We knew it would be bad. Since lifting his hand off the Bible on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump has launched headlong into disabling or undoing long-standing US government institutions, commitments and obligations. Notably, this has included a spectacular hostility to anything related to, or even mentioning, climate change and its impacts.

Casualties have included the United States’ withdrawal (again) from the Paris Agreement; a “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements” order that instantly rescinded the Biden administration’s International Climate Finance Plan; devastated budgets, programmes and staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and USAID; the erasure of scientific data and reference to climate change from government websites and publications; the repeal of key elements of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark industrial policy legislation; and the launch of what the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) itself calls the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in US History.” (This, of course, is to speak only of climate policy, saying nothing of a renewed and increasingly violent onslaught against students, activists, migrants and many others.) Viewed together, it is tempting to despair that in a few short weeks, the Trump administration has undone US, and by extension global, climate progress.

In this inaugural issue of The BREAK—DOWN, our contributors make the case, among other things, for resisting this temptation. While dissecting this moment in climate politics, they locate it in a longer trajectory. Certainly, the second Trump administration represents something new. But amid the chaos it is vital to reflect on the nature of the political consensus, including on climate, that this administration and similar parties and movements around the world seek to upend: its assumptions, its compromises, its failures. Only in doing so can we recognize where the contradictions of an ascendant new right create the opportunities to build something radically different, and how we can grasp them.

The Impossibility of the Present

Climate change has always had a scale problem. This is true in both the physical and the temporal sense. Unlike many other objects of knowledge and political struggle, climate change is widely understood as a global problem first, with second order (if by no means minor) impacts at smaller scales. The general sense is that its overall reality is planetary, and its effects cascade down upon the sub-planetary worlds in which we live, generating a perceived mismatch between what must be done, and what can be done—in other words, it often seems like the “most important” scale is the one at which we have no capacity to act.

It has a similarly troublesome relationship to time. The carbon that has so far been dumped into our common atmosphere is the sum of countless historical flames fuelled by the accumulated matter of “billions of dead plants and the animals that consumed them”, to quote one contributor to this issue, laid down over hundreds of billions of years.^[1] Once there, these unruly molecules linger, enduring up to 1,000 years into the future and, consequently, baking in significant climatic change even if we were to stop emitting tomorrow. The fight over who bears historical responsibility for the climate crisis, and is therefore most obligated to act, is rooted in this reality.^[2] Like a world-historic hangover, the carbon already wreaking havoc represents the accumulation of the waste of generations, albeit skewed toward particular countries and regions, and particularly toward the past several decades during which emissions have continued, with rare exception, to rise. In this sense, as Andreas Malm writes, we can “never be in the heat of the moment, only in the heat of this ongoing past.”

We can add to this confusion a final layer: in both politics and the media, climate change is often contrived as a problem of the future, fixing our gaze on the end of the century, by which point we will ideally have levelled out at a supposedly safe 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. These horizons, ever shifting as they are, lend climate change the aura of some far-off apocalyptic event rather than the context in which we are already very much living: an all-encompassing, often difficult-to-feel background condition punctuated in the immediate term by increasingly regular and acutely felt disasters. Together, this spatial and temporal strangeness make the science, politics and discourse of climate change somewhat distinctive—and profoundly complicated. Despite or perhaps because of this complexity, liberal capitalism has, like every problem it confronts, attempted to address climate change by forcing it through the impossibly limited prism of market mechanisms. Increasingly, this has been to the detriment not just of effectiveness but also of already fragile political consent for any action at all.

The Years of Magical Thinking

Mainstream climate politics has so far put nearly all its time and energy into correcting the “market failure” of climate change, from attempting to reflect the “social” cost of emissions with a carbon price, to creating markets where none existed and forcing actors to participate. It by now goes without saying that despite some minor improvements at the local or regional level, these efforts have achieved little. This is not to say, however, that they have not been material. To the contrary, in providing the illusion that something is being done, market-based climate policies have had considerable material impact by delaying more effective action.

On this point, liberalism’s disciples have, for decades, suffered from an increasing cognitive dissonance. While opining on the one hand on the gravity of the dangers we face, on the other they have continued to prescribe highly ineffectual market tweaks and incentives, dressing this up as reason and moderation. How can we explain the durability of this commitment, even as the impacts of its failures have mounted at an accelerating rate?

There is surely no single answer. Fortunately, the economist Mancur Olson, whose The Logic of Collective Action described why markets fail to provide “public goods” like a stable climate, offers some guidance.^[3] In certain situations, Olson tells us, there is a non-market solution to our so-called “collective action problem”: at some point, the disintegration of essential public goods should lead those with the most power and resources to take responsibility for them—not because they feel some obligation to the collective, but because they will be willing to save the planet if this is what is required to take care of themselves. (That they share it with the rest of us is, presumably, a regrettable feature of the arrangement, but one they must live with—Elon Musk’s imminent departure for Mars notwithstanding.) In other words, the fortunate few will, at some point, provide the solution the market fails to. Critically, the more unequal the distribution of resources, the sooner we should expect this to happen. If this is indeed the case, we can rest assured that we are well on our way to salvation.

