Global warming and its related crises receive less attentional oxygen in these days and years of the polycrisis. Geopolitical turmoil, a second Trump administration and the horrors of genocide dominate the global political debate in 2025. The most fundamental crisis of all – the breakdown of the biophysical conditions for modern human life – is continuing and accelerating. How can we not only cultivate our pessimism of the intellect, but also foster an optimism of the political will against all odds? I suggest three avenues that might help with this task.

Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates recently irritated serious climate scientists by touting three tough truths about climate. While Gates‘ suggestions on how to basically give up on serious climate action are based on half-truths and selective reading of data , his pivot is representative of a broader zeitgeist: the uncomfortable feeling that global politics dropped the ball on climate change. While yet another COP in Brazil  has passed, we received the news that 2024 hit an all-time-high on carbon emissions, that it was the hottest year in recorded human history, and that, according to the world‘s leading climate scientists, we are hurtling toward climate chaos. Meanwhile, industrial powerhouses like Germany and France are on the brink of scrapping green targets for the sake of industrial competitiveness in a darker and more geopolitical world. The rift between runaway global heating and climate-pivoting politics is, so it seems, growing by the day.

There is plenty of excellent analysis of what is driving this pivot, from Trump providing the US fossil industry with a last lifeline, to the impossibility to govern well in the all-encompassing ‘polycrisis‘. I want to ask another important question looking forward, namely: what can we do to keep the light on in a world that is driving towards climate chaos with the brakes off? I propose three ways of thinking constructively about progressive alternatives to geopolitically and geoeconomically infused doomsday thinking. The baseline of what is still possible in a warming world is shifting – which is bad – but it also means that a window for a new politics of dealing with the biggest crisis of all is emerging. I first draw on my own research, then the current research within the broader climate politics field, and finally on current political developments highlighting a practice of hope in a world of shrinking progressive room to manoeuvre.

The next best steps

In a recent article for Global Environmental Politics, Caroline Ahler Christesen, Jacob Hasselbalch and I looked at three arguments that shape the debate on the possibilities of state-led green transitions. As has been widely acknowledged, market-led approaches to climate change have not helped to avoid spiralling emissions, and might have even had a detrimental effect through questionable policies like emissions trading. In addition, state-led approaches are being critiqued not only from market fundamentalists, but also from within. The state, so the glass ceiling thesis goes, is systematically unable to overcome the capitalist impulse to growth and hence to systematically transform the way we (re-)produce our societies and economies. There is simply a hard limit to environmental transformation that cannot be overcome within the current system. Second, the overburdening thesis claims that states are increasingly unable to meet the simultaneous challenges posed by secular trends such as economic stagnation, rising unemployment or environmental breakdown. Third, the lame duck thesis holds that states are bureaucratic slow-movers that have a hard time adapting to the status-quo-breaking nature and speed of the climate crisis. In short, we should put little hope in the possibility of the contemporary capitalist state to solve our climate enigma.

While these critiques are important and instructive, we argue that they also somewhat miss the actual mark. In a world of shifting baselines – from lofty 1.5 degree promises adopted at the Paris Agreement to the reality of runaway global warming – we advocate for a focus on what Robyn Eckersley once called‚ “the next best transition steps”. In our case, this would be, for example, to figure out how to decarbonise the global economy by mid-century in order to avoid the worst fallouts of the climate crisis. While this might sound ambitious, much of the criticism levelled at the environmental state deals with its inability to create fundamental, systemic change within global capitalism. Such change would involve much more than just moving towards a low-emissions global economy in roughly three decades.

While we agree that the capitalist state might not be the best agent to retool how the global economy works, it gives us a fighting chance amidst climate catastrophe. Thus, mid-century decarbonisation is a viable and important ‘next best step’. Our specific argument relates to the disaggregation of the environmental state that can lead the way: apparatuses like central banks, state-owned enterprises or other state-controlled economic entities can be employed to quickly decarbonise. Other arguments, going beyond our paper, point out the current rapid ‘electrification‘ of the Chinese state and how this might influence global decarbonisation – with all the caveats and critical scepticism that is appropriate here.

Global climate politics are changing - fundamentally

In her latest book, Jessica Green points to a key problem of how global climate politics worked in the last four decades . Instead of embracing the fact that green transitions will create winners and losers, arduous negotiations and last-minute half-baked compromises at COP after COP conveyed the false sense of climate politics as an inter-state bargaining issue. In the last years of increasing climate chaos and loss, the main problem at hand became clearer to see. Obstruction of climate action by those social forces that would lose out on fast and fundamental decarbonisation became possible because governments treat decarbonisation as a collective action problem. Trying to measure emissions, incentivising actors to use market tools to decarbonise and negotiating with the fossil fuel industry not interested in making its business model obsolete — decision-makers wasted precious time, resources and legitimacy for effective climate action.

