I often see people ask, “what can we give the working class that will make them like environmentalism?”
The idea is that demands for ecological reparations, climate justice, etc., just won't appeal to the working people.
Some thoughts.

Note that by working class, it is often meant the working class in industrialized countries. This group expects significant life improvements within the current system.

So working class environmentalism must involve transforming the current system to meet working class expectations in industrialized countries (e.g. full employment while largely automating undesirable work such as farming and household tasks).

Otherwise, it is argued that people in the Global South simply want industrialized lifestyles, and expect to attain the promises that modernity has dangled in front of them.

It's also argued that the industrialized working class is in a privileged position vis-à-vis capital because they are in the capitalist core, and therefore is central to the defeat of capital. So their expectations need to be met for a just transition to be feasible.

This argument is based on a Western-centric position. In fact, the majority of capitalist value is generated in the Global South. https://twitter.com/maxajl/status/1389956982409412608

This sets up a (Western) working class against (non-Western) peoples whose interests are not aligned and whose position in capitalism is not the same.

But this argument is also based on the idea that "what the working class wants" (whether in the North or South) is static, which we have no choice but to strive to provide. This is a serious failure to see desires and needs themselves as subject to transformation and struggle.

The point shouldn’t be to develop an environmentalism that meets the desires and needs of the Western working class, seen as distinct from global South movements, but to mobilize the working class to align their expectations with ecological imperatives & w/ the global majority.

It may not sound very different at first glance, but the first implies an undifferentiated working class with unmoveable wants and needs while the second means that ecology and liberation is a process of movement building and shaping hegemony and desires.

The first forecloses struggle through assuming an undivided “mass” whose wants we already know while the second invites struggle and the shaping of what “the collective” means.

This reverses the question of “what can we give the working class that will make them like environmentalism?” to “how can organizing be better aligned with ecological imperatives and anti-imperialist struggle?” & “how can fostering these forms of struggle help us build freedom?"

To put it another way, the goal isn't to decouple environmental destruction from economic growth, so that Western working class consumers can continue to meet their life expectations.

The point is to decouple well-being and the good life from lifestyles rooted in uneven development, to decouple our needs and desires from an Imperial mode of living.

Don't let anyone tell you this isn't possible: those who do simply can't imagine that people can desire, and are willing to fight for, a world completely different from the present.