, our current mood seems a toxic blend of confusion, despair, avoidance, madcap conspiracy theories, and outright denial.
But on the other side of this paralyzing fear, real momentum is building. Last September, thousands participated in “Draw the Line” rallies, connecting the dots between previously separate fights – against militarism, against fossil capitalism, and for economic justice and migrants’ and Indigenous rights. This coalition offers a crucial glimpse of a sustainable future. Does it have the unified vision and strategy to guide it?
William Carroll’s recent book, Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World (Routledge 2024) offers a powerful, structural analysis of our current mess and sketches a path forward. The book itself is academic, drawing on scholarly research, including Carroll’s own work on global political economy. But its underlying plot is electrifying: a race between an exterminist political-economic machine and popular movements searching for sanity.
The trifecta: Three pillars of destructive power
Drawing on key insights from thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Karl Marx, Carroll identifies three core, interlocking pillars of power – a “trifecta” – that explain why our system is structurally wired to destroy humanity’s habitat. Understanding these pillars shows us what we are truly up against.
First, capital accumulation, the corporate pursuit of endless profit. It creates a structural division between owners (capitalists) and workers. It tends to reduce much of human activity and need – from housing to healthcare – to a commodity to be bought and sold. It treats nature as separate from humanity, treating it as a limitless source of free resources and a bottomless garbage dump.
Second, imperialism, the geopolitical reality where the ruling classes of wealthy Global North nations dominate the Global South, stripping land of resources and super-exploiting cheap labour.The third pillar is hegemony (controlling the story). This is rule by consent, where the ruling class maintains power not primarily through tanks, but by shaping our culture, media, and common sense. Such persuasion is backed up by the threat of force, but it mostly operates by making us believe the current system is the only possible one.
These three concepts explain why liberal-democratic capitalism constantly breaks its own promises of freedom and rights for all, and “death dives” toward ecocide. Carroll’s trifecta could be thought of as a meta-algorithm, shaping policies through both business as usual, and active pressure from the ruling coalition of political and social forces, the historic bloc. It’s not a hidden global conspiracy or a few bad apple oligarchs, but rather a deeply flawed operating system. But it’s not a rigid destiny. It’s constantly contested by workers, activists and oppositional voices.
How we got stuck: Fossil fuels and neoliberalism
How did we reach this terrifying point?
Carroll traces the problem to the very emergence of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism in 19th-century Britain. This system was founded not just on coal, but on the violent expropriation of land and wealth from colonized territories and the exploitation, enslavement, and/or extermination of their people. Paradoxically, this age of empire gave rise to a limited form of democracy for industrial workers in the imperial heartlands, often called “carbon democracy,” which secured consent while limiting action for true equality.
After World War II, Fossil Capitalism solidified under US leadership. For three decades, the Global North experienced a post-war economic boom: mass production and consumption (think: Fordism), high wages for some workers, cars, suburbs, and to varying degrees, a welfare state. This imperial mode of living involved a class compromise between big business and unionized industrial workers. But it was also conditional on massive, unsustainable resource extraction from the Third World and the lifeblood of fossil fuels. This period of peak prosperity directly coincided with the “Great Acceleration” of greenhouse gas emissions.
The golden age ended in the 1970s. As profits declined, the ruling class shifted to a new strategy: Neoliberalism. David Harvey, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, defines it simply: liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms within a framework of strong private property, free markets, and free trade. The state’s role shrinks mainly to preserving this market framework.
Unfortunately, neoliberalism triumphed just as the world woke up to the climate threat. Neoliberalism worshipped profit, reduced protective environmental policies, deepened inequality, and compressed democracy. It promoted the toxic ideology of market fundamentalism and intense individualism, pushing more and more of society’s decision making into the private sphere, and teaching people to distrust democratic government. All those factors greased the wheels of Fossil Capitalism.
The way forward: Beyond false solutions
Progressive analyses often offer a long train of critiques and a short caboose of solutions. Fortunately, this book’s caboose is a full three chapters. Carroll starts with capitalism’s “false solutions.” The ruling class is aware that climate collapse threatens its own dominance, leading to policies that offer a “green” façade but still protect capital accumulation (e.g., electric vehicles, geoengineering, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade). These are branded as “green growth” or “ecological modernization”.
