Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary on Aug. 17, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. During this series, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.
The last piece in this series comes from senior editor John Thomason. This essay is about falling out of love with dogmatic ideologies, but it’s not a love letter for moderation or a case against strong political convictions. Instead, John argues that liberalism is uniquely suited to people with deep commitments who nevertheless recognize they might be wrong. After a series about learning to live with people who see the world differently, it seems fitting to end with an essay about learning to live with the possibility that you might someday see it differently, too.
If there was one issue that convinced me that I must be a socialist, it was climate change. Climate change has arguably been the defining issue of the 21st-century left. For many of us, it was not just one issue among many but the premier existential threat to human well-being the world over.
My ideological journey started innocently enough, with a broad consideration of the evidence: It’s indisputable that the historical causes of global warming can be traced to countries like ours with the most wealth and resources — we are the ones whose energy and transportation needs have been met with coal, gas, and oil, while others go without. And climate change’s damages are poised to fall most severely on those with the least.
I saw climate change not just as a failure to regulate pollution, but as a consequence of who controlled the economy. The companies selling fossil fuels could collect massive profits while much of the damage fell on people who had neither a stake in those companies nor a say in their decisions.
What was disastrous for humanity could still be good for business. And those businesses could use their largesse to railroad politicians, leaving few avenues for effective political change, except maybe mass mobilization.
Socialism seemed to offer a way out of this mess. If decisions about energy and investment were put under collective control, then we could make them according to what humanity as a whole really needed, rather than what was merely valuable for shareholders. I assumed that if the people bearing the costs of pollution had the power over its sources, then they would make dramatically different choices about how much to pollute.
I now believe I was wrong.
There is no theory of everything
My socialist account of climate change seemed to make all of my commitments point in the same direction: Protecting the climate, fighting exploitation, and lifting people out of poverty were all parts of the same struggle against the same enemy. What I eventually had to confront was that those commitments could sometimes be in conflict and that no one ideological movement held all the answers — or could resolve all of those conflicts.
The unequal harms of climate change often mimicked older relationships of violence and exploitation that rich countries visited upon poor: The U.K. contains less than 1% of the world’s population but is responsible for 4% of historical carbon emissions. Bangladesh and Pakistan, two of its former colonial holdings, together have more than five times the population but are only responsible for less than 0.5% of historical carbon emissions. And they will almost certainly suffer more from climate change, experiencing disruptive levels of extreme heat and drought.
The U.K. may not need to do much besides investing in air conditioning.1
Just as climate change can be seen as reviving the injustices of colonialism, so too can it be seen as reinforcing the inequalities of capitalism. This is why Naomi Klein subtitled her bestselling 2014 book Capitalism vs. the Climate. The accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was concurrent with the rise of global capitalism. And, again, those who have benefited the most from that rise also have the most resources to deal with its consequences, while those who have benefited least will be hit hardest by its effects.
While this seems to clarify the moral stakes of climate change, it doesn’t tell us exactly what to do about it. As Karl Marx put it, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Like Marx, I turned my attention to the capitalists.
Finding these villains was easy enough. The past decade has seen a recurring chorus of headlines like “Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms,” “80 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions Come From Just 57 Companies,” and “You’d Be Surprised How Few Companies Are Behind Half the World’s CO2 Emissions.” If most new sources of warming are caused by just a few dozen companies, the logic goes, then those companies can be targeted for reform (or destruction).
This same impulse helps explain why I became fixated on ExxonMobil. If you look at the database that all those headlines are based on, Exxon is the American company that has the greatest share of global emissions attributed to it between 2016 and 2022 (1.4%). Activist groups like Climate Defiance, which disrupted a private event in order to tell Exxon CEO Darren Woods to “eat shit,” hope that their unrelenting ire can bring that number down. (Of course, it helps that Exxon’s own corporate history isn’t exactly spotless: It concealed its own knowledge of the reality of climate change for decades, during which it supported climate denial campaigns in public.)
For years I held fast to this worldview: Climate change meant that the chickens of capitalism and colonialism were coming home to roost. We would either have to end the tyranny of the fossil fuel capitalists once and for all, or we would subject most of humanity to wave after wave of increasing misery — possibly snuffing our species out altogether. It was a stark vision, but it gave me a feeling I’ve always had trouble mustering on my own: resolve.
Then, one day, I looked at the other companies on those lists.