All you have to do to understand this problem is to think about all the jobs in coal, oil, gas, plastics, slaughter houses, meat processing, and car manufacturing. And all the pensions.

In general, fossil jobs need to go. We can’t get around this fact.

Leftists need to dig deep into history and realize that socialism existed before fossil industry. While abundance sounds great, there is no abundance of means and places to put atmospheric carbon in (sinks). Many carbon sinks are burning and defrosting as we speak.

Fortunately, leftism has a long tradition of managing scarcity. That’s missing from these parties. Example:

Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: The Political Economy of Direct Air Capture , by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.

The alternative is an aggressive pursuit of sequestration folded into a programme for ‘euthanizing the fossil fuel industry’, in Parenti’s words: and the two could be fully unified in one act. Private producers of fossil fuels could be nationalised and converted into organisations for capture and storage. This would, as Buck has argued, be the most logical solution: compelling the polluters to clean up their own mess; making good use of their geological and chemical expertise; transferring workers in a doomed industry to new jobs, without having them move one mile. The company formerly known as ExxonMobil: a public utility for drawing down all the emissions it has caused and then some.147

A similar policy needs to come for the automobile industry. The apostles of DAC often calculate that 10 or 20 million DAC machines should be manufactured every year and argue that this is entirely within the realm of the feasible, since more than 70 million cars – devices of comparable size and sophistication – are turned out annually from the world’s factories. But the contention would be more credible if it came with the proposal that one fourth of the automobile industry be converted to DAC manufacturing (and the rest to other segments of the transition).148 The state could force the pace of development by acquiring the secrets from start-ups. It could open the valves of funding to improve the tech – yes, Manhattan Project-style – at maximum speed. Only the state could navigate the minefield of DAC energy and resource requirements and prevent unconscionable trade-offs. But most importantly, it is difficult to see any other actor that could release DAC from ‘the universal domination of mankind by exchange-value’ and let it work for something to which no such value can attach: a stable climate for all, impossible to bring to the market in a shining green bottle or white shoe.149 States could supplement DAC with other forms of drawdown, provided these are compatible with progressive ambitions – natural forest regeneration on land taken from the hands of the meat industry, for instance. For the time being, however, it appears that direct air capture, mineralisation and sequestration could be an important part of removal. After zero-emissions, this process can start lifting the burden, stone after incremental stone, let the earth go free and heal the wounds to the best of its ability. But best-case scenarios are, of course, in very short supply in this overheating world. That is why the politics of carbon dioxide removal will be defining for decades to come.

And a discussion on YouTube: The Imperial Mode of Living - Ulrich Brand & Markus Wissen, comments by Lucas Poy

Bonus meme: