Kevin Young is a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is active in labor and climate organizing. He spoke at the 2025 Upstate Anarchist Book Fair, held May 3rd and 4th in Binghamton, NY.
The event was sponsored and hosted by PM Press: https://pmpress.org
How we can muster the political strength to neutralize polluters is one of the most important questions humanity has ever faced. Although the US climate movement is not currently winning, it has achieved important partial victories that illuminate the vulnerabilities of the fossil fuel industry.
Kevin Young’s focus is on how the movement has targeted the industry’s enablers, including financial institutions, regulatory agencies, and purchasers of fossil fuels. He argues that the growing resistance to dirty energy projects has jeopardized investor confidence, leading the industry to lash out in increasingly desperate ways. The most powerful movements in US history succeeded in similar ways.
In addition to analyzing the recent climate and Indigenous movements, his presentation draws lessons from four classic victories: the abolition of slavery, battles for workers’ rights in the 1930s, Black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and the fight for clean air. Those movements inflicted costs on economic elites through strikes, boycotts, and other mass disruption. Gains in the electoral and legislative realms were usually the byproducts of great upsurges in the fields, factories, and streets.
The presentation draws from Kevin Young’s recent book, Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won (PM Press, 2024).
