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

by Naomi Klein

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