Capitalism turns the ‘free gifts of nature’ into profit. And in the incessant drive to raise profitability, it depletes and degrades natural resources. And as nature is privatised and turned into private property, the owners of ‘nature’ can also extract rent from the exploitation of labour. However, there is a continual battle by capital to control and lower rising raw material prices as natural resources are depleted and not renewed, adding another factor to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The drive for profit has led to an uncontrolled expansion of industrialisation, energy and commodity production in agriculture that emits carbon emissions and provokes natural resource depletion that is heating up the planet to levels that threaten its very existence.

Yet much discussion of the GND lacks mooring in the political economy of the production of discourse, the environmental crisis, or shifts in capitalism. In what follows, light will be shed on why and how the GND emerged, as layers of space and time slammed together: shifts and challenges to US accumulation, the broader environmental crisis, and breakdown of capitalism as a political mode of rule in the core. The GND in its dominant anti-racist green Keynesian formulation emerges as one resolution—if not exactly a solution—to these instabilities.

The left sees that capitalism is responsible for climate change. It recognizes the urgency of the situation. But instead of building its capacity to seize the state, it advocates small-scale, local, decentralized solutions and more protests and democracy. If we really are on the verge of catastrophe, shouldn’t we building a revolutionary party able to respond to the disaster and push forward an egalitarian alternative?

By pointing to the intersection of capitalism with patriarchy, racism and speciesism on the world scale, socialist ecofeminism allows to see ecological transition as an intersection of different struggles for ‘system change’. Taking this vision seriously could help socialist organizations to free themselves from their inherited obsession with the forces of production and GDP growth – the capitalist/industrial version of modernity – and envision a true ecological revolution.

Today we are faced with two main strategies for solving the problem of climate change. In the first, (symptomatic) measures are applied within the capitalist system, which tend towards "energy transformation" and alleviate symptoms, rather than addressing the causes. Examples of such policies in action abound in many countries: broadly similar, they defer to the interests of capital. This may be termed the hegemonic climate politics. The second strategy is that of anti-capitalist climate politics of the people as exploited workers and oppressed segments of society. The two policies differ not only in terms of solutions, but primarily in terms of their grasp of the causes of the climate question. Unlike the first, the second acknowledges that the climate has changed due to the functional laws  of capitalism