Lecture 1. Renewable Futures and the Temptations of Nationalism

Nation-States and Climate Change

In the politics of climate change, there is a foundational divide: either the nation-state is seen as having a fundamental role in addressing climate change or the nation-state is seen as the main problem, as the entity that prohibits or impedes action, whether by creating inadequate policies or by developing no climate change policies at all. In most cases, those committed to climate action are not fully advocates of one or the other of these positions—neither completely committed to the nation-state and looking only to nation-states as effective climate actors nor taking the position that it is entirely pointless to direct their energies to influence nation-state decision-making.

One can understand the hesitancy to figure climate action in relation to the practices of nation-states. The trauma of climate change extends far beyond borders. Carbon dioxide does not need a passport or visa to move through the atmosphere. Should there ever again be a summer in which there are no major forest fires in British Columbia—which is unlikely—smoke from California, Oregon, or Washington will still make it impossible to see the other side of the valley in south central B.C., despite the border that has been drawn across the continent at the forty-ninth parallel. The problem climate change poses is global, and nation-states are not. So, when it comes to climate action, why bother with the nation-state at all?

The answer to this question is perhaps obvious: nation-states are the only large-scale, sovereign powers that exist today. They have the capacity to do things. Borders are absolute fictions. But nation-states make these fictions real, erecting fences, instituting laws of transit, establishing ports of entry, and creating armies to safeguard them from external threat. Beyond making fictions into reality—a magical capacity that other political forms have found hard to mimic—nation-states also shape what takes place within their borders. Changes to structures, infrastructures, or social and economic practices that can have an impact on pollution, energy use, and transportation appear of necessity to require the work of nation-states. International agreements are not without importance or power. But nation-states are the political actors that put them into practice, whether by force or by law. International agreements do not, in the end, have the power to force sovereign nations to do anything about climate change; signatories to such agreements can decide to abandon them, even on a whim, as when the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump abandoned the Paris Agreement in 2017. Whatever one’s opinions and views about nation-states, it thus seems hard to imagine any significant action on climate change and energy transition that does not involve decisions made by them—decisions rooted in the function they play within the networks of global power demarcated by property and ownership and animated by a history of violence and colonialism.

To be clear, this is not to say that other political entities do not or will not play a role in shaping our climate futures. Nations are organized around a division of power that accords discrete responsibilities to a range of internal political actors, such as cities and regions, which are also important in addressing climate change. Cities are entities that can institute curbside recycling policies or introduce bike lanes. In Canada and elsewhere, subnational entities, such as provinces and states, have constitutional responsibility to manage resources, develop power grids, and plan for energy transition. Some of the most radical and important decisions about energy transition to date have been made at these levels of governance. For example, cities and other regional governments located around the world have signed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, pledging to end extraction; still other cities (112 in total) are participants in the European Commission’s Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities program, which commits them to reaching climate neutrality by 2030. Although the impact of these political actors has been significant, it is nonetheless still the nation-state that has the power to create the big carrots and even bigger sticks needed to generate climate action and energy transition with speed and at scale. Vancouver is a signatory of the aforementioned nonproliferation treaty, and the province of Quebec has indicated that it will no longer extract fossil fuels. But it is the Canadian federal government that is ultimately responsible for fulfilling the terms of the Paris Agreement. So, too, with the U.S. federal government and every other sovereign national government on the planet.

Nation-states can and do take action to address climate change. However, with some exceptions, their record to date in undertaking such changes has been miserable. The all-too-real limits of national action on climate change are evidenced by the continued increase of atmospheric CO₂. In 1958, the year the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began collecting direct measurements of the levels of atmospheric CO₂, the reading on accumulated levels stood at 315 parts per million; in May 2024, it was 427 parts per million—a 35 percent increase. The safe level of accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide has been calculated to be 350 parts per million. Even if immediate action were taken to get the level of carbon dioxide production to zero, we would not see the latter level reached for one thousand years, according to calculations by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In its 2022 ranking of nations based on their performance on climate change, the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) left the top three positions empty: no country achieved a high enough rating to fit one of those slots. In the words of the CCPI, “even if all countries were as committed as the current frontrunners, it would still not be enough to prevent dangerous climate change.”11

