Abstract: The fossil fuel industry is more vulnerable than its current profit margins would suggest. What are its vulnerabilities and how can the climate movement exploit them, including in countries where the dominant political parties are beholden to polluters? This presentation will review some of the movement’s strategic options, with a focus on nonelectoral strategies that do not require majority support. US history’s most successful movements rarely had majority support at the time of victory. They won in large part because they posed a direct threat to capitalists through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption. After analyzing some historical examples, I then review some recent successes of the climate and Indigenous movements, again with a focus on the United States. I stress the importance of targeting unelected powerholders, including polluters, financial institutions, institutional investors, businesses and other big consumers of fossil fuels, and state actors such as regulators and judges.

Speaker: Kevin A. Young is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests are in social movements, revolution, labor, political economy, and imperialism in modern Latin America and the United States. His most recent book is Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won (2024). The book analyzes the power of the fossil fuel industry, how the climate and Indigenous movements have chipped away at it, and how other mass movements throughout U.S. history have defeated capitalists. His other books include Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017), the edited volume Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left (2019), the coauthored book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (2020), and the coedited volume Trump and the Deeper Crisis (2022).

How Can We Exploit Polluters’ Vulnerabilities Clues from Some Movements That Won