No Ordinary Office: What a DSA-Backed President Can Give the Left (Part 2)

Part I

Part II

How are our radical objectives to be achieved? The answer is simple, deceptively so: through political power.

Bayard Rustin, From Protest to Politics (1965)

In part two, I continue the analysis of what a democratic socialist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) can do unilaterally from the White House under non-ideal institutional conditions to advance our priorities. Palestine, Cuba, and the climate crisis are each considered in turn; given the scale of the global climate emergency, I reserve the most detailed analysis for this last issue. The conclusion then answers a burning question about such a possibility: what if all this fails? Where would defeat leave us? I argue it would leave us better resourced to demand more.

Palestine

If the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) back a U.S. president in 2028, Palestinians will in all likelihood still be under brutal occupation when she is inaugurated. For years, Biden’s and Trump’s stubborn Zionism has led activists to push boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns in non-executive arenas—universities, corporations, cities, states, and Congress. But none have stopped the flow of arms and taxpayer dollars to Israel. Block the Bombs legislation has languished in Congress for years, while 99% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats in the House still voted, in July 2026, to renew the $3.3 billion in military aid sent annually to Israel. In fact, no meaningful barrier against Israeli access to American weaponry has ever come from legislatures; the only threat, however limp, has come from presidents—Eisenhower during the 1956 Suez crisis, Reagan during the 1982 invasion of Beirut, and Biden in 2024 with the 2,000-pound bombs.

For AOC in particular, perhaps no other issue has polarized the American left on her potential candidacy more than her reliability on Palestinian rights. Her supporters can truthfully say that since taking office in 2019, she has never voted to send weapons of any kind to Israel, has condemned the Biden-enabled genocide in Gaza (a year and a half before Bernie Sanders did), and has sponsored multiple bills to block arms sales, recognize the Nakba, and restore UNRWA funding. In July 2026, she voted in favor of the Massie amendment to strip $3.3 billion in Israeli military aid. In a recent DSA forum, she’s clarified she will not support the transfer of any so-called ‘defensive’ weapons to Israel. On DSA members’ own vote tracker on Palestine, she ranks in the 96th percentile of House Democrats.

However, her record on Palestine is not as consistent as that of Michigan DSA congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. There was AOC’s 2021 ‘present’ vote on Iron Dome funding (she immediately apologized), her 2023 vote for Israel’s “right to exist”, and her remarks at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that presidential nominee Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire”. Her recent statement that “the Israeli government should be able to finance their own weapons” suggests that as president she would not block the sale of weapon systems from U.S. companies to Israel, as long as Israel purchases them with its own money. To consolidate leftist support, AOC must stake out higher ambitions. One development can reinforce this: public opinion has greatly shifted in direction and intensity since AOC took office. More than 60% of Democrats now support sanctions on Israel. This should give confidence that retreating into a Biden-type Zionism would backfire.

Fortunately, an arms embargo on Israel and Arab autocracies like Egypt is trivially easy for a U.S. president to guarantee: she needs only to enforce U.S. laws already passed by Congress. These include the Leahy laws, which target specific military units, and the Foreign Assistance Act, which outlaws military aid to any country that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The president can also declare her hands tied by the Glenn Amendment and Arms Export Control Act, which outlaw military assistance to nuclear-armed states that detonate nuclear explosives (Israel almost certainly did this on a subantarctic island in the Indian Ocean in 1979) or have not signed nonproliferation treaties. There are no presidential waiver provisions for these laws. And of course, the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention, both ratified with Senate approval, obligate the U.S. to end weapon transfers to states committing genocide or other international crimes.

The president can also greatly expand Global Magnitsky sanctions on Israeli cabinet officials, party leaders, and West Bank settlers, as well as military commanders who commit war crimes in Gaza. Given official Israeli support for settler violence, an AOC president may consider designating Israel a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which would immediately trigger trade restrictions and capital flight. Although she cannot unilaterally ratify the Rome Statute, the U.S. president can lift sanctions on the International Criminal Court, resume ordinary cooperation for it, and honor its arrest warrants for Netanyahu. The president can also end UN Security Council vetoes on Palestine, negotiate the release of Marwan Barghouti and other prisoners, lift sanctions on PLO and Hamas diplomats, recognize Palestinian statehood, and resume aid to UNRWA.

These are modest measures, applicable to either of the prevailing visions—one that coerces Israel into pre-1967 borders and attaches a weaker, Palestinian state to it, run by autocratic collaborationists, or one that returns to the PLO’s older vision before Oslo—dismantling Israel and the Palestinian Authority and establishing a religiously pluralist state in Palestine from the river to the sea with free movement, land reform, and right of return for all. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that democracy would flourish in a sovereign Palestine of any size while surrounded by U.S.-backed dictatorships and absolute monarchies. A broader democratic-reformist or revolutionary force in the region is necessary. And while no one can guarantee what a future president would do to improve the conditions for such a movement, the relevant question for us is: given the substantial opportunities that come with executive power, if civil uprisings erupt in the Arab world as they did in 2011, or in Palestine in 1987, whom do we prefer in the White House—an AOC-style candidate, a centrist Democrat, or a MAGA Republican?

Cuba

Recent U.S. escalations against Cuba—such as the oil-tariff blockade and the national emergency declaration—have been brutal for the island. Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, U.S. sanctions have attempted to immiserate Cuban society and foment state collapse. Obama’s thaw reopened the embassy, removed the risible terrorism designation, and eased travel and remittances. But it was temporary, checked by the refusal of the post-2014 Republican Congress to lift the embargo. Trump I then fully reversed Obama’s thaw, Biden restored it only partially, and Trump II imposed an even harsher siege, with Marco Rubio at its helm. The DSA, in its biennial conventions, has made ending the embargo a priority.

Ocasio-Cortez has maintained a firm anti-interventionist line on Cuba and co-sponsored multiple bills across her tenure to overturn the embargo and outlaw U.S. military aggression. As president, she can immediately end the oil-tariff blockade and remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, which has deterred third-country banks and businesses from touching Cuba at all. AOC can rewrite federal regulations for official travel, remittances, telecom licensing, and people-to-people programs.

She can also waive Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, which punishes Cuba for Revolution-era nationalization. And with enough of a partisan co-majority, the president can use her bully pulpit to whip Congress into legislating a permanent reconciliation, similar to the U.S. normalization with Vietnam in 1995. Biden and Obama failed to do this in their first two years while they had majorities in the House and Senate, so one cannot assume that any Democrat in the White House will make it a priority. One needs an AOC president and DSA-led vanguard in Congress to get it done.  

Climate

Building the Ark

No crisis threatens human society like climate change. The scale of it can feel daunting: humans send about 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere annually, as world fossil fuel combustion grows. The symptoms assert themselves with violence: record heat, rising sea levels, acidifying oceans. Billions now breathe forest fire smoke every summer—our cities bathed in apocalyptic orange smog—while rivers once sustained by mountain snowpack accumulated over winter run dry. Moreover, the great absorbers of our carbon—the ocean, soil, and forests—have degraded. [1] Planetary radiative forcing has also risen due to amplifying feedback mechanisms: increased water vapor, thawing permafrost-methane, ice-albedo loss, and the decline of sulfate aerosol pollution. [2]

Although its emissions have been declining since 2005, the United States is still responsible for the world’s largest share of cumulative emissions, and it remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of oil. Our carbon pollution per capita sits at about 170% of China’s and 270% of Europe’s. The wealthy are responsible for the lion’s share of those emissions. Solar and wind have absorbed most new energy demand but have not yet eroded growing U.S. combustion of natural gas or petroleum. Cement, steel, and air transport remain stubbornly carbon-intensive. Trump’s return has also unleashed a vengeful assault on the climate: he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, overturned the EPA’s endangerment finding, repealed power plant carbon standards, blocked nearly all wind projects, and is now auctioning off 2 billion acres of public seas and land in the Arctic, Gulf, and American West for oil drilling.