Carroll argues these are “false solutions” not because they are completely ineffective, but because their effectiveness is profoundly limited by the commitment to endless profit-driven capitalist investment (p. 117). For example, carbon taxes are too small and slow. Renewable energy production has its own massive footprint. Electric vehicles reproduce the privatized, car-centric system. Cap-and-trade and net zero are riddled with fanciful accounting and scam potential. Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is hard to profit from because its benefits are too diffuse and its costs too high.
In short, these solutions refuse to challenge the trifecta of power. They are designed to save capitalism, not the planet. This explains why a country like Canada, despite its image, reduced its official emissions by only 1.2 per cent between 2005 and 2019 and continues to champion the fossil fuel industry. Mark Carney, elected as Prime Minister since publication of Carroll’s book, was until recently considered a climate champion. But Carney seems to have swallowed the neoliberal potion, abruptly axing the carbon tax and the redistributive rebates that went along with it. With the support of the Conservatives, he fast-tracked legislation to enable quicker approval of extractivist projects.
Sketching a real alternative: Ecosocialism
Despite the barriers – especially neoliberalism’s tendency to dissolve worker solidarity and the continued attraction of the imperial mode of living – Carroll finds hope in globally resonant movements: the Green New Deal/Just Transition, Degrowth, and the Indigenous tradition of Buen Vivir (which stresses human well-being and harmony with nature).
By combining the best of these traditions with a historical materialist perspective, Carroll sees the shape of a sustainable alternative: ecosocialism. Its essential ingredients include:
- Democratic and Participatory Economic Planning: This involves conscious decision-making on regional, national, and global scales to meet human needs, not corporate profit targets. It requires states with a significant, guiding role.
- Strategic Degrowth: We must shrink sectors that are socially and ecologically destructive (like the military, advertising, and wasteful consumer goods). But we must grow areas essential for well-being: education, health, and a care economy. This is growth of life, not growth of capital accumulation.
- Controlled Geoengineering: Given the climate urgency, technological intervention may be needed, but it must not be under the control of capital, which would only use it to delay the end of fossil fuels and extract more profit.
How to win: Non-reformist reforms
For how to secure our future, Carroll points to the “environmental proletariat” – a diverse collection of people whose economic and environmental struggles are now deeply intertwined. This is the base that can incubate “diverse alliances of movements,” like those seen at the Draw the Line rallies.
The tactics must move beyond simply slowing the exterminist machine – like the crucial but ultimately unsuccessful “Blockadia” protests against projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline extension. In the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby and elsewhere in BC, hundreds of us stood in front of trucks and gates, peacefully accepting arrest and in many cases imprisonment. As Carroll notes, we delayed its construction, and spooked its US investors, leading Trudeau’s government to buy and complete the pipeline at massive public expense. But we didn’t stop it. We must pivot to doing something new.
Carroll’s proposed strategy involves pursuing “non-reformist reforms”: campaigns that don’t just tweak the system, but transform the political relations and actors themselves, pushing the system past its structural limits. His examples include campaigns for free public transit – climate action that also provides economic justice, rebuilding the idea of public goods and collective action. Another is Energy Democracy – building localized, popularly controlled energy production and supply systems that take power away from the fossil fuel giants.
Helping humanity avoid self-destruction is no small topic. No single book can address everything. More could be said about media’s role in maintaining Fossil Capitalism’s hegemony (disclosure: Bill Carroll and I co-authored Remaking Media, a book on media democratization in 2006).
Could economic planning be democratic and workable, especially on a global scale? How effective are different political strategies? What are the gender dimensions of the climate crisis and proposed solutions? How “green” have non-capitalist states been? Carroll notes the rise of neo-fascism, but we need more discussion of its strategic implications. Does it portend the emergence of a new even more coercive historic bloc, integrating sectors of capital with white supremacists, precarious and declining sections of the middle class, and elites in the Global South?
The late social critic George Carlin famously said, “They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
The 2008 financial crash was a loud alarm clock. Likewise, heat domes, wildfires, and other climate disasters. But in the absence of a coherent left alternative, neoliberalism stumbles on like a zombie.
This book is a vital tool for waking up. It helps us prepare for the next phase of the fight, like transnational coalitions for ecopopulist alternatives to Fossil Fascism. Knowing the algorithm is the first step to rewriting it.
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