Green’s arguments resonate with a broader awareness and increasing resoluteness of climate scientists and climate advocates that there is little left to be conceded to those forces that fight tooth and nail to slow down and maybe even reverse global decarbonisation progress. In an age of climate breakdown, it becomes increasingly absurd to treat the business interests of the fossil asset holders driving this breakdown as on par with the interest of humanity to live within the biophysical limits of the earth system. Although the second Trump administration is doing its best to turn the US into a full petro-state, it is still a major advantage that the direction of climate policy is shifting away from stalled multilateral negotiations towards a direct confrontation with fossil asset holders, as Green argues. In other words, we now have a clearer picture of the real levers of rapid and just change. They do not lie in inter-state negotiations, but in the fight against the privileged position of fossil asset-holders and the broader incumbency regimes upholding the status quo. This makes it also easier to mobilise popular support and broad coalitions around targeting the abolishment of fossil fuels, as Kevin Young recently argued in his historical comparison between climate and other successful historical movements. Hence, despite the preliminary defeat of broad decarbonisation coalitions after Joe Biden‘s Inflation Reduction Act got dismantled by the Trump administration, the stakes are clearer than ever before – which facilitates political mobilisation around what Green calls ‘existential politics‘.

Affordability and the climate crisis

Such successful coalition building can, however, not solely rest on the scientific insight that decarbonisation is objectively necessary. It needs to connect to the everyday life of people and become embedded into the preferences, struggles and political horizons of different social groups. The former mode of global climate politics – top-down, high-level, inter-governmental negotiations to determine the lowest common denominator – were too removed from what a majority of the populations across the major economies was occupied with. Climate politics, like many other issues requiring international cooperation, was after all elite-driven politics. This crystallized in major setbacks and even climate backlashes over the last years, for example during the Yellow Vest protests over fuel taxes in France in 2019. Episodes like these suggest that confronting climate change is not only a technocratic task for a global policy-making elite but also requires deep socio-economic transformations that need to build enduring political coalitions from the bottom-up. A major problem for such a political project was that for a long time the connection between the everyday life of majority populations in the industrial core and the climate crisis was not obvious. Market-led approaches like emissions trading and carbon pricing were either too technical and removed or perceived as making life more expensive and harder for struggling working people and downward-mobile middle classes. These tendencies were only further exacerbated by economic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic that created supply chain bottlenecks; Russia’s war on Ukraine that sent energy prices soaring; and geoeconomic competition that fuels deindustrialisation and makes people wary of the presumed additional costs of decarbonisation.

However, in the middle of these overlapping crises, a renewed focus on issues like costs of living and affordability forges a clear link between climate action and everyday life perspectives. Episodes of especially energy and food price inflation, coupled with still broken housing markets all over the world make this a clear venue for progressive and popular political projects. An electoral campaign centred on affordability brought new life into the vanishing German left populist party Die Linke in 2025; and it also informed the successful run for New York mayor of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in the same year. While these are only anecdotal episodes, they bear important lessons for serious climate politics: the minimum requirement for building progressive coalitions is to make a credible connection to such kitchen table issues. An obvious link is the issue of food price inflation, which squeezes the working poor and is contributing to push the middle classes of the global industrial core into the arms of fake populists like Donald Trump. Recapturing the political horizon of these groups for serious climate policy can only emerge by taking affordability and its class dimensions, such as the role of rising inequality, seriously. It is abundantly clear that decarbonisation, if done right, can make the lives of ordinary people better – through alleviating climate stress, propelling renewable energy abundance and lowering energy bills, creating jobs for green infrastructure renewal, lowering grocery costs through cheaper energy, and increasing geopolitical resilience through decentralised energy systems, for example. The link between affordability and decarbonisation is not an artificial one. It will define the shape of climate policies in the industrial core countries and beyond for the next decades. Progressive politics needs to learn this lesson, quickly.

Keeping the lights on

After the global climate movement had its largest cultural and political successes in the late 2010s, a series of geopolitical, fiscal and political backlashes seemed to deflate its relevance in the first half of the 2020s. Here, I illustrated three ways which can help develop critical optimism in an age of setbacks and challenge the powers delaying substantive decarbonisation. We can and should think differently about what the state can and should do in the climate crisis. We should take the reframing, and in many ways escalation, of climate politics into ’existential politics‘ seriously and we should embrace and work on integrating the cost of living and affordability crisis into the logic of long-term decarbonisation coalitions. These examples are by no means exhaustive and also not a recipe for doing better climate politics. But they might help in developing perspectives that reshape the way we see climate politics in the polycrisis: not as a dead end, but as a means of working against the darker versions of our shared future that global politics is foreshadowing these days.