Yet there is still hope for emergency action on climate. It will depend, almost uniquely, on U.S. executive power. Since her first orientation day in Congress, when Ocasio-Cortez joined the Sunrise Movement to occupy Nancy Pelosi’s office, no issue has defined her legislative career like the Green New Deal. As president, even without a friendly Congress, AOC would acquire a vast set of tools to build the ark. First is the U.S. military, which emits carbon at levels on par with mid-size countries. A more peaceful world is a greener world; the US can substantially cut emissions by reducing its troop deployment (as it has slowly done since the Cold War), heavy aviation and ocean voyages, and carbon-intensive production and shipment of heavy weapons. U.S. grand strategy has long been committed to the strategic defense of global petroleum shipping. Simply not sacrificing more U.S. military assets to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow it to remain closed or heavily tolled by Iran, as Trump has apparently done, will force a global reckoning in consumption. It already has. [3]

The president can also scale the Army Corps of Engineers civil works to build climate-resistant infrastructure, especially levees for coastal defense and flood control. Every new disaster provides an opportunity to bully Congress into authorizing new emergency appropriations. The Defense Department’s research budget and lab network are also enormous and can be used to prioritize climate-relevant R&D such as batteries, materials science, grid resilience, uranium recycling, micro-reactors, and alternative fuel cells. Together with the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) and National Science Foundation (NSF), federal innovation policy can direct public funding (and public claims over its intellectual property) into carbon sink expansion, batteries, magnets, green steel, and atmospheric science.

With a pen stroke, AOC can overturn Trump’s ban on wind projects and halt fossil fuel drilling permits on millions of acres of public land. She can pause the federal coal leasing program and adjust its royalty and bonding requirements to make it more expensive. Under AOC, the Bureau of Land Management can lease more federal land for public solar, wind, and geothermal power. An eco-socialist president can further invoke the Antiquities Act and Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which would empower her to designate marine monuments and protect seabeds from oil and gas drilling. Bush and Obama did it in the Pacific, and such designations require lengthy litigation to reverse. It is a rare tool to keep oil in the ground.

The president can undermine the wealthy’s ability to pollute at scale by enforcing taxes and bankrupting them for fraud and other white-collar crimes. In the past, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has often banned private jets at major airports; it can do this more routinely to make flying private jets a hassle. Federal housing policy can also double its public good effect; per capita emissions are lower in compact cities than sprawling suburbs. The Department of Transportation can encourage local zoning reform by rewriting the scoring criteria for its subsidies to favor cities that legalize multifamily housing near transit and abolish parking minimums. The General Services Administration (GSA) can use its surplus federal property in city downtowns for infill housing. FEMA’s flood maps and insurance pricing formulas can also make urban sprawl into wetlands and floodplains a financially risky, unprofitable endeavor for developers.

Wielding the Regulatory Apparatus

Barriers to a cleaner grid are often regulatory. AOC can appoint new officials to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates interstate transmission and wholesale electricity markets. The queue of projects waiting for FERC’s greenlight currently has more wind, solar, and storage than the entire existing U.S. power plant fleet. Paperwork and cost-allocation fights keep it slow. A socialist FERC can settle who pays for inter-regional transmission lines, mandate a minimum transfer capacity, and pause the plugging in of new AI-powering data centers to the grid. Similarly, AOC can invoke the Defense Production Act to direct industrial production for national defense. Biden used it in 2022 for heat pumps and solar parts. AOC will likely need it for grid-level batteries, transformers, and other high-voltage equipment, where there are global, years-long lead times.

Ironically, recent Supreme Court decisions that narrow obligations for environmental review can be useful for a green buildout; such review channels are often co-opted by deep-pocketed landowners to prevent renewable energy. Bill Koch, the Kennedys, and other rich families on Cape Cod used them infamously to wage a successful, 16-year war of attrition against the offshore Cape Wind project despite a majority of residents supporting it. A similar campaign by Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket homeowners is underway against Vineyard Wind 1, using National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act litigation. Directing federal litigation resources against these veto players can help decarbonize the electric grid faster. Appointing hundreds of allied judges can reduce judicial delays on such projects.

Other aspects of the regulatory framework must be rebuilt. First, Ocasio-Cortez can reissue the EPA’s endangerment finding. This will take years of public comment and litigation. But regulating carbon does not have to wait; a socialist EPA can regulate it indirectly by regulating other pollutants that are byproducts of fossil fuel combustion: nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and soot. Regulation of these compounds rests on firm legal authority, so fossil fuel companies cannot use the courts as easily to contest it. Wielded effectively, the executive can tighten national air quality standards, pushing coal and oil plants into retirement. Its regulations can also push industry into electrifying its heavy equipment: steel furnaces, glass melters, cement kilns, and boilers.