In the mishmash of technocracy and market-making that constitutes mainstream climate politics, Olson’s proposition has always offered a psychological safe-haven from the sinking feeling that none of it will be enough, and certainly not in time. Generously, then, either political leaders have operated in wilful blindness to the market’s continued failures, or the plan has always rested at least partly on the belief that those in the luxury cabins would never willingly let the ship sink.

Of the many things this Trump administration has so far destabilized or altogether blown apart, this unspoken article of faith is one of them. The naïveté of postwar liberalism has been thoroughly exposed: the rich (people, firms, countries, classes and castes) intend to save themselves. Nor are they particularly interested in hiding it. The leading figures of this new coalition, notably the techno-libertarian lords of Silicon Valley, are as open about their plans for bunkers and walled-off oases with private militaries as they are in their conviction that if anyone were coming to save the day, it would be them—all that’s standing in their way is a vestigial state shackling genius. Per Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and Trump ally, in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”: “There is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.”

There are, of course, countless people around the world who, in view of all available evidence, have never believed this.^[4] They are not, however, the agents of mainstream climate politics in the world’s wealthy Northern states, even if many may reside there.^[5] But for the insiders—the boosters and green-tech bros, gradualist technocrats and reasonable grownups for whom liberalism’s ceaseless self-congratulation is proof of its inevitable moral and material victory—the realization that an elite planetary rescue mission will not materialize is sure to come as a blow. In other words, the “rich-as-saviour” model, which never had a basis in history, now has no promissory basis in the present or future either.

To take just one example: while the process had begun before his re-election, since Trump’s return to the White House corporations and financiers have been gleefully abandoning their (already inadequate and unmet) climate commitments. The always-ephemeral Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero crumbled following the departure of major US banks and asset managers from its constituent green “alliances” en masse. The dismantling of this infrastructure, Brett Christophers argues in his contribution to this issue, may capture the biggest shift so far in US federal climate action: not what the state itself does, but what it expects others, chiefly capital, to do. While both Biden and Trump have worked with enthusiastic vigour to boost US fossil fuel production and exports,^[6] under Biden, corporate America had to at least perform concern for the climate crisis. In short: where before policymakers had willingly handed the reins on climate (with generous support) to capital—and finance capital in particular—no one expects them, any longer, to steer.

This is not to say that in freeing corporations from the obligation to play-act on climate, Trump has affirmed a straightforward relationship to US politics’ traditional core constituencies of finance and fossil capital. Indeed, an even more significant rupture in Trump’s second term so far might be his willingness, if periodically cowed, to antagonize or threaten the interests of both. To put it in the terms of the Zetkin Collective elsewhere in this issue: alongside runaway climate denialism, state violence and repression, Trump’s second term has also been defined by a striking, if partial, “detachment from the base” and a marked retreat from the United States’ long-standing role as defender of globalized capitalism.

A Family Feud

Importantly, the US has not been alone in this dogged defence. Throughout decades of press conferences and legislative debate, political leaders in the world’s wealthier states and regions have first and foremost defended the fundamental rules and institutions of capitalism regardless of the cost, be that planetary crisis, rising poverty and inequality or, increasingly over the past decade, an ascendent far right. In this way, the climate crisis has fallen victim to the same virulent defence of capital and market freedom as everything else, from social care to education, and from vital utilities to insurance against disaster. For most people, the outcomes of decades of these policies have been dismal, while the parties defending them have held on—until recently.

The Democratic Party leadership currently boasts its lowest-ever confidence rating; in the UK, nearly a decade on from the Brexit referendum, both major parties have crashed in recent polls to stand at or below the Reform Party, with its combination of vicious anti-migrant posturing and hostility toward “net zero madness”, over which it promises to hold yet another referendum. Across Europe, this is a pattern with which centrist parties are by now rather familiar, where from Alternative for Germany to Sweden’s Sweden Democrats, far-right parties have made strides not only in polls but in legislatures.

And yet, as Quinn Slobodian has identified, this “new populist right” is in many ways not new. Instead, this new right is simply a warped version of what came before, retaining rather than rejecting neoliberalism’s core tenet: protecting capitalism from democracy. As Slobodian puts it: “the reported clash of opposites is”, more accurately, “a family feud.”^[7] So while Trump and his counterparts around the world, from Milei to Modi and Weidel to Farage, rail against the mainstream, globalism, liberalism and everything else, in many ways their policies (Trump’s tariffs perhaps excepted)^[8] are a clear continuation of what’s come before: tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, sweeping deregulation and privatisation, the policing of people and oppression of labour, and sundry other entries from the playbook written over decades of the neoliberal experiment. The result is an unstable foundation, in which the policies advocated by these forces can only reproduce the malaise and alienation which they promise to vanquish.

