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

by Naomi Klein

There is no question that Republicans in Washington will continue to paint the Green New Deal as a recipe for turning the United States into Venezuela—about that we can all be certain. But this worry misses one of the greatest benefits of approaching the climate emergency as a vast infrastructure and land regeneration project: nothing heals ideological divides faster than a concrete project bringing jobs and resources to hurting communities. One person who understood this well was FDR. When he rolled out the network of camps that made up the Civilian Conservation Corp, for example, he purposely clustered many of them in rural areas that had voted against him for president. Four years later, when those communities had experienced the benefits of the New Deal up close, they were far less vulnerable to Republican fearmongering about a socialist takeover of government, and many voted Democrat.