Mass arrest of Earth First! protesters in Seattle. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Adam Aron: I want to start with your views on the climate struggle then and now. A few years ago, you were in Germany’s lignite pits trying to stop the coal industry. But more recently, you’ve said ‘the climate ship has sailed.’ What do you mean by that?

Tadio Müller: We were an extremely well-organized anti-coal movement. We were fighting a declining industry, and we managed to convene some of the biggest demonstrations in German history. And yet, with everything we brought to the table, great actions, huge demonstrations, an enemy who was behaving stupidly, all we got in the end was a coal phase out in 2038. Now that’s like 15 to 20 years after the world starts burning. So the first thing was that our struggle wasn’t victorious from a climate perspective – which is relevant insofar as the German climate movement was one of the strongest, if not the strongest in the world, and we still lost.

Secondly, the problem is the one we can feel all around us: the climate is in fact collapsing. We built the anti-coal movement to contribute to the struggle against climate collapse. And clearly that struggle has been lost because the climate is collapsing.

But the last sense in which the ship has sailed, I think, is the more controversial one. Society, which was always our main point of leverage, is tired of hearing about the climate. In rich countries—the UK, the US, France, Germany, Sweden—societies are done with this climate stuff. In those societies we thought about changing our ways, realized it’s too difficult and expensive and makes us face questions of guilt, shame and fear. We don’t want to hear about it anymore. So our protests have lost their point of leverage. Society, says, much like an abusive boyfriend, honey, I’ve heard enough of your critiques, now shut the fuck up. There’s simply no realistic path towards ‘climate majorities’ anywhere in the global North, possibly anywhere in the world.

AA: Could opinion change in rich countries? Look at the multiple heat waves in Europe in 2026. Two hundred thousand people had to evacuate near Bordeaux. Does the moment just pass without gaining political traction?

TM: All environmentalists in the global North have operated from the same strategic assumption: the more the climate crisis hits us, the more climate rational we’ll become. But the last few years have falsified that hypothesis. In fact, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we want to look at it. Shit has gotten worse. But shit getting worse in a way that reminds us of all the changes we should have made over the last 30 years doesn’t make us more rational, it makes us more ashamed. The more we’re reminded of our decades of inaction and centuries of exploitation, the more we’re going to turn away.

AA: How does your view that the climate ship has sailed square with the mainstream climate policy view these days which is basically: hey, modulo the wrong politicians, victory is around the corner on climate with cheap solar, batteries, electric cars, and heat pumps?

TM: It’s a mélange of magical thinking designed to make us feel less bad. I used to work as an energy policy expert, and one thing that’s obvious when you look at the history of energy is that there has never been an energy transition. There have only ever been energy additions. Fun fact: at the height of the coal age, we burnt more biomass than ever before. At the height of the oil age, we burnt more coal than ever before. And at the height of the gas age, we’re burning more oil than ever before.

So all these people saying that adding renewable energy will mean fewer fossil fuels being burnt, that’s simply not true. In a world where the hunger for energy rises faster than energy production, renewables simply add more energy to the system. And if you imagine a green capitalist round of growth kicking off, you’d have to reconfigure the entire system, requiring enormous productive effort, all run from a fossil-fuel energy system. So basically, more renewables does not mean less fossils, it just means more energy in the mix.

AA: Is one response to your concern that renewables simply add more energy to the mix, rather than displacing fossil fuels, to fight for governments to reduce material and energy use? That is, to implement policies for degrowth or post-growth?

TM: Well, it would, except it’s not happening, and as far as I can tell, it’s not really possible. From an ecological perspective, the degrowth argument is simple. We are living beyond our ecological means. Fact. But what do societies want? We want jobs, lower prices, lower taxes. And of course, capitalists want higher profits. So societies are addicted to growth. Growth is how we deal with social conflicts because there’s more to distribute, to grease the wheels of compromise. Which government is going to say, guys, we’re going to cut off growth because it’s ecologically bad? You’ll pay higher taxes, have lower profits, fewer jobs and higher prices. How about that? No government that relies on votes or legitimacy from the population is going to go for a degrowth strategy.

AA: Just to be clear about characterizing the degrowth position. They’re not arguing for a recession or an overall contraction whatsoever. It should really be called “selective degrowth”. They’re saying some things need to go down, other things need to go up.

TM: A degrowth position that takes itself seriously would have to support an absolute reduction in material throughput in the world economy. And that is simply not going to happen. Degrowthers might say, well, we’re going to grow renewables a bit, shrink fossils a little bit, and end up with a net reduction in material throughput. But the main critique of capitalist growth is not that some sectors grow too fast; it’s the two to three percent compound growth on which global capitalism relies. And that has got to end somehow. But how? Nobody knows, certainly not the degrowth school. You’d also have to redistribute to countries that have not enjoyed hundreds of years of imperialist profits. They would need huge resources in order not to grow.

We also had an interesting experiment in what degrowth looks like. During the first corona lockdown, the virus forced governments to implement a kind of managed degrowth. But most societies seem to remember that lockdown as a trauma. There was much less freedom of movement, fewer consumption opportunities, and basically we don’t want to go back there.

AA: Your new book is about collapse. What do you mean by collapse? And what kind of journey do you take the reader on?

TM: The usual understanding of collapse comes from movies like The Day After Tomorrow and things like St. John’s Revelation and Hieronymus Bosch. That’s where everything collapses and everybody lives in hell. But from the perspective of us living in society, collapse is actually just the disappearance of normality. Imagine a collapse in the agricultural or food delivery system. That wouldn’t mean nobody has food, but that there’s less food at higher prices, creating all sorts of social conflicts. Or, since I’m HIV positive, a collapse in the distribution system for those meds wouldn’t affect folks who aren’t HIV positive. So collapse isn’t the immediate end of the world. In the short term, it’s the disappearance of normalities we’ve gotten used to.

On a longer timeline, collapse is the end of the world of more. In a world of more, if we are defeated in our........

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