Overview

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In this ground breaking class analysis, Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics in the professional class is not capable of building a movement up to this challenge. For an alternative strategy, he proposes climate politics that appeals to the vast majority of society: the working class. Huber evaluates the Green New Deal as a first attempt to channel working class material and ecological interests and advocates building union power in the very energy system we so need to dramatically transform. In the end, as in classical socialist movements of the early 20th Century, winning the climate struggle will need to be internationalist based on a form of planetary working class solidarity.

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9781788733885

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Reviews

Praise for Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital by Matthew T. Huber Lifeblood offers a radically alternative way of thinking about 'cheap oil' and 'oil addiction' and in so doing peers beneath the liquid surfaces of petroleum to see how the long century of American oil consumption has been central to the rise of American neoliberalism itself. An original and masterful account of oil in contemporary American capitalism. -Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley Compellingly presented and enlivened by fascinating archival research, Huber's arguments about the 'ecology of politics' and the centrality of oil to the making of 'entrepreneurial life' are important and intriguing. -Gavin Bridge, Durham University Huber offers a poignant analysis of how oil shapes the American way of life and neoliberal hegemony in the US. -CHOICE Huber makes it abundantly clear that the problems with patterns of oil consumption are not fundamentally technical and economic but cultural, social, and political. -Economic Geography An incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. -New Books in Geography The most succinct, theoretically grounded critique of the culture of oil yet in print. -Humanities and Social Sciences Review Online [Lifeblood Oil] is a compelling account, and is highly recommended. -Urban Studies Huber takes us. . . into Americans' own subconscious minds, to their un-thought-out daily patterns, and their emotional attachments to a sense of entrepreneurial success--and shows how these are linked materially to oil. -Environmental History An elegantly written and empirically rich account which joins economic history, cultural analysis, and Marxist political economy. -Human Geography

Author Information

Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood.

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