‘Official! – climate change is real’. Now: what is to be done?

John Foster argues that the acceptance that climate change is happening, illustrated by the revised guidance to editors issued by the BBC in September 2018, which put denying climate change on a par with "denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday", marks a significant moment for Green politics. That we face looming climate danger is no longer just one possible interpretation of the evidence, but what the evidence now decisively demonstrates to be how things really are, and therefore cannot be treated as just one possible basis for organising our socio-economic and political life.  The problem is that democratic politics has come to be seen as an arbiter of the facts from which action should start, rather than a way of negotiating consent for ways of tackling whatever is generally agreed to confront us.  Foster argues that the UK Green Party (or some organization evolving from it) should actively pursue the political changes necessary to prevent climate disaster running away from us into climate catastrophe, without waiting for majorities to be convinced by its campaigning.  He suggests that this should be done by a co-ordinated, strategic infiltration of community-level organizations, such as transition town groups, school governing bodies, village hall committees, town and parish councils, etc, to set up shadow Green local administrations.  His model is the Bolsheviks in their mode of interaction with the local soviets of workers’ deputies which emerged after the abortive 1905 revolution.  That was inspired by Lenin’s conviction that Marxism was a genuine science, and proletarian power inevitable.  Marxism was in fact a pseudo-science but the Green claim to reshape society and create a successor ecological state is based on the near-unanimity of genuine science.  Oncoming climate chaos is as good as inevitable and Greens currently offer the only plan for organising our societies and economies which even begins to face up to that reality, ​but they need more Bolshevik-style confidence to get on and do this.