Future on Fire: A Review

David Camfield, Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change (Oakland: PM Press, 2023)

Published on East Bay Syndicalists, 22 December 2025

David Camfield’s Future on Fire is a clarion call for the application of an “emergency brake” to the uncontrolled global warming produced by the capitalist system (15). While the greenhouse effect was identified at least as early as 1824 by the mathematician Joseph Fourier, and the physicist Svante Arrhenius predicted in 1896 that carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions would greatly worsen this effect, the ineffectual Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has been farcically meeting on an annual basis now for three decades. The COP began convening in the wake of the mainstream scientific acceptance of the risks posed by global heating, following climatologist James Hansen’s public testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988.

Yet, in reality, little to no progress has been made to date, given that CO₂ emissions are at record highs. As Dharna Noor notes in the foreword to Future on Fire, despite incontestable evidence of the risks that climate breakdown poses to humanity and many other species, “state actors have largely avoided imposing even moderate regulations” on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG’s) (xiii).

In this slim volume, Camfield traces the fatal dance between fossil-fuel interests and governments, whereby mega-capitalists from the hydrocarbon industry either capture the State directly or make it bend to their will by threatening disinvestment and capital strike. The bosses act this way, so that they can preempt national legislation aimed at curbing GHG’s and lobby against binding international climate treaties—even if such profit-maximizing strategies jeopardize the very future of humanity (8–13, 28–9). Environmental sociologist Allan Schnaiberg outlined this fatal dynamic back in 1980 through his proposed model of the “treadmill of production.”

Such sober and critically realistic analysis leads Camfield to conclude that only mass-movements can deliver a just transition away from fossil-fuel-driven climate chaos in the short timeframe that we appear to have left before runaway global warming takes effect (31–3). In this sense, the author acknowledges that “climate justice politics should be fundamentally extraparliamentary,” not directed toward electoral politics. At best, this reconstructive alternative would be based on egalitarianism, internationalism, and the self-emancipation of the working classes (44–59). Camfield discusses the survival of Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians, as providing possible inspiration for future human survival under scenarios in which GHG emissions are not mitigated (62–6).

The author concludes his book with a short chapter extolling eco-socialism, which he defines as “a self-governing society with a nondestructive relationship to the rest of nature” (67). He proposes a shift toward democratic workplaces as part of a devolution of power from the capitalists to the workers on the path to the “ecologically rational cooperative commonwealth” (72–4). Short of this, the author controversially affirms the relevance of eco-socialist politics even as harm reduction and palliative care (56, 74–5), assuming the bourgeoisie does “ruin the world” irreparably, in the knowing words of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist Buenaventura Durruti.

Conclusion

In closing, we highly recommend Future on Fire. Like the cause of green syndicalism, Camfield confronts the urgency of the climate crisis head-on, proposing radical mass-movements as the proper remedy. While brief, this book will hopefully serve as an important catalyst for conversations and organizing campaigns aimed at fighting global warming, resisting capitalist authoritarianism, and bringing about the much-needed cooperative commonwealth.