Class

The climate crisis is rooted in the structure of capitalist production, where fossil‑fuel profits soar while systemic transformation is delayed. A class analysis argues that real power lies at the point of production, not consumption, and that workers – who lack control over the ecological means of life – hold the structural capacity to disrupt and reshape the system.

Because the climate movement is currently dominated by professional and middle class perspectives focused on lifestyle change, awareness and persuasion, it struggles to build mass power. Only broad, working‑class movements – democratic, internationalist and organised at scale – can transform production and confront the interests driving extraction, with no shortcuts available.(1)

The richest 1% drive a disproportionate share of the climate crisis – producing as much carbon as the poorest 66% of humanity, and overshooting the 1.5°C‑compatible limit by more than twentyfold. A progressive tax on their incomes could raise trillions for a fast, fair transition. Securing an equitable future for the 99% requires greater equality, a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and economies redesigned for human and planetary wellbeing.

Climate activism has long been shaped by white, middle-class leadership, even though environmental harm falls hardest on working-class communities and people of colour. Rebuilding the movement requires recognising its class and privilege gaps, learning from the working class and Global South movements that have historically led environmental struggles, and modernising climate discourse so those most affected are empowered to lead genuinely intersection, community-rooted organising.

A study based on Reckwitz’s four‑class model in the UK shows that different social groups contribute differently to environmental harm, yet all current class lifestyles exceed the remaining carbon budget: the new middle class has higher mobility‑related emissions, the old middle class has higher housing‑related emissions, and the super‑rich dominate overall impacts. Existing research focuses on elites, but a fuller class analysis reveals that unsustainable consumption is structurally embedded across society, tied to class position rather than income or taste.

Class has been sidelined in climate politics, yet working‑class people hold the structural power to disrupt capital through strikes and other forms of labour action. Expanding class analysis to include social‑ecological reproduction shows that struggles over care, subsistence, and environmental conditions are also sites of strategic power, and that reclaiming the means of subsistence is central to building the kind of broad, organised working‑class movements capable of confronting the climate crisis.

Decarbonising core systems like energy, food, housing, and transport is ultimately a struggle over who controls production, since the climate crisis stems from ownership and profit structures rather than individual behaviour. Confronting the carbon‑intensive capitalist class and building planetary working‑class solidarity (including strong unions in the energy sector) is essential, especially because the climate movement remains rooted in professional‑class spaces and lacks the broad base needed for transformative change.

Calls for “united action” overlook how climate vulnerability is shaped by class, race, gender and global inequality: poorer and marginalised groups, who contributed least to the crisis, face the greatest risks, while affluent groups both drive emissions and shape policy to their advantage. Without linking these unequal struggles into a broader transformative movement supported by a rigorous theory of environmental conflict, it is impossible to chart pathways out of the crisis or build a politics capable of confronting the environmental realities of our time.

Climate justice is increasingly recognised as a class struggle: the power to confront the industries driving the crisis lies in mass working‑class organising, just as it did in earlier eras that built unions, welfare states and progressive taxation. Because most emissions come from production for profit, not individual behaviour, climate action must centre frontline communities while also building a broad movement with the structural power to force high‑emitting sectors to change the material systems that shape how people move, eat, heat, and power their lives.