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

by Naomi Klein

It has been over three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve “the children,” “the grandchildren,” and “generations to come.” We were told that we owed it to them to move swiftly and embrace change. We were warned that we were failing in our most sacred duty to protect them. It was predicted that they would judge us harshly if we failed to act on their behalf.

these children are ready to deliver their moral verdict on the people and institutions who knew all about the dangerous, depleted world they would inherit and yet chose not to act. They know what they think of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison in Australia and all the other leaders who torch the planet with defiant glee while denying science so basic that these kids could grasp it easily at age eight. Their verdict is just as damning, if not more so, for the leaders who deliver passionate and moving speeches about the imperative to respect the Paris Climate Agreement and “make the planet great again” (France’s Emanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and so many others), but who then shower subsidies, handouts, and licenses on the fossil fuel and agribusiness giants driving ecological breakdown.

Greta also learned from climate scientists that the worst of this was not a foregone conclusion: that if we took radical action now, reducing emissions by 15 percent a year in wealthy countries like Sweden, then it would dramatically increase the chances of a safe future for her generation and the ones that followed. We could still save some of the glaciers. We could still protect many island nations. We might still avoid massive crop failure that would force hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people to flee their homes. If all this were true, she reasoned, then “we wouldn’t be talking about anything else . . . If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal?” It made no sense.

“Why,” Greta wondered, “should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society.”

Thunberg’s overarching demand is for humanity as a whole to do what she did in her own family and life: close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave.

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. All three of these mental tricks help us get through the day. It’s also extremely helpful to look unconsciously to our peers and role models to figure out how to feel and act—those social cues are how we form friendships and build cohesive communities. When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased. In part, this is because if we were to decide to take climate disruption seriously, pretty much every aspect of our economy would have to change, and there are many powerful interests that like things as they are.

I have been trying to figure out what is interfering with humanity’s basic survival instinct—why so many of us aren’t acting like our house is on fire when it so clearly is.

We were failing to act, it was said, because politicians were trapped in short-term electoral cycles, or because climate change seemed too far off, or because stopping it was too expensive, or because the clean technologies weren’t there yet. There was some truth in all the explanations, but they were also becoming less true over time. The crisis wasn’t far off; it was banging down our doors. The price of solar panels has plummeted and now rivals that of fossil fuels. Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshaled for endless wars, bank bailouts, and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition.

According to the UN World Meteorological Organization, we are on a path to warming the world by 3–5°C by the end of the century. Turning our economic ship around in time to keep the warming below 1.5°C would require, the IPCC authors found, cutting global emissions approximately in half in a mere twelve years—that’s eleven years as this book goes to press—and getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Not just in one country but in every major economy. And because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already dramatically surpassed safe levels, it would also require drawing a great deal of that down, whether through unproven and expensive carbon capture technologies or the old-fashioned ways: by planting billions of trees and other carbon-sequestering vegetation. Pulling off this high-speed pollution phaseout, the report establishes, is not possible with singular technocratic approaches like carbon taxes, though those tools must play a part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move ourselves around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report’s summary states in its first sentence, is “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

Green New Deal. The idea is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.

at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even about what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.

the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.

Long before the IPCC’s 1.5°C report, the climate movement had focused on the perilous future we faced if politicians failed to act. We popularized and shared the latest terrifying science. We said no to new oil pipelines, gas fields, and coal mines; no to universities, local governments, and unions investing endowments and pensions in the companies behind these projects; no to politicians who denied climate change and no to politicians who said all the right things but did the wrong ones.

Something else has changed since that call was issued a decade ago. Before, when social movements and small country governments made these demands, it felt as if we were screaming into a political void. There was really no cohort in the governments of the wealthiest countries on the planet willing to entertain this kind of emergency approach to the climate crisis. Trickle-down market mechanisms were the only ones on offer. And when there was an economic downturn, even those inadequate offerings evaporated. That is no longer the case today. There is now a bloc of politicians in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, some just a decade older than the young climate activists in the streets, ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times. Most prominent among this new political breed is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress.