A president can also take unilateral action to reduce methane emissions, which is important because methane has an atmospheric warming effect about 28 times greater than CO₂ per unit of mass over 100 years. She can do this by modernizing public methane sensors directed toward the hydrocarbon industry. A socialist EPA can also end flaring, which would raise costs and make fossil fuels even less cost-competitive against renewables. The EPA can similarly levy fines against methane super-emitters and illegal methane gas turbines, and tighten regulations on landfills, which release about a sixth of U.S. methane. [4] The USDA and FDA can also investigate supplements in cattle feed that suppress methane in their gut microbiome.

Nitrous oxide is another low-hanging fruit. The chemical has an atmospheric warming effect 273 times greater than CO₂ per unit of mass over 100 years. Adipic and nitric acid producers produce the pollutant at its industrial source point—for nitric acid, the ammonia burners. These acids are critical feedstocks for modern materials such as nylon, fertilizer, and adhesives. But although catalytic decomposition is a relatively inexpensive abatement technique, only about half of American nitric acid plants and less than a fifth of nitric acid plants worldwide do it. A socialist president can use regulators and tariff threats to force them to abate. The president can also rewrite the Office of Management and Budget’s cost-benefit rules for all federal agencies, requiring them to consider the social cost of greenhouse gases. This would propagate conservation decisions across the federal bureaucracy.

Federal Purchasing and Electricity

The federal government procures about $750 billion annually in goods and services. A socialist president can use this procurement power to enforce a ‘decarbonize’ mandate for steel, concrete, asphalt, and aluminum. Because the GSA is such a large buyer of heavy materials (for buildings, highways, etc.), a state preference on embodied carbon can build out a green production chain. By guaranteeing itself as a buyer in advance, the government makes it safe for firms to build a billion-dollar plant for green concrete or a new production line for electric vehicles. This ‘marketcraft’ is how the United States oversaw mass biomedical production during COVID; before the vaccines existed, it guaranteed itself as a buyer. The U.S. Postal Service is also electrifying its vehicles through advance market commitments. Unlike the regulatory apparatus, a decade-long procurement contract cannot easily be broken without paying damages. It extends green policy beyond a single administration.

Then there is federal electricity. As noted in part 1, the Tennessee Valley Authority produces electricity for 10 million people, issues its own bonds, and generates $1 billion in annual income. The majority of its energy mix comes from non-carbon sources. Its board and executive fall under presidential appointments; the boards of federal hydropower areas in the American West are similarly structured. A president can direct them to decommission fossil fuel plants and install more wind, solar, and geothermal generation, as well as utility-scale batteries. The Agriculture and Energy departments similarly have loan capacity in the hundreds of billions that they could use for rural electricity cooperatives, which need capital and operate many of the dirtiest and least efficient power plants in the country. [5]

International cooperation is essential for addressing the climate crisis, and no bilateral relationship is as important for the climate’s future as that between the United States and China. United States capital reserves are massive, while China’s manufacturing capacity for finished solar panels stands at around 1.1 terawatts per year—enough to meet the annual electricity demand of the entire U.S. population. To decarbonize the world, global solar demand must rise to meet China’s capacity. U.S. lending and tariff policies—all within the executive portfolio—can guarantee only renewables are built on American credit abroad and that China’s solar factories are exporting to the rest of the world at full capacity. [6] A socialist United States Trade Representative could grant tariff exclusions and relax anti-dumping rules for Chinese grid and battery equipment. The executive branch could also coax U.S. automakers into technology-sharing agreements with Chinese EV and battery firms.

Food and Aviation

Flying is a destructive activity for the climate. But up to 57% of the impact comes not from the carbon emissions but from the cirrus clouds left behind by burning jet fuel (‘contrails’). Such clouds trap heat. Because contrails only form in certain regions of ice-supersaturated air, planes can avoid them by adjusting their altitude. Long, horizontal reroutes are usually not necessary. In fact, nearly all contrails can be avoided with just a 1.3-1.4% fuel penalty on affected flights. And most flights aren’t affected anyway because about 80% of contrail warming comes from just 3% of flights globally. But the airline industry refuses to set a standard under the pretext that antitrust law forbids it; a DOJ business review letter encouraging them to form a contrail-avoidance protocol would remove the excuse. The president can also order the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fund better contrail forecasting, require the FAA to build it into flight planning, and do bulk federal purchases of cleaner jet fuel. [7]

Animal agriculture also pollutes the climate massively, and federal commodity purchase formulas heavily favor dairy and meat. What if the USDA shifted the mix toward legumes? Legumes do not command anywhere near the public promotion support that beef or dairy receive; a socialist president can simply change the USDA’s promotion priorities. The BioMADE and USDA public research arms can further investigate how to reduce the costs of precision fermentation so ‘cultivated’ vegan meats become more affordable. Rules for school meals can also favor plant proteins. And as mentioned, novel supplements can change the gut fermentation of cattle, reducing their methane emissions. The FDA can prioritize trials and regulatory review.

