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Anyone perusing Twitter or reading the works of Karl Marx will notice that socialists can get fractious with one another. But as one hardworking ecosocialist leader in the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) will tell you, an existential threat to humanity like climate change can bring people together. Its not like were debating about Lenin, Charlie Heller joked over coffee in June (though he acknowledged his comrades did have diverse perspectives on Lenin).

Something about being focused on climate makes you crazy in a unique way, Heller says. We are here to win, and we have to seize the power of the state because nothing else can address this global crisis at a scale that can match it.

Heller was reflecting on a major ecosocialist victory, a phrase that would have seemed oxymoronic five years ago. That victory was New York states Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), a big step toward a Green New Deal. While other states have taken steps as wellIllinois 2021 labor-led Climate and Equitable Jobs Act comes to mindNew York is the first state to do so in a way that explicitly rejects the neoliberal obligation to put corporate profits first. Instead, the BPRA puts the publicly owned New York Power Authority in charge of building renewable energy with a mandate to do so in the interest of working people.

Ecosocialists in New York won because their goal was unabashedly socialist, because theyd built a bench of elected leaders, and because they were willing to try everythingeven with great riskwhile rethinking strategies that werent working.

In 2017, as DSA membership skyrocketed in the wake of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, a handful of DSA members formed a national ecosocialist working group. It seemed clear that capitalist profiteering was fueling the climate crisis, confirmed by a 2017 study that found that just 100 corporations had produced more than 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

A socialist solution felt urgent. For decades, leaving the problem to the capitalist elites who caused it had yielded mostly empty greenwashed rhetoric.

But even within DSA, not everyone was convinced climate should be a focal point. The question (shared by centrist Democrats at the time) was whether climate, as a broad issue, could mobilize working-class Americans. It sounds crazy to say now, says Mike Paulson, one of the leading strategists on BPRA and an early member of the Ecosocialist Working Group, but four years ago, a lot of socialists just didnt care about climate. So we had to prove ourselves within DSA.

In 2018, these attitudes began to change quickly. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist bartender and a Standing Rock protester, won a congressional seat in Queens and championed the idea of a Green New Deal. It was the first time a United States elected official had proposed a plan to decarbonize the economy that matched the scale of the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, more and more young people were painfully aware of the climate crisis. Paulson remembers this time well. I was becoming increasingly despondent, he says. Its really dark to confront that without any framework for thinking about how there could be anything other than a totally disastrous future.

By the end of 2018, it was clear that DSA had a good model for socialist electoral work, having won 46 electoral victories that year, from the local to the federal level. And socialists have had a model of how to organize workers for more than a century. So the question was, Paulson recalls, how would socialists do climate work?