The reasons for climate inaction by nation-states have been well documented by scholars and climate critics. There are vested interests that must be kept happy. Corporations, regardless of whether they express public commitments to climate change, provide marching orders (in public and in private) to members of the political establishment, reminding them of their best interests. Corporate and political elites are often drawn from the same social groups, which align their interests even without any need for backroom arm-twisting. In democratic nation-states, elections are always just over the horizon, and both governing and opposition parties are alert to which messages play well with publics and which don’t. Affirming the reality of climate change and the need for energy transition has now become par for the course in elections worldwide, expressed as a goal by parties across the political spectrum, which can perversely create confusions about what exactly is at stake. In the 2021 Canadian federal election, for example, the Green Party and the Conservatives were distinguished not by their acceptance or disavowal of climate change but by how much they felt the nation could reduce its emissions by 2030 under 2005 levels: 60 percent for Greens versus 30 percent for Conservatives. The other parties in the election occupied an in-between territory that quickly became demarcated as reasonable and rational in comparison to these extremes.12 This constitution of the “reasonable” or “commonsense” approach to climate has been used by governing parties to do less than needed or to defuse the need for any action whatsoever, as Canada’s poor performance on climate change makes amply clear.

Yet, despite all these potential limits and barriers, and despite any evidence of substantive action to date, climate hopes continue to be placed in the actions of nation-states. This is not only due to the absence of intergovernmental sovereignties powerful enough to compel climate action; it is because nation-states are seen to possess something to which few other political entities can lay claim. Climate action has always, at its core, whether explicitly articulated or implicitly presumed, been constituted around theories of collective action and mass mobilization. Above and beyond their differences in how they understand nature or the relationship between human and nonhuman, all forms of climate action lay claim to a theory of the political and to the mechanisms by which political change occurs. Peaceful protest? Violence? Mass demonstrations? Voting? Pamphleteering? Advertising? Twitter campaigns? Petitions? All of these? None? One of the oft-repeated frustrations about effective climate action emerges from the apparent limits of all such forms of environmental communication to generate significant action. By contrast, nation-states possess a capacity to suture together belief and action in a single process. They have a proven method for compelling their citizens to act quickly, en masse, and collectively: nationalism.

An environmental nationalism promises to accomplish several things at once. It would resolve climate knowledge into climate practice, and do so in relation to a common project, whose import—national and international—would be foregrounded for populations now seen as either disinterested in climate change or intimidated by what needs to be done to address an unprecedented social, political, and ecological challenge. The various appeals made to nation-states to carry out Green New Deals, or to mobilize what activist Seth Klein has called “a good war” against climate change, each speaks to this capacity of the nation-state, if in varying ways and to different degrees.13 The view that nation-states could make a difference—and fast—if they were to treat carbon dioxide as an enemy is not uncommon; indeed, many have come to see it as the only way forward, even if one has to hold one’s nose to avoid the stink of concession to politics as now practiced.

Climate action and energy transition likely must tarry with the nation-state in some way, given today’s organization of sovereign power and the necessity for immediate action. But need they do so via nationalism? And just what does it mean to do so? Before I answer these questions, it’s necessary to take a slight detour into the contemporary landscape of nationalism; how this has been constituted has a significant impact on whether nationalism can in fact accomplish substantive action on climate change and energy transition or if it constitutes little more than a ruse—a promise of action that will never in fact be taken but that reaffirms the position of nation-states at the heart of the story of climate change, with all this entails for alternative and more radical visions of the future of the sun.

Bad Nationalism, Good Nationalism

Climate change isn’t the only place where nationalism is being discussed today as a force that might save us from our worst tendencies. In books and articles written recently by a number of scholars and critics—I am thinking here, for instance, of Anatol Lieven, Yael Tamir, and the prophet of the end of history, Francis Fukuyama—a renewed nationalism is being proffered as the solution to the scourge of populist totalitarianism.14 The way this nationalist politics is being articulated has consequences for how—and whether—nationalism might actually work as a mechanism to achieve energy transition and address climate change.