Restoring Carbon Sinks

At this stage, 1.5°C of warming is guaranteed, and the window for 2°C is closing fast. Decarbonizing the world to net-zero is not enough. A socialist hoping to check the damage will have to strengthen natural carbon sinks by the gigaton. One ally is the humble mangrove. Mangroves absorb 3-5 times more carbon per hectare than temperate forests and protect coastal communities from storm surge. The Army Corps of Engineers dredges roughly 200 million cubic yards of sediment a year but dumps it mostly offshore. That same sediment can be used to rebuild salt marshes and mangrove platforms. A socialist president can unilaterally scale such “Engineering With Nature” programs. Abroad, federal Development Finance Corporation risk insurance was critical in swapping national debt for marine conservation; Belize, Gabon, and Ecuador signed deals. A socialist can similarly scale debt-for-nature swaps to countries with substantial coastal mangroves, like Indonesia and India.

Seafloor sediment is another major carbon absorber the U.S. president can protect. Often overlooked, sediment is the largest organic carbon pool in the ocean. Bottom trawlers, as they drag their fishing nets on the seafloor, disturb the sediment and resuspend the carbon, and more than half of it (up to 370 million metric tons) enters the atmosphere within a few years. The U.S. president has authority to restrict trawling via “essential fish habitat” designations and the Magnuson-Stevens Act. She can also interpret the Antiquities Act to ban trawling in marine monuments and devote litigation resources to defending that interpretation. U.S. national forests are another net sink. The president can rewrite Forest Service rules to extend harvest rotations, conserve old-growth (Biden tried and failed), and clear the reforestation backlog on burned land. Wildfire, insects, and drought are taking their toll, so more prescribed fire and thinning, co-managed with tribes, will be necessary.

Rewilding farmland is another notable project a U.S. socialist president can accelerate. Some 30-36 million U.S. acres grow corn and soy for biofuel. Congress gave the EPA the job after 2022 of setting volumes of biofuels required in the gasoline refinery process. These standards should be abolished because electric cars now exist, and there’s evidence that U.S. biofuel land use, especially soybeans, has raised net emissions by driving tropical forest clearance in Indonesia and Brazil to make up for the lost cooking oil supply. Incorporating that damage into the indirect land use factors of federal tax-credit lifecycle models would make biofuels largely unprofitable. The USDA’s easement programs and the Commodity Credit Corporation’s multi-billion dollar annual borrowing authority can buy farmland and rewild it permanently, especially river banks, prairies, and wetlands in the Mississippi basin.

Soil is another large carbon sink, but measuring how carbon is sequestered across uneven land characteristics is difficult. Carbon offset markets measure it badly and have incentives to inflate their claims. Instead of regulating these profit-oriented credit markets, a socialist president can treat soil carbon as an incidental benefit of public soil stewardship. In particular, she can use the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation and Risk Management Agency’s board to subsidize better cover crops, extended crop rotation, and gentler plowing and grazing. The state can direct the insurance actuaries to price-in the better performance of healthier soils during drought years and remove subsidy rules that penalize cover crops and thereby make soil conservation a financial risk.

Carbon Capture

Soil, forests, and seabeds are important carbon sinks, but they have limits to what they can absorb quickly at the gigaton scale. Moreover, as climate change imposes itself with increasing violence, demand for relief through carbon capture and solar engineering may grow. I will consider three interventions—direct air capture (DAC), ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) , and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). Currently, all three invite substantial apprehension, both from the public and, particularly, from left coalitions, domestic and international, that a DSA candidate will be responsible for. Objections include doubts about how to precisely measure effects or scale them to a level that could actually alter the planet’s temperature. Many fear that techno-optimistic deus ex machina can delay decarbonization, be co-opted by fossil capital or militarists, and impose their own direct harm.