The Green New Deal resolution begins with the terrifying science and short time lines in the IPCC report and calls for the United States to launch a moon shot approach to decarbonization, attempting to reach net-zero emissions in just one decade, in line with getting the entire world there by mid-century. As part of this sweeping transition, it calls for huge investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean transportation. It states that workers moving from high-carbon industries to green ones should have their wage levels and benefits protected, and it guarantees a job to all who want to work. It also calls for the communities who have borne the toxic brunt of dirty industries, so many of them Indigenous, black, and brown, not only to benefit from the transitions but to help design them at the local level.

in January 2019, the political coalition European Spring (an outgrowth of a project called DiEM25, where I serve on the advisory panel) launched a Green New Deal for Europe, a sweeping and detailed plan to embed an agenda of rapid decarbonization within a broader social and economic justice agenda: “From a green investment programme to drive through the world’s ecological transition to clear action on ending the scandal of tax havens; from humane and effective migration policy to a clear plan to tackle poverty in our continent;

Those of us who advocate for this kind of transformative platform are sometimes accused of using the climate crisis to advance a socialist or anticapitalist agenda that predates our focus on the climate crisis. My response is a simple one. For my entire adult life, I have been involved in movements confronting the myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit.

The painful, even lethal, impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet.

I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localized market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

debates about which precedents from history to invoke to help inspire the kind of sweeping, economy-wide transformations the climate crisis demands. Many clearly favor FDR’s New Deal, because it showed how radically both a society’s infrastructure and its governing values can be altered in the span of one decade. And the results are indeed striking. During the New Deal decade, more than 10 million people were directly employed by the government; most of rural America got electricity for the first time; hundreds of thousands of new buildings and structures were built; 2.3 billion trees were planted; 800 new state parks were developed; and hundreds of thousands of public works of art were created. In addition to the immediate benefits of pulling millions of Depression-ravaged families out of poverty, this period of frenetic public investment left behind a lasting legacy

Others insist that the only precedents that show the scale and speed of change required in the face of the climate crisis are the World War II mobilizations that saw Western powers transforming their manufacturing sectors and consumption patterns to fight Hitler’s Germany. It was certainly a dizzying level of change: Factories were retooled to produce ships, planes, and weapons. To free up food and fuel for the military, citizens changed their lifestyles dramatically: in Britain, driving for anything other than necessity virtually ceased; between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit went up by 87 percent in the United States and by 95 percent in Canada. In 1943 in the United States, twenty million households (representing three-fifths of the population) had “Victory gardens” in their yards, growing fresh vegetables that accounted for 42 percent of all those consumed that year. Some argue that a better analogy than the war effort was the reconstruction afterward—specifically, the Marshall Plan, a kind of New Deal for Western and southern Europe. In West Germany, the US government spent billions to rebuild a mixed economy that would have broad-based support and would undercut the rising support for socialism

Over two and a half decades, we have seen the creation of complex carbon markets; the occasional small carbon tax; the replacement of one fossil fuel (coal) with another (gas); various incentives for consumers to buy different kinds of lightbulbs and energy-efficient home appliances; and offers from companies to opt for greener alternatives if we are willing to pay more for them. Yet, only a few countries (most significantly, Germany and China) have made serious enough investments in the renewable sector to see a rollout at anything like the speed required. We are slowly starting to see a shift to a more aggressive regulatory approach in a handful of countries, invariably as a result of strong social movement pressure. A few countries, states, and provinces have placed bans or moratoriums on fracking for gas. The government of New Zealand, significantly, has announced it will no longer issue leases for offshore oil drilling. Norway’s government has announced plans to prohibit the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2025, a move that will certainly accelerate a shift to electric vehicles if its aggressive targets spread to other countries. But no national government of a wealthy country has been willing to have a frank discussion about the need for high consumers to consume less or for fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up the mess they created.

the 1930s through to the 1950s are still useful. They remind us that another approach to profound crisis was always possible and still is today. Faced with the collective emergencies that punctuated those decades, the response was to enlist entire societies, from individual consumers to workers to large manufacturers to every level of government, in deep transitions with clear common goals. Past problem solvers did not look for a single “silver bullet” or “killer app”; nor did they tinker and wait for the market to trickle-down fixes for them. In each instance, governments deployed a barrage of robust policy tools (from direct job creation on public infrastructure to industrial planning to public banking) all at once. These historical chapters show us that when ambitious goals and forceful policy mechanisms are aligned, it is possible to change virtually all aspects of society on an extremely tight deadline, just as we need to do in the face of climate breakdown today. The failure to do so is a choice, not an inevitability of human nature.

we don’t need to figure out every detail before we begin. Every one of these earlier mobilizations contained multiple false starts, improvisations, and course corrections. And as we will see later on, the most progressive responses happened only because of relentless pressure from organized populations. What matters is that we begin the process right away.

