Dig deeper by race, and it’s clear that only one group ranks climate change highly as an issue — white liberal college grads (ranked sixth compared to twenty-seventh for the white working class). Even black and Latino college grads don’t rank it highly (twenty-second and twenty-third out of thirty respectively). Given the scale of what’s required to address climate change, surely requiring large supermajorities to accomplish the boldest action, these numbers should raise alarm bells.

I would imagine non-white groups rank wage inequality and the continued decline of civil rights in American as a much more important issues to them than climate change. I would agree with them. Climate change is very important, but our nation must serve each of our citizens equally.

This is a US centric article but I expect there are similar effects in most "western" countries.

I'm a left-wing indigenous Australian, but find my own political priorities don't align with most other left indigenous people I meet. I consider the climate crisis the #1 problem in the world, with the potential to cause the literal extinction of humanity. Wage equality and racial issues aren't going to be a problem if everyone is dead.

The term "professional managerial class" is what comes to mind.

It has some interesting stuff in it, even though it's of course very USA-focused. I remember Ajay Singh Chaudhary destroying Matt Huber for the productivist ideas in his book, which do not respect the material reality of the ecocrisis. The above piece takes no position on questions of reducing consumption and production either. But this bit I'll try to memorize:

One of the most frustrating aspects of climate politics today is that it is arguably the Right that mobilizes class politics most effectively on this issue. Right-wing politicians consistently argue climate action is a plot of the liberal elite to harm the lives of average working-class families with rising energy costs and lost jobs. On the other hand, liberal activists often make climate change about everything but class — “Believe Science” — and sometimes advocating policies like carbon taxes that would raise the price of energy (affirming precisely what the Right warns against).

I think that the everyday material concerns are indeed key, and there might be some fairly "easy" victories in the fields of affordable energy, housing and public transport. However, I think there is a real clash between the current desire of the working classes to accelerate their consumerist lifestyles, and the ecological boundaries. For all their sins, the predicament is not just the fossil fuel industry being evil, it's bigger than that. Getting the obvious things sorted out is a beginning in the right direction, but actual sustainability requires a deeper change of orientation.

I don't believe we'll get very far in this transition in the next decades unless we begin to break capital's control on all the essential aspects of our lives. The accumulation of capital would continue to drive the resource allocation, the political system and the meaning we grant our own existence, to the detriment of life upholding earth systems and the majorities of the world. And there will be no political consciousness to break the control of capital in a consumerist society where people are estranged from how life is recreated and upheld, where democracy means just voting in an election and where work is done just in exchange for a paycheck.

How can this begin to change? Heron, Millburn and Russel have one pretty convincing proposal and example in their book Radical Abundance. An intentionally designed institution that brings workers, local communities and the public sector together to deliberate on and control matters of production and consumption that are directly relevant to the participants.

The best part? It does not require prior legislative or electoral victories to start building these kind of institutions. It would directly counter some growth dependencies. Ideological motivations are not assumed to be the driver of participation. The hardest part? To get people involved and organized of course. But it starts from seeing the promise in this kind of action.

While there are so many different tracks of action required, this is one with great promise, that I've seen too little discussion and action on.

https://fojournal.org/interview/radical-abundance/

There is a reason why education of the working class has always been a concern for the left and why it has always been fought by the right.

You don't change class when you become educated. You may change income brackets though. College education can turn you into a lawyer or into a doctor, but it is very unlikely to turn you into the inheritor of a multi-million company.

The thing is, too often I meet militants who confuse the different meaning of bourgeois, thinking that anyone with a bit more income than the median person is from the dominating class and an enemy of the working class. That's a self-defeating mentality.