In the next decade, devoting major fiscal capacity to altering the planet’s radiative forcing or scaling ‘artificial’ carbon capture would waste collective resources better spent on planting trees and building utility-scale solar, wind, and storage. But Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios modeling a trajectory below 2°C of warming by 2100, let alone 1.5°C, assume a substantially carbon-negative economy by the mid-century. To get there, cultivating plant biomass is insufficient. Land is limited. As Holly Jean Buck argues, a new atmospheric carbon removal sector must emerge, operated not by capital to offset and greenwash its pollution, but by socialists as a global public good. Nationalizing fossil industries can, ironically, be the nucleus for this. Oil firms originally pioneered injecting CO₂ into subterranean reservoirs to store it stably for centuries. They just do it to extract more oil. Converted to utilities, their firms can provide engineers, data, and physical machinery needed for carbon removal. [8]

While remaining focused on rapidly ending emissions, a U.S. president in 2029 can lay the groundwork for a socialized direct air capture industry in future decades. ARPA-E and other public research arms can innovate breakthroughs in artificial photosynthesis and electricity costs that drive DAC below $100 per ton of CO₂ (it’s currently about $400-1000 per ton). She can oversee the DoE’s Carbon Negative Shot projects and appropriate bankrupt oil infrastructure assets, such as wells. Active oil firms can be nationalized by Congress or the slower public ownership mechanisms outlined in part one. The executive can reform the well permit system and consolidate geologic review for individual projects over shared basins. She can steward the subterranean pore space of federal land. If one day DAC becomes the next lowest opportunity cost intervention, then the state, not private firms, should do it—with its own credit, land, storage and electricity—in partnership with tribes and locals.

The ocean’s surface layer absorbs about 31% of human carbon emissions. This has made it increasingly acidic, placing stress on calcifying organisms that adapted to a pH balance before the Anthropocene. Coral die-offs are one result. The ocean’s growing acidity has also steadily weakened its capacity to absorb carbon. Adding alkaline material like crushed olivine and limestone or generating alkalinity electrochemically can counteract this, if applied at gigaton scale. A similar proposal would not add anything to the ocean but simply use electric pumps to move the more acidic surface seawater down the water column, where it would remain suspended for centuries and allow more basic water to interact with the atmosphere at the surface. Some estimates put the cost at $130-250 per tCO₂ or as low as $86 per ton under modest learning-curve assumptions.

But measuring and verifying carbon sequestration is a problem because alkaline material disperses across thousands of miles of sea, and CO₂ uptake happens gradually over a year or two and must be inferred from chemical sensors. A socialist president, while remaining focused on emergency decarbonization, may also prepare for future efforts to restore ocean pH. She can do that by funding OAE research through federal science and innovation arms: NOAA, NSF, ARPA-E, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Office of Naval Research. A national ocean-carbon detection infrastructure—including sensor networks and standardized sampling protocols—would be a great public good and lay a foundation for more informed decisions. The EPA can also issue a general permit framework under existing ocean-dumping laws and approve safe pilot studies supported by tribes and other coastal communities. The 2025 LOC-NESS experiment in the Gulf of Maine is a good example of generating public buy-in.

The president can also commission a consensus study from the National Academies on ocean Carbon Dioxide removal, building on its prior work, and incorporate that into IPCC assessments. She can push for a London Protocol amendment recognizing OAE and fund a multilateral OAE science consortium similar to current meteorological or seismic monitoring. And if by the mid-2030s carbon uptake verification improves, and adverse effects are low, then socialists can start with low-hanging fruit, such as requiring desalination plants to electro-alkalinize the brine that they already dump into the sea, or allowing coastal communities to use OAE locally to protect their ecosystems from acidification stress. Setting up a surface acidity pumping experiment on defunct oil rigs with offshore wind would also be achievable. And if carbon credits can be verified, the president can use the GSA and DoE carbon credit purchase programs to oversee an expansion of ocean alkalinity restoration.