The idea that nationalism is the way to confront populism and totalitarianism can’t help but come as a surprise. After all, isn’t nationalism precisely the cause rather than the solution to national and international woes? When I think of present-day nationalisms, I think of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, Narendra Modi’s India, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. A range of forces and practices define contemporary populist nationalism, including the significant role that social media plays in animating ideology and suppressing dissent. But at heart, contemporary totalitarianism is constituted in much the same way Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism: around inclusion and exclusion, the promise offered to some of absolute belonging and identification—often as a salve for social isolation and loneliness—in relation to the supposed threat others pose because of their race, ethnicity, or political difference.15 If nationalism is so important to illiberal nations, how exactly is the former also supposed to challenge the principles on which the latter are constituted?

The answer that these critics offer is surprisingly simple—which is not to say that it’s satisfactory. Lieven argues that while there might be a growing number of “bad” nationalisms—to use a shorthand—this does not ipso facto rule out the possibility of establishing good nationalisms. Bad nationalisms are defined by prohibitions and surveillance and by the manner in which elites use exclusions and violence to gain and then maintain power (consider Modi vs. Muslims, Erdoğan vs. Kurds, Orbán vs. Jews and their coconspirators). But against this form of nationalism, Fukuyama, Tamir, Lieven, and others argue that good nationalisms are also possible. Such nationalisms are defined by modes of being-in-relation-together framed around values that have long defined liberalism: freedom, the rule of law, tolerance of difference, pluralism, and respect for and a commitment to individual rights. Contra populist nationalism, good nationalism insists that universal rights and freedoms be constitutive of the political and civic life of all nations. In contrast to the illiberalism of populist nationalism, its advocates see good nationalism as shaped according to universal liberal values, such as those captured in the language of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A conceptual and practical tension seems to be arising from the conjunction of liberal universalism and articulations of good nationalisms. This is a tension, it must be said, that mirrors commitments to climate change made via international accords, such as the Paris Agreement, that must nevertheless be fulfilled by nation-states; it is also a tension foundational to liberalism as such. One must ask, if the values of liberalism are understood to be universal, an expression of a core set of political values developed in relation to a belief in liberty and equality for all, why do they need to be expressed via nationalisms, which are of necessity particular and exclusionary? Why turn to nationalism and not to postnational forms of belonging, which might better challenge and contest the parochialism and divisions generated and maintained by national borders? In “A Country of Their Own: Liberalism Needs the Nation,” an essay in Foreign Affairs that offers a condensed version of the argument he makes in his 2022 book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama provides a direct answer to this question: nation-states are the only form of sovereign power in the world; they are the only actors able to enforce the rule of law and create the conditions to guarantee liberal universalisms.16 It is unavoidable: nations must come first. Bad nationalisms also place the nation first, using sovereign power to make determinations about (for example) freedom of speech and assembly in a manner that suppresses liberalism and secures belief in and commitment to illiberal ideologies. What thus makes a nationalism good comes down to a single thing: it builds collective belonging and common cause around universal values, around inclusions instead of exclusions, pluralism instead of homogeneity, and with a commitment to the rule of law and respect for individual rights.

When it comes to how nationalism operates as a form of collective belonging linked to a common project, the difference between the bad nationalisms now in existence in all too many places on the globe and the good nationalisms advocated by Fukuyama and by Tamir in Why Nationalism is a very fine one. It hinges on little more than a vision of the character of belonging articulated within nationalism—either a nationalism shaped around the rejection of liberal humanism or one that embraces it. The difference advocated by these critics is taxonomic more than it is political: there are two types of nationalism, and it would be better to have one (a nonchauvinistic one) instead of the other (defined by the chauvinisms of populism). Fukuyama fully understands the difficulty of making a case for liberal nationalism, especially given the obvious attractions of populist nationalisms: the latter offer individuals an easy way to make sense of an increasingly complex world, despite the consequences for communities within nations and the need to make common cause by limiting who belongs to the common, often by the threat of violence or its actual use. The political task liberals face today is to newly articulate its values, attractions, and importance to all those left behind, to reconstitute liberal societies by ensuring that everyone can thrive within them. But precisely how this is to be done is never elaborated, which makes the arguments for good nationalism little more than subject matter for New York Times op-eds and essays in Foreign Policy.

