I was shocked when I heard that David Schwartzman had passed away from cancer on July 1. I had been corresponding with him in the preceding days and weeks about how we should organize to defeat Trumpist neofascism and about the upcoming COP30 Climate Summit in Belém, Brazil and an ecosocialist conference being planned for Belém just preceding the Climate Summit. He told me he was writing a review of Malcolm Harris’ new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (Little, Brown and Co., 2025). David never mentioned that he was sick.
David was a professor emeritus who had taught geochemistry and climate science at Howard University for 39 years. David was a stalwart member of the DC Statehood Green Party who had run for city council three times. He was a persistent advocate in the DC Fair Budget Coalition, calling for more progressive taxation to fund better city services in hearing testimony to city council each year about the city budget, including less than two weeks before he died.
The Washington Post obituary gives more background on David’s life and achievements. I want to emphasize in this remembrance David’s contributions as one of the world’s top experts on climate change and climate policy and a leading advocate for the vision of an ecosocialist and global Green New Deal. I had a discussion with David on that topic on Green Socialist Notes on January 7, 2023. Many of David’s popular writings on this can be found at two of his websites: Solar Utopia and The Earth Is Not for Sale. His book The Earth Is Not for Sale: A Path Out Of Fossil Capitalism To The Other World That Is Still Possible (World Scientific, 2018), co-authored with his son Peter Schwartzman, is a clear examination of the climate crisis and an ecosocialist solution to it. Peter is a professor of environmental studies at Knox College and a Green Party member who served 10 years as a city councilor before being elected as Mayor of Galesburg, Illinois, where he was re-elected this past April to serve his second 4-year mayoral term.
I relied on David’s advice and comments in formulating the Ecosocialist Green New Deal policy papers for my 2020 Green Party presidential campaign. David was a pioneer in ecosocialist thinking, having written about it since the 1990s in such essays as “Solar Communism.” David was working on a book by that title when he died.
I think one of his most important contributions to climate policy and the debate around degrowth was the class analysis and commitment to ending poverty that he brought to it. In his 2016 article “How Much and What Kind of Energy Does Humanity Need?” he argued that overall energy production needs to grow from 18 trillion watts today to 20-25 trillion watts by 2050 in order to bring all people on Earth above the minimum of 3.5 kilowatts per person in primary energy consumption that is necessary for acquiring the highest life expectancy that we see in some of the wealthy countries today. That means, he argued, that we need to substantially grow the solar-powered renewable sector while we radically degrow the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complexes of the world. He argued for a significant reduction in average energy consumption per person in the wealthy Global North, where it is wastefully well above 3.5 kilowatts per person, while increasing energy consumption in the impoverished Global South. He argued that we need degrowth in some sectors but also need growth in other sectors in order to create a sustainable solar civilization with substantive equality and democracy. I think he has been a needed corrective to those simplistic degrowthers who call for degrowth across the board without regard to economic sectors and social classes.
I also think David’s perspective on the importance to climate solutions of accelerating carbon sequestration is important. He advocated that we need to supplement building up biospheric carbon sequestration through afforestation, habitat restoration, and organic agriculture with geospheric carbon sequestration that mineralized carbon into the Earth’s crust. He said we need to build a solar-powered industrialized acceleration of the natural geological carbon cycle where atmospheric carbon is mineralized into rock through weathering. One method of this process is injecting carbonated water into underground basalt rock formations where the carbon is mineralized into rock formations as calcium carbonate, a stable mineral. The biosphere’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon is not big enough to absorb all the carbon released from Earth’s crust by burning fossil fuels in the industrial era. In such essays as “Should we reject Negative Emissions Technologies, except for organic agriculture?” David argued that zero carbon emissions is not enough to restore a safe and stable climate. We also need to rapidly bring the levels of atmospheric carbon from today’s levels that are shooting well past 400 parts per million back down to below the safe limit of 350 parts per million in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. David was cutting against the grain with most climate activists in making this argument. But David said we cannot argue with the physics of the climate. We have to acknowledge it and act accordingly.
I will sorely miss David’s constant stream of new insights on climate science and policy and the ecosocialist politics of social, environmental, and international justice. His loss is irreplacable. We should honor David by making sure his ideas continue to circulate and live on.
