On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

by Naomi Klein

And it has meant that we are saddled with an apparatus of “free-trade” deals that tie the hands of policymakers just when they need maximum flexibili...

Because of the way our daily lives have been altered by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change is indeed an emergency—let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of living is possible.

The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate is objectively nuts.

It means we need to create integrated solutions, ones that radically bring down emissions while tackling structural inequality and making life tangibly better for the majority.

A story: When I was twenty-six, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did.

They knew they were being badly exploited, that the garments and gadgets they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month.

So, one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks.

At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction? It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me with something like pity. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all.

Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate f...

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs, first and very often last, through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism...

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

vatican

Vatican

pope

Pope

A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

descended

Descended

The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer—it was a key part of the Zionist “back to the land” pioneer ethos. And in this context, trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, and over Palestinian villages.

The most notorious actor on this has been the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan, “Turning the Desert Green,” boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them nonnative to the region.

I grew up in a Jewish community where every occasion (births and deaths, Mother’s Day, bar mitzvahs) was marked with the proud purchase of a JNF tree in the name of the honored person. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand that those feel-good faraway conifers, certificates for which papered the walls of my Montreal elementary school, were not benign—not just something to plant and later hug. In fact, these trees are among the most glaring symbols of Israel’s system of official discrimination, the one that must be dismantled if peaceful coexistence is to become possible.

on our current emissions trajectory, we face the “loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history”—and not in thousands of years from now but as soon as this century.

But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of “othering,” what is described in his 1978 book Orientalism as “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.”

So, this isn’t just about gasping at how ugly the vast tailing ponds are in Alberta. It’s about acknowledging that there is no clean, safe, nontoxic way to run an economy powered by fossil fuels. There never was.

When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.

Actually, we have hit the hard limits of what the earth can take; we have to leave resources in the ground, even when they are still profitable. The time for a new story, and a new economic model, is now.

“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”

Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.

What other lessons can we take from our two-day-old reality that we now live in a world with a President Trump?

One lesson: that the economic pain is real and not going anywhere. Four decades of corporate neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and austerity have made sure of that.

Another lesson: Leaders who represent that failed consensus are no match for the demagogues and neofascists who claim to be toppling it. They have nothing tangible to offer, and they are seen, quite correctly, as the...

Only a bold and genuinely redistributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs: to the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of l...

It begins to strike me how precarious it all is, this business of not being on fire.

For years, climate scientists have warned us that a warming world is an extreme world, one in which humanity is buffeted by both brutalizing excesses and stifling absences of the core elements that have kept fragile life in equilibrium for millennia. At the end of the summer of 2017, with major cities submerged in water and others licked by flames, we are currently living through Exhibit A of this extreme world, one in which natural extremes come head-to-head with social, racial, and economic ones.

You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers, I believe you call it the “fatberg?” Well, Trump—he’s the political equivalent of that: a merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy, and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very, very hard to dislodge.

In all our countries, we can and must do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice, and gender injustice. We need to understand and explain how all those ugly systems that place one group in a position of dominance over another (based on skin color, religious faith, gender, and sexual orientation) consistently serve the interests of power and money, and always have. They do it by keeping us divided, and keeping themselves protected.

Now we need to up our ambition and show exactly how battling climate change is a once-in-a-century chance to build a fairer and more democratic economy. Because as we rapidly transition off fossil fuels, we cannot replicate the wealth concentration and the injustices of the oil and coal economy, in which hundreds of billions in profits have been privatized and the tremendous risks are socialized.

the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life.

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

our planet’s resources can provide us with “private sufficiency and public luxury,” in the forms of “wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks.” The earth cannot, however, sustain the impossible dream of private luxury for all.

the health of our planet is the single greatest determining factor in the quality of all our lives.

a climate-disrupted future is a bleak and an austere future, one capable of turning all our material possessions into rubble or ash with terrifying speed.

nine more reasons the Green New Deal has a fighting chance—a

1. IT WILL BE A MASSIVE JOB CREATOR

2. PAYING FOR IT WILL CREATE A FAIRER ECONOMY

3. IT TAPS THE POWER OF EMERGENCY

4. IT’S PROCRASTINATION-PROOF

5. IT’S RECESSION-PROOF

6. IT’S A BACKLASH BUSTER

7. IT CAN RAISE AN ARMY OF SUPPORTERS

8. IT WILL BUILD NEW ALLIANCES—AND UNDERCUT THE RIGHT

9. WE WERE BORN FOR THIS MOMENT