The arguments by Fukuyama and Tamir, and other recent appeals to a renewed liberalism, are shaped around a mea culpa: post-1989, the attractions of globalization made liberals insensate to the experiences and struggles of those whose lives were negatively impacted by neoliberalism. The fact that this mea culpa has appeared three decades after Fukuyama’s infamous proclamation of “the end of history” suggests that these thinkers have failed to pay any attention to social and political movements and academic analyses that have relentlessly drawn attention to the traumas produced by globalization over this time period.17 (We will witness other such mea culpas over the course of these lectures; they are a powerful rhetorical tool.) Tamir suggests that liberals became mobile and forgot about the immobile classes; they couldn’t see them from the cruising altitude of their corporate jets. Twenty-five years ago, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman had already made much the same point: the advent of globalization had divided humanity into tourists and vagabonds, the first group able to move easily across borders, the latter moving only when forced to do so, due to poverty, war, or climate destruction.18 The arrogance developed by wealthy globalists is captured in Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign as a “basket of deplorables,” half of whom were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”19 In Why Nationalism—tellingly, the title has no question mark—Tamir writes, “Members of the middle classes . . . lost trust in the ruling liberal elites and questioned their willingness to protect the interests of the different social classes.”20 It is this trust that Fukuyama, Tamir, and other liberals now want to regain, by striving to protect (they claim) the class of immobiles and vagabonds from the threats and dangers they now daily encounter. Whether they have any similar ambition to help vagabonds become more like tourists, or to reduce the air miles accumulated by liberal elites, is far less certain.

I’ve taken the time to elaborate these recent arguments being made on behalf of a renewed, postglobal liberalism for two reasons. First, the liberal nationalism being articulated here is one whose success depends on its ability to better attune itself to conditions on the ground—that is, to class divisions exacerbated by global processes within nation-states. Despite the desire of liberal nationalism to highlight universal values in the governance of individual nations, as a political project, the reinvigoration of good nationalisms is today being narrated as necessarily anti-internationalist. The political work of countering populist nationalisms and rebuilding trust in elites demands attention to local, national projects—job growth, the strengthening and expansion of social services, and improvements to health and education—designed to motivate the class of deplorables to switch ideological teams. Given this emphasis, it is perhaps unsurprising that this version of liberal nationalism appears to have little interest in climate change as a problem worth worrying about, at least in the short term. It is telling that neither Fukuyama nor Tamir mentions climate change in his or her book-length argument for why the world needs good nationalisms.

This brings me to my second point. The limits of liberal nationalism as an environmental project adhere in the necessity for climate action to take place within the right kind of nationalisms—good nationalisms committed to a universal project. Liberal nationalism always imagines itself as a universal project, even if this is a universal conducted within the borders of a given nation. So, too, with liberal nationalisms committed to climate change: the fight against climate change is necessarily global (remember, CO₂ and smoke from forest fires don’t obey borders). The promise of liberal nationalism—the argument that underlies many of the beliefs that the existing nation-state system is sufficient to address climate change—is that the sacrifices of citizens for the good of their national communities are at the same time acts for the good of the globe. This fantasy is embodied in the Paris Agreement, which pretends to act as something like an environmental constitution that aggregates discrete nationalisms into a single global project. But an effective transmutation of the national into the global depends on the presence of good nationalisms everywhere in the world. It is unlikely that such a network can ever be completed—and in the absence of such a network, any given liberal nation-state is provided with a convenient argument for the lack of true action on energy transition and climate change: the local can become global only once the whole planet is liberal, and that is far from where we find ourselves today. The limit for effective action on climate change thus isn’t liberal nationalism as a project at the level of the nation but the absence of a universal system of good nationalism. Or so the argument goes.

A world of good nationalisms doesn’t exist, nor is there anything to suggest that even the best renewed liberal nationalisms—ones now attentive to the classes they had so recently disavowed—would be especially attuned to the challenges that climate change poses. There is certainly no evidence that existing liberal nation-states have been more effective in addressing climate change than populist or totalitarian ones. On the CCPI, Brazil ranks above New Zealand, Turkey ranks above Japan and Ireland, and almost every nation ranks above Canada (which sits sixty-first on a scale with sixty-four places).21 Troublingly, populist nationalisms are rapidly incorporating environmental action into their narratives, legitimating racial and ethnic exclusions as necessary to defer further degradation of the national soil.22 Despite its attractions and promises, it is hard to see nationalism as a mechanism for resolving the political challenges of producing action on climate change. And yet, the common sense of environmental action that persists is that the nation-state remains the single most powerful body to secure energy transition and to undertake climate action, despite how slowly it might actually be able to do so.

