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

by Naomi Klein

imagine a scenario in which men like Trump, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un were empowered to deploy these climate-altering technologies like unconventional weapons, hurtling us into an era of undeclared weather wars in which one country sacrifices the precipitation of another in order to save its crops, and the other retaliates by unleashing mega-floods. Some would-be planet hackers insist that these worst-case risks can be managed (though they never explain how). All concede to lesser downsides, however. Spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere would almost certainly create a permanent milky-white haze, making clear blue skies a thing of the past for the entire planet. The haze might well prevent astronomers from seeing the stars and planets clearly, and weaker sunlight could reduce the capacity of solar power generators to produce energy. When you think about this in the abstract, it can seem like a small price to pay to buy “some more time to get our act together” on pollution control, as the Atlantic article puts it.