Solar Engineering

Sulfate particles in the stratosphere reflect solar radiation back to space before it warms the Earth. As global sulfate pollution declines, the heating potential of our atmosphere increases; about 25% of the rise in global temperature over the past 20 years stems from this unmasking effect. Using high-altitude aircraft to inject reflective sulfates (or diamond dust) into the stratosphere, where they stay longer, can offset this heating. It already happens naturally through large volcanic eruptions, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which cooled the planet measurably for two years. Current peer-reviewed estimates put the cost of lowering global temperature by 1°C at $18-30 billion annually—within trivial fiscal reach of the American or Chinese state. While it would not cut emissions, it would mitigate some symptoms—acting like a shade on the earth’s radiative forcing that prevents it from metabolizing extra sunlight into heat.

Stratospheric aerosol injection risks are real and invite opposition: unpredictable disruptions to global rainfall and weather, moral hazard that delays emission cuts, damage to the ozone layer, termination shock. On the American right, opposition is bound up with the ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy discourse which has provoked laws like Florida’s SB 56 banning geoengineering and weather modification activities in the state (of course, greenhouse gas emissions are never recognized as de facto geoengineering). On the left, environmental justice and Indigenous groups are also loud opponents of such proposals; they are arrayed against tech venture capital and billionaire philanthropists like the Gates Foundation. Many European Green parties have formalized their opposition in party programs, while African and small island states have demanded a full moratorium. A 2025 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion has reinforced this. This intense opposition is why solar-engineering experiments like Harvard’s SCoPEx project fail.

During the next decade, socialists must give priority to emissions cuts. However, if climate change continues to ravage human society and temperatures rise still further, SAI will become more tempting as an emergency measure to reduce human suffering. China, for example, which already has an extensive cloud seeding program, has recently invested more institutional focus into it. Under these conditions, a socialist president in 2029-2033 can reasonably prioritize building the science, monitoring, diplomacy, public trust, and legal framework for future generations. That will help them make shared, informed decisions on SAI—whether an indefinite moratorium or modest use.

Current research into SAI is often funded by venture capital and billionaires with financial and ideological interests in the outcome. By contrast, the public often trusts publicly-funded university science research. That public funding channel for SAI is meager—about $11 million a year—but the president can easily direct NOAA, NSF, and DoE to raise it, even within existing appropriations. One simple public good is to develop the observation infrastructure so we can detect others’ interference in the stratosphere. This can include upgrading the stratospheric chemistry features of Earth System Models. It means more balloons and aircraft samplers as well as better satellites that can measure radiative forcing and aerosol depth. A new scientific body, modeled on the committee conducting the National Academies’ current geoengineering assessment, could set up safety thresholds and review small-scale field experiments to better understand its effects.

The world has a set of multilateral venues to discuss SAI—the World Meteorological Organization, the UN Environment Program, and the Montreal Protocol meetings. A U.S. socialist president can engage in these fora with good faith and insist that Global South countries participate as equals. As the earth bakes and oceans rise, individual states may threaten to use SAI unilaterally if it is not done together; a socialist leader can help ensure that global risks of such multilateral use are low. For example, against an imminent threat to use it unilaterally, she can negotiate an international agreement that requires hemispheric balance and outlaws isolated regional use, and that applies SAI at a gentle rather than sharp gradient over time. Such features would reduce the risk of weather disruptions.

Facing the threat of unilateral deployment, she could advocate for an aerosol parity standard that injects sulfates only to the degree that decarbonization is currently removing sulfate emissions. This would hold total radiative forcing flat, rather than increase it. Such limits would hew most closely to eco-socialist principles because (1) they enforce a restorative commitment to the baseline conditions to which the world’s ecosystems and agriculture have now adapted; and (2) there is a sunset mechanism: as carbon emissions fall toward zero, the amount of sulfates needed to supplement volcanic eruptions falls to zero as well. This gives the arrangement an expiration date.

Conclusion

They [the workers] can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves.

Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, 1850.

On every front, socialists assume that capital is clever. The NLRB union rights decision that initially seemed like a transformative victory gets tied up in a 30-month lawsuit or leads to another bureaucratized labor aristocracy collecting dues from a sullen base. Closing a carried-interest loophole shifts tax avoidance to a different section of the tax code, easily activated by the accountants of the wealthy. Treasury’s public trust fund scraped together from the returns on ARPA-E grants accumulates too slowly, or at levels too meager to command mass excitement. The public pharmacy is derailed by an act of Congress or by an incoming neoliberal administration. All the climate regulatory moves prove inadequate to halt rising temperatures. An apartheid Israel embargoed by the United States turns to the Germans, Russians, or British. At all levels, vetoes of socialist policy-making are common. What, then, are we to make of the defeats? Of the disappointing compromises?