In this violent new context, whispers of proto- and actual fascism abound, reviving a long-enduring debate over how exactly it should be defined. When former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly warned during Trump’s second campaign that he met the definition of a fascist, he based his analysis on a web definition describing fascism in terms of “ultranationalist political ideology” combined with authoritarian repression and “belief in a natural social hierarchy.” Elsewhere, in a recent essay in the Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor sketch the outline of an “end times fascism”. This is a politics populated by the techno-solutionist Trump allies profiled by John Merrick in his contribution to this issue, and which has set its sights on creating and policing a “bunker” nation sustained against apocalyptic threats by securing resources through increasingly aggressive means, from Greenland to Ukraine.

The contributions to this issue, for the most part, do not wade directly into this debate. But they nonetheless engage with it in the sense that to debate fascism is, inescapably, to debate the conditions for its emergence—to inquire about genuinely “fascism-producing crises”, in Geoff Eley’s formulation. This, implicitly or otherwise, is the object of inquiry for this issue. In other words, our contributors ask: how did we get here? What are the conditions that have produced this crisis? And, crucially, where in all this crisis can we find the seeds of something different?

Crisis is itself a capricious and overused word. We speak endlessly of crises—usually for good reason, but with a nonetheless anaesthetic effect on its meaning. It is easy, in this context, to forget that “crisis” is not simply a synonym for “bad thing”. Instead, a crisis is a turning point, the moment of pressure in which a decision is demanded that has not yet arrived. Viewed from this vantage, the crisis of this moment is not, as Trump or his outriders might put it, an invasion at the Southern border, or some similarly ghoulish conjured enemy. Nor, on the other hand, is climate change, the condition within which this is all unfolding, necessarily a “crisis”.

Instead, decades of obstruction, delay, and ideological belief in the primacy of the market have helped to make it so, shepherding us to this moment of acute pressure. In other words, it is the wilful failure to act decisively—not just on climate, but on the increasing alienation and stagnation rendered by a global economic consensus indifferent to human suffering—that has created the conditions for the heat of this moment.

Refusing To Run Out of Time

“The time for fascism”, Alberto Toscano writes, “as a crisis time, is a clash of temporalities.” To this end, the politics of the new and far right conjure a past artificially reconfigured to contrast with the supposed decay and degeneracy of the present, while the future becomes salvageable only through a grand project of national rebirth and technological transformation. This is where the photo-ops of leaders flanked by coal workers or standing next to closed mines meet the techno-solutionism of Silicon Valley’s messiahs. It is a mishmash of past, present and future that, if accidentally, mirrors the confusion wrought by accelerating climate change, in which the weight of the past and stasis of the present collide against a looming future defined by risk, loss and the foreclosure of possibility.

We are in strange territory. The political no-man’s land of market-based liberalism has proven infertile terrain from which to build responses to challenges from climate change to economic stagnation, and as a result, remarkably fertile terrain for the outgrowth of the new right’s politics and imaginaries. The uneven and colossally uncertain terrain in which all this leaves “us” (the construction of a generous and welcoming “us” being perhaps the most important project of all) is the question that motivates this issue.

Things are bad, and they are for the moment getting worse, but the exhortation to suppress this truth in the interests of coddled “hope” and forced optimism has been one of the least compelling aspects of (some parts) of the climate movement. The problem is not an honest reckoning with the state of the world, but a postured “positivity” founded, ultimately, on a mistrust of the judgment of the very peoples and publics that must come together if something effective is to be done. They don’t need to be fooled. In Mara van der Lugt’s words: pessimism is not fatalism. The problem, she says (quoting Camus), is being “willing only to take on tasks that succeed.”^[9] There will be a lot of non-successes in our efforts to right our upside-down worlds, but these are distinct from failures.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for building our collective response is that, paradoxically, by mistreating climate change as a problem for the future, liberalism’s decades of ineffectiveness have left us with startlingly little time. It would be easy to respond to this pressure with paralysis, but as the late Mike Davis put it in characteristically straightforward terms in one of his last interviews: “despair is useless.” In place of paralysis or bland positivity, this is the moment for an honest reckoning with where we stand, what we are up against, and where, already, resistance and remaking is underway. In this first issue of The BREAK—DOWN, from a diversity of perspectives and approaches, our contributors undertake some small part of this task, and make us all more alive to the challenge ahead.