Time, Nationalism, and Climate Change

I’ve noted the absence of climate change as a topic in the recent books on liberalism and nationalism by Fukuyama and Tamir. By contrast, there is a book that explicitly endeavors to connect the dots between the politics of nation-states and action on climate change: Anatol Lieven’s Climate Change and the Nation State: The Case for Nationalism in a Warming World. Many of the arguments he makes on behalf of nationalism echo those I’ve outlined herein. Lieven, too, makes the claim that there is a need for “good” nationalisms and argues that today’s troubling nationalisms don’t rule out the possibility that good variants might be created. The force of his argument, however, comes from a different place. Lieven strongly insists that nationalism is the only means by which to address climate change. The nation-state is the only sovereign actor capable of producing mass change, and nationalism is a proven mechanism by which states can mobilize their populations to act. As such, there is no possibility for effective energy transition or action on climate unless nationalism is mobilized for this purpose.

The subtitle of Lieven’s book suggests that he is arguing for a position by outlining its rationale; this is, after all, what it means to make a case. In the end, however, the argument he proffers is premised less on the articulation of the specific effectiveness of nationalism than on the elaboration of a position by means of negation: a relentless criticism of all those who might be wary of or even directly opposed to the nation-state as climate actor and nationalism as its tool of action. Repeatedly, Lieven positions the nation-state as the only force capable of undertaking climate action. He is ferocious in his attacks on left political theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri or philosophers like Alain Badiou, all of whom he sees as presenting models of political and social change that are, in the end, little more than speculative and fantastical and so not to be countenanced. He is equally critical of environmental critics and advocates like Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor—“committed opponents of capitalism tout court”—who evoke the need for transnational approaches to addressing climate change and make appeals for the end of capitalism.23 For Lieven, these critics articulate no mechanism by which to generate public consent for policies about climate action. The necessity of nation-states and nationalisms is affirmed largely because no other feasible political approaches to climate change are available.

As luck would have it, Lieven sees nationalism as a perfect substitute for the political commitments articulated by socialists, Marxists, and other radical environmentalists (though it must be remarked that less radical ones, such as McKibben, also want to rein in capitalism). This is perhaps especially so in relation to time. Lieven writes, “Apart from nationalism’s legitimization of painful reforms in general, what especially brings nationalism and ecological thinking together is the capacity of both to demand sacrifices on the part of existing people for the sake of future generations.”24 This understanding of the place of time in nationalism has a long history. It can be found in Edmund Burke’s infamous description of the social contract as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”25 It can be found, too, in Ernest Renan’s definitive 1882 essay on nationalism, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s answer, which also comes about through a negative process, via eliminating other ways of being together (e.g., tribes, city-states, “great agglomerations of men”), is that

a nation is . . . a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. It presupposes a past but is reiterated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.26

Lieven sees clear parallels between the time of nationalism and appeals commonly made within environmentalism to safeguard future generations through present-day sacrifices. Indeed, he sees an overlap between the time definitive of nationalism and the “alleged ‘seven generations’ thinking of the Iroquois people of North America.”27 Given such shared commitments to time, ones that also produce forms of common cause and self-sacrifice akin to war, Lieven argues that there should be nothing for those committed to climate change to worry about: nationalism will take care of it all.

Despite what might appear to be structural similarities, commitments to the future (and to the past) need not affirm nationalism or the nation-state in any way. Indigenous understandings of the past and present don’t emerge from, nor are they imagined in relation to, nationalism as articulated by Burke and Renan; the claim Lieven makes that equates the former to the latter is offensive in the extreme. Nor can the political self-understanding of movements like Fridays for Future (“We are fighting for our future and for our children’s future”) be categorized as something akin to nationalism; whatever else Greta Thunberg might be doing, she’s not gearing up for war or vying for the presidency of a proto-nation made up of youths. As in the case of the arguments he makes against those he deems to be socialists, Lieven’s intent is to rule out alternative forms of climate action by affirming the rationality of the status quo. Or rather, it is to make claims about circumstances not yet in place but that he treats as status quo—a coming good nationalism that stands ready to mobilize populations via a good Green New Deal.