The near-certainty of failure leads some to conclude that socialists cannot govern in a capitalist system, that it first must be abolished to make any progress. But there are two kinds of defeats. There are defeats that discourage and demobilize us, that make us fatalistic about contesting office with mass-oriented campaigns, and that mischaracterize the underlying reasons for failure. Then there are defeats that “we stand on the foundation of”, as Rosa Luxemburg said in her final essay Order Prevails in Berlin! (1919). “Where would we be today without those ‘defeats,’ from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?” The truth is that the message a defeat sends is underdetermined; it is mediated by an interpretive apparatus that narrates what institutional constraint generated the failure, how that constraint connects to the needs of capital, and what specifically is necessary to overcome it.

Faced with the decision over backing a democratic socialist presidency in 2029, we too often flip Antonio Gramsci’s famous formulation, adapted from Romain Rolland, on its head. Instead of cultivating a “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” we instead adopt a pessimism of the will that cannot imagine something greater than fatalistic defeat and consequently abjures from mass political life. We combine that with an optimism of the intellect—a naivety that indulges in wishful thinking about the returns on abstention, that imagines time on a dying planet is on our side, or pretends that an insurrectionary revolt is on the horizon and will soon put us into power, if only we maintain our vigilance and purity.

Gramsci himself, like Engels in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, was skeptical that the Bolshevik model of a frontal assault on a state in crisis (‘the war of maneuver’) could be replicated in the West, where civil society is dense, and the capitalist state is backed by many consent-generating institutions—media, schools, churches, and parties. As Gramsci put it in his Prison Notebooks, “The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.” Instead, he called for a ‘war of position’—a protracted, cumulative struggle across all institutions where individual defeats do not threaten the project as a whole but are expected. The war of position does not rule out an insurrectionist possibility, but it does put an emphasis on laying the groundwork for a successful mass uprising in the future.

A DSA-backed president cannot hope to overcome all those earthworks alone, but she does widen the arena for an assault on the hegemonic apparatus. Adapting Marx’s concept of permanent revolution to our own institutional conditions, we would adopt the posture of a permanent campaign—to remain both critical and independent of a DSA-backed president while also agitating to make her job at building socialism easier. I have outlined how in crucial areas of that campaign—Cuba, Palestine, climate, taxes, public ownership, and worker power—an AOC presidency in 2028 would give us opportunities to send relief to allies under siege, accumulate policy victories, and raise mass expectations of what is possible to do with the state. Narrated correctly, the failures put scrutiny on the residual constraints on our power. They give us the mandate to say that this world, and these victories, are not enough. The people need more.

Footnotes

[1] Forests seem to have fared better globally, but not in the tropics.

[2] Aerosols reflect the sun’s energy back into space and serve as condensation nuclei and brighteners for low-level clouds, which have net radiative cooling. Counter-intuitively, as the world improves air quality, it unmasks the heat potential of its greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020 for example, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80%. This created a radiative forcing effect equivalent to about 0.04C of global warming. Roughly 25% of the increase in global temperature over the past two decades stems from this unmasking of human-caused heat.

[3] This is how Sweden and France decarbonized their electric grid with nuclear and hydro-power in the wake of the 1970s oil crises, which convinced national planners that energy independence from fossil fuels was a strategic priority. Decarbonization was an unintended benefit of that process.

[4] Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI in Memphis is one of those mega methane polluters.

[5] Retiring coal for new, affordable renewables would help build a political majority among rural Republican areas for a decarbonized economy.

[6] The U.S. can do this through its Export-Import Bank, Development Finance Corporation (FDC), and vote shares at the IMF, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.

[7] Europe already regulates non-CO₂ aviation effects on the climate; a president can broker a common contrail standard through ICAO and European airlines over the North Atlantic corridor, where contrail warming is concentrated.

[8] Converting the hydrocarbon industry into publicly-managed geothermal utilities would also be a useful off-ramp for the oil and gas extractive industry. Geothermal power is firm unlike solar and wind; the ‘fuel’ is clean, local, endless and does not require harmful uranium supply chains abroad or extensive land-use like solar farms. The technology and skills share substantial overlap; up to 80 percent of hydrocarbon skills are transferable to geothermal, according to the International Energy Agency.