This is a crisis overwhelmingly created by the wealthiest strata of society: almost 50 percent of global emissions are produced by the richest 10 percent of the world’s population; the wealthiest 20 percent are responsible for 70 percent. But the impacts of those emissions are hurting the poorest first and worst, forcing growing numbers of people to move, with many more on the way.

justice requires that the wealthiest 10–20 percent stop the underlying cause of this deepening crisis by lowering emissions as rapidly as technology allows (the premise of the Green New Deal). Justice also demands that we heed the call for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” that Bolivia’s climate negotiator called for a decade ago: to roll out resources in the Global South so communities can fortify themselves against extreme weather, pull themselves out of poverty with clean tech, and protect their ways of life wherever possible. When protection is not possible—when the land is simply too parched to grow crops and when the seas are rising too fast to hold them back—then justice demands that we clearly recognize that all people have the human right to move and seek safety. That means they are owed asylum and status on arrival. In truth, amid so much loss and suffering, they are owed much more than that: they are owed kindness, compensation, and a heartfelt apology.

In other words, climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution.

The goal of this fortification around Europe and the Anglosphere is all too clear: convince people to stay where they are, no matter how miserable it is, no matter how deadly. In this worldview, the emergency is not people’s suffering; it is their inconvenient desire to escape that suffering.

The drivers of mass migration are complex: war, gang violence, sexual violence, deepening poverty. What is clear is that climate disruption is intensifying all these other crises, and it’s only going to get worse as it gets hotter. But rather than helping, the wealthiest countries on the planet seem determined to deepen the crisis on every front. They are failing to provide meaningful new aid so poorer nations can better protect themselves from weather extremes.

In the rough and rocky future that has already begun, what kind of people are we going to be? Will we share what’s left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to attempt to hoard what’s left, look after “our own,” and lock everyone else out?

For the past five years, a central strategy of the climate justice movement has been to demonstrate that these companies are immoral actors whose profits are illegitimate because their core business model depends on destabilizing human civilization. That strategy has led hundreds of institutions to pledge to divest from fossil fuel stocks. More recently, the Sunrise Movement and others have focused on getting elected politicians to take a “no fossil fuel money” pledge, which well over half the contenders for the Democratic Party leadership quickly agreed to sign. If it became the policy of a governing party to refuse fossil fuel donations, and to shun fossil fuel lobbyists, the industry’s hold over policymaking would be dramatically weakened. And if, under public and regulatory pressure, media outlets stopped running advertisements from fossil fuel companies, much as they stopped running tobacco ads in the past, the industry’s outsized influence would be further eroded. With less misinformation skewing debates, and a clear separation between oil and state, the path would be far clearer for the kinds of robust regulations that would quickly reign in this rogue sector, because all extractive companies function within a nonnegotiable “grow-or-die” framework: they need to constantly reassure investors that their product will be in high demand not just today but well into the future.

as soon as governments begin denying new exploration and drilling permits on the grounds that we need to transition rapidly to 100 percent renewable energy, investors will start to jump ship.

But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During congressional testimony, BP’s Hayward said, “The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear” on the crisis, and that “with the possible exception of the space program in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime.” And yet, in the face of what geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well,” they are like the men facing the angry crowd at the town hall meeting: they act like they know, but they don’t know.

Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing in wonder not at humanity’s power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else, too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself.

The experience of following the oil’s progress through the ecosystem is itself a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day, we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba; then Europe. Next, we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf Coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub. Everyone seems to have a stopover there: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75 percent of all migratory US waterfowl. It’s one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes.

They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature’s circulatory systems by poisoning them.

I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book, Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their lightbulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements, and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership, and opposition to abortion.

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free-market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing. . . . It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of our forests are already causing temperatures to increase.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out, it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. And it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil, and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mind-set that has so long governed our relationship to nature is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits demands not just green products and market-based solutions, but a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires a willingness to engage in industrial planning and strong government action at all levels. But some of the most successful climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, ecological agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users. Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a broad strokes look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

1. REVIVING AND REINVENTING THE PUBLIC SPHERE After years of recycling, carbon offsetting, and lightbulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars, and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone, and maybe even free; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible. The private sector is ill suited to provide most of these services because they require large up-front investments, and if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically ...

In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. Industrial planning. Land use planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every city and community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels,

Climate change demands other forms of planning as well, particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather, and dependence on fossil fuel inputs.

reregulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to phasing out dirty-energy extraction projects

The cargo ships, jumbo jets, and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never repaired—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed.