Kevin Young, labor-climate activist featured in this issue’s “Spotlight” above, has recently published Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements that Won. Young is historian at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a leader in the LNS-coordinated Educators Climate Action Network and the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA).
According to Young, climate destruction is a problem of political power. Activists have been most successful when they’ve targeted the fossil fuel industry’s enablers: the banks, insurers, and big investors that finance its operations, the companies and universities that purchase fossil fuels, and the regulators and judges who make life-and-death rulings about pipelines, power plants, and drilling sites. This approach has jeopardized investor confidence in fossil fuels.
Young observes that the most powerful movements in US history succeeded in similar ways. He examines four classic victories: the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air. Those movements inflicted costs on economic elites through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption. Those historic movements offer lessons for building a multiracial, working-class climate movement that can win a global green transition that’s both rapid and equitable.
LNS co-founder and senior strategic advisor Jeremy Brecher says, “Young presents a careful analysis of the powers that are purveying fossil fuels—and of how ordinary people can defeat them by inflicting sustained disruption on the elites that are perpetuating climate destruction. If the original Abolitionists could take down the slaveholders—the greatest power in the land—why can’t we abolish fossil fuels? Kevin Young’s answer is we can. I hope this book will become the strategic handbook for the climate protection movement.”