Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won with Kevin Young in conversation with Sasha Lilley

Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won with Kevin Young in conversation with Sasha Lilley

Sunday, September 15th, 5pm to 6:30pm

Join PM Press at Autumn Leaves for our final event of the 2024 Ithaca is Books Festival, a talk on "Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won" with author Kevin Young in conversation with Sasha Lilley (Against the Grain, editor of the Spectre series). Co-sponsored by Cornell's Society for the Humanities and Extinction Rebellion Ithaca.

Climate destruction is a problem of political power.

We have the resources for a green transition, but how can we neutralize the influence of Exxon and Shell? Abolishing Fossil Fuels argues that the climate movement has started to turn the tide against fossil fuels, just too gradually. The movement's partial victories show us how the industry can be further undermined and eventually abolished. Activists have been most successful when they've targeted the 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, leading the industry to lash out in increasingly desperate ways. The fossil fuel industry's financial and legal enablers are also its Achilles heel.

The most powerful movements in US history succeeded in similar ways. The book also includes an in-depth analysis of 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. They forced some sectors of the ruling class to confront others, which paved the way for victory. Electing and pressuring politicians was rarely the movements' primary focus. Rather, gains in the electoral and legislative realms were usually the byproducts of great upsurges in the fields, factories, and streets.

Those historic movements show that it's very possible to defeat capitalist sectors that may seem invulnerable. They also show us how it can be done. They offer lessons for building a multiracial, working-class climate movement that can win a global green transition that's both rapid and equitable.

Kevin Young teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In addition to Abolishing Fossil Fuels, he is the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia, editor of Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left, coauthor of Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It, and coeditor of Trump and the Deeper Crisis.

Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. She is the co-founder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. Sasha Lilley is the author of Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult, coauthor of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, and series editor of PM Press's political economy imprint, Spectre.