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There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness, a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social science and helps explain a current conundrum in critical sociology: Why are alternatives to a system that drives climate change and other catastrophic risks still seen as unrealistic? We suffer from a political‐economic system impervious to transformation before we suffer from a lack of alternative ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social-theoretical assumptions and assesses the potential effectiveness of holding carbon-intensive corporations legally accountable for climate change harms. We argue that the structure of private corporations operating in a growth-dependent capitalist social formation is the problem, not concrete companies. Ignoring social structure has practical consequences. Assuming favourable court outcomes in the future – a questionable assumption considering remaining procedural obstacles and the status quo-preserving tendencies of law –, bringing claims against corporations for civil wrongs will remain ineffective as a mitigation strategy because many carbon-intensive corporations can absorb substantial lawsuit-related costs and, even if legal costs push fossil fuel companies out of business, their competitors will step in to extract open reserves. Changing the law, rather than pursuing individual offenders, will necessarily need to provide more systemic recourse to environmental degradation. We recommend a potentially more effective mitigation strategy for which lawyers concerned about climate change could lend knowledge, resources, and time: fossil fuel nationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of scientists have illustrated how economic growth is an underlying driver of the climate crisis. This article examines how associated levels of excess work, production, and consumption repress human flourishing and drive global warming. Drawing from the work of Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, we discuss the irrationality of a system of excess work, production, and consumption in terms of unnecessary human repression and environmental destruction. In the context of the climate crisis, this system becomes even more irrational as it threatens the habitability of Earth for humans. We examine work-time reduction and related sufficiency measures as a rational response to the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectacular reassurance strategies, drawing from Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, refer to tactics that mitigate environmental concern and action while simultaneously maintaining or accelerating the social-structural causes of environmental harm. Three such strategies are identified here, each of which advances a critique of image-based, consumerist-oriented, and ineffective environmental politics. First, spectacular justifications for environmental harm are legitimations of environmental degradation based on values that paradoxically presuppose a livable environment. Second, spectacular environmental communication is the use of 'green' images and symbols that mitigate environmental concern and action. Third, spectacular environmental reform refers to policy or lifestyle changes that fail to alter the underlying systemic causes of the environmental crisis. Debord's prescriptive environmental politics are explicated and his conceptual framework is brought into conversation with overlapping theories and concepts influential in contemporary environmental political analysis: social practice theory, green governmentality, hegemony, and post-ecologist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erich Fromm argues that the only reliable way to solve the environmental crisis is to alter current social formations in a way in which biophilia can flourish, so humankind can solve its existential dichotomy as well as meet survival needs in an ecologically sound way. However, society's preoccupation with the non-alive—elements such as technique, the mechanical, gadgets, and commodities—shows that the modern social character is far from biophilous. Instead, modern societies are inherently ecologically destructive due to systematic processes and attraction to its progress is a less acute form of, what Fromm terms, necrophilia. His insights can help formulate a social theory of environmental degradation that includes structural and ideational variables. Prescriptively, this means appeals for value changes must correspond with fitting appeals for structural changes in social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]