And so, we return again to the notion of a good nationalism. What defines this nationalism is that it retains all of the constitutive collective power attendant to it—that is, charging subjects to act against their own will for the good of the nation, whether this external threat is the result of geopolitics or climate change—while safeguarding against potential antiliberal extremes. In the end, Lieven’s argument against (what he sees as) the speculative and utopian viewpoints that Klein and others have articulated comes down to the speculative and utopian elaboration of a prospective good nationalism. He writes,

Sixty years on, unconstrained free-market capitalism has once again been running amok for a generation, with disastrous results; and many socialists in the West have once again abandoned loyalty to their nations in favor of a return to fantasies of a borderless progressive world guided by themselves—and looming in the background, unaddressed, is the threat of climate change to all existing states. The task then is to develop a new version of social imperialism without the imperialism, racism, eugenics, and militarism.28

And again:

A future US president who hopes to push through a Green New Deal will need to combine Obama’s appeal to core US traditions with much greater radicalism, backed by a much stronger appeal to nationalism.29

Radicalism without too much radicalism; imperialism without imperialism; a nationalism drained of all the dangers of nationalism; a status quo liberal capitalism inflected by a kinder, gentler ethos: by adopting a supposedly realistic, commonsense position about what can change and what can’t, Lieven argues that a good nationalism can secure future possibilities in a manner that socialist internationalisms supposedly cannot.

For reasons I’ve named at the beginning of this lecture, there is an understandable temptation to concede climate action to the nation-state and to turn to nationalism as an effective mechanism of individual and infrastructural change. There are status quo versions of this—Lieven’s being one example—and more radical ones as well: Andreas Malm’s “war communism” is one example; another is Chantal Mouffe’s argument for a “left populism”; still another is Fredric Jameson’s articulation of a citizen army, which bizarrely enough evokes Lieven’s own account of the environmental benefits that might be produced by required national service.30 But to this one can’t help but raise a simple point: there is no good nationalism. There is no harm in arguing for models of sociopolitical structures that might be better than the ones we now occupy. When such models are taken as evidence of the utter infeasibility of other political positions, we are witnessing an attempt to take full control of conceptual space within which it might be possible to contest political common sense. If their arguments are pushed to the wall, the trump card that Lieven and other liberals play is sovereignty: only nation-states have it. Environmental activists and others who recognize the importance of rapid climate action and energy transition need to challenge the legitimacy of this card trick; they may even be able to do so via the language of nationalism, not to argue for their own variant of a good nationalism, but to articulate new ways of being in relation to one another, even within the system of nation-state sovereignty. (I’ll say more about how they might do so in lecture 3.)

My aim in this first lecture has been to show the distinct and complex ways in which the nation-state and nationalism has been configured today as a site of climate action. Despite the failure of nation-states to take significant action on climate change—as significant as needed, given the size of the threat—strong claims continue to be made about the key role of nation-states in fighting climate change; they are imagined to be the only real climate actors in town, whether or not one might want this to be the case. Yet this role is effective only to the degree that it originates from within the terms of what the critics at whom I’ve been looking have envisioned as a good nationalism. Conceptually, such an imagined nationalism does two things at once, both of which secure the status quo organization of power. Good nationalism guarantees the collective internationalism of nation-states by virtue of the fact that such states are liberal, which in turn rules out the worst tendencies of nationalism witnessed in contemporary, “bad,” populist nationalisms, because the former have a different ideological valence; that is, they’re good. This nested set of tautologies, almost impossible to parse, should act as a warning. Even if one were to concede the reality of the sovereign capacities of nation-states, and so, too, their potential for real climate action, it is crucial that we not concede that climate action has to occur (or can only occur) through nation-states. If nothing else, articulations of international climate solutions, which Lieven rules out as inconsequential, are necessary to unsettle the status quo fantasy of the promise of eco-nationalism as a last-ditch way to take on climate change. Waiting for good nationalisms to take charge will only lead to more of the same: not climate action at scale and with speed but too little, too late. The environmental and social consequences of climate change are too serious to concede action to a self-satisfied liberalism that imagines itself as the only game in town.