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

by Naomi Klein

a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while they had stabilized, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production to places like China. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

Increases in consumption should be reserved for those around the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.

the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is. That means taxing carbon, and financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets, and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry ($20 billion annually in the United States alone).

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for a large portion of the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change. Beyond higher taxes on polluters, governments will have to negotiate much higher royalty rates so that less fossil fuel extraction would raise more public revenue to pay for the shift to our postcarbon future (and the steep costs of climate change already upon us). Since corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into their profits, nationalization, the greatest free-market taboo of all, cannot be off the table. When Heartlanders claim, as they so often do, that climate change is a plot to “redistribute wealth” and wage class war, these are the types of policies they most fear.

This is a crucial point to understand: it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists, but rather, opposition to the real-world implications of those facts.

political/cultural worldview explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.” Those with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. On the other hand, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.

this tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition.” This refers to the process by which all of us, regardless of political leanings, filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.”

If solving this crisis requires the kinds of profound changes to the economic order that I have outlined, then every major corporation benefiting from loose regulation, free trade, and low taxes has reason to fear. With so much at stake, it should come as little surprise that climate deniers are, on the whole, those most invested in our highly unequal and dysfunctional economic status quo.

When I asked Michaels if rich countries had a responsibility to help poor ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed at the idea, saying that there was no reason to give money to poor countries “because, for some reason, their political system is incapable of adapting.” The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade. • • • This is where the intersection between hard-right ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity in the developing world. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind-set is a matter of great urgency, because climate change will test our moral character like little before.

growing number of would-be geoengineers who advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. In addition to George’s scheme to fertilize the ocean with iron, other geoengineering strategies under consideration include pumping sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to imitate the cooling effects of a major volcanic eruption and “brightening” clouds so they reflect more of the sun’s rays back to space. The risks are huge. Ocean fertilization could trigger dead zones and toxic tides. And multiple simulations have predicted that mimicking the effects of a volcano would interfere with monsoons in Asia and Africa, potentially threatening water and food security for billions of people.

Now that geoengineering threatens to escape the laboratory on a much larger scale than one artificial algae bloom, the real question we face is this: Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior, to reduce our use of fossil fuels, before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?

there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

And increasing numbers of us are responding accordingly: blockading fracking activity in Balcombe, England; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (as Greenpeace has done); taking tar sands operators to court for violating Indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of resistance large and small. In Brad Werner’s computer model, this is the “friction” needed to slow down the forces of destabilization; the great climate campaigner and author Bill McKibben calls it the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever.”

Climate change demands that we consume less, but being consumers is all we know. Climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by changing what we buy—a hybrid instead of an SUV, some carbon offsets when we get on a plane. At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume less so that others can have enough to live.

Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves. Thus, telling people that they can’t shop as much as they want to because the planet’s support systems are overburdened can be understood as a kind of attack, akin to telling them that they cannot truly be themselves. This is likely why, of environmentalism’s original “three Rs” (reduce, reuse, recycle), only the third has ever gotten any traction, since it allows us to keep on shopping as long as we put the refuse in the right box.I

Shielded from the elements as we are in our climate-controlled homes, workplaces, and cars, we can find the changes unfolding in the natural world passing us by. We might have no idea that a historic drought is destroying the crops on the farms that surround our urban homes, given that the supermarkets still display miniature mountains of imported produce, with more coming in by truck all day. It takes something huge—a hurricane that passes all previous high-water marks, or a flood destroying thousands of homes—for us to notice that something is truly amiss.

So much of our economy relies on the assumption that there is always an “away” into which we can throw our waste. There’s the away where our garbage goes when it is taken from the curb, and the away where our waste goes when it is flushed down the drain. There’s the away where the minerals and metals that make up our goods are extracted, and the away where those raw materials are turned into finished products. But the lesson of the BP spill, in the words of ecological theorist Timothy Morton, is that ours is “a world in which there is no ‘away.’ ”

This is one of the ironies of being told that we live in a time of unprecedented connection. It is true that we can and do communicate across vast geographies with an ease and speed that were unimaginable only a generation ago. But in the midst of this global web of chatter, we somehow manage to be less connected to the people with whom we are most intimately enmeshed: the young women in Bangladesh’s firetrap factories who make the clothes on our bodies, or the children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose lungs are filled with dust from mining cobalt for the phones that have become extensions of our arms. Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness.

The generations before you used up more than just your share of atmospheric space. We used up your share of big failures, too—perhaps the ultimate intergenerational injustice. That doesn’t mean that we all can’t still make mistakes. We can and we will. But Alicia Garza, one of the inspiring founders of Black Lives Matter, talks about how we have to “make new mistakes.” Sit with that one for a minute. Let’s stop making the same old mistakes. Here are a few, but I trust that you will silently add your own: Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians. Thinking the market will fix it. Building a movement made up entirely of upper-middle-class white people and then wondering why people of color don’t want to join “our movement.”

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.

It is true that we have to do it all. That we have to change everything. But you personally do not have to do everything. This is not all on you. One of the real dangers of being brilliant, sensitive young people who hear the climate clock ticking loudly is the danger of taking on too much. Which is another manifestation of that inflated sense of our own importance.

The contrast is a vivid reminder of just how far Pope Francis has to go in realizing his vision of a Church that spends less time condemning people over abortion, contraception, and whom they marry, and more time fighting for the trampled victims of a highly unequal and unjust economic system. When climate justice had to fight for airtime with denunciations of gay marriage, it didn’t stand a chance.

Turkson seems to gently warn the crowd here not to get carried away. Some African cultures “deified” nature, he says, but that is not the same as “care.” The earth may be a mother, but God is still the boss. Animals may be our relatives, but humans are not animals.

if one of the oldest and most tradition-bound institutions in the world can change its teachings and practices as radically, and as rapidly, as Francis is attempting, then surely all kinds of newer and more elastic institutions can change as well.

James Hansen, perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world.

Fossil fuels aren’t the sole driver of climate change—there is also industrial agriculture and deforestation—but they are the biggest. And the thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills.

Diagnoses like this also erase the very existence of human systems that organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration.

we are running out of cheap and easy ways to get at fossil fuels, which is why we have seen the rise of fracking, deepwater drilling, and tar sands extraction

Weizman points out that the Syrian border city of Daraa falls directly on the aridity line. Daraa is where Syria’s deepest drought on record brought huge numbers of displaced farmers in the years leading up to the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, and it’s where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought wasn’t the only factor in bringing tensions to a head, of course. But the fact that 1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role. The connection between water and heat stress and conflict is a recurring, intensifying pattern that spans the aridity line: all along it you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures, and military conflict—from Libya to Palestine to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

The Paris Agreement commits to keeping warming below 2°C. It’s a target that is beyond reckless. When it was unveiled in Copenhagen in 2009, many African delegates called it “a death sentence.” The slogan of several low-lying island nations is “1.5 to Stay Alive.” At the last minute, a clause was added to the Paris Agreement that says countries will pursue “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” Not only is this nonbinding, but it is a lie: we are making no such efforts. The governments that made this promise are now pushing for more fracking and more mining of the highest-carbon fossil fuels on the planet, actions that are utterly incompatible with capping warming at 2°C, let alone 1.5°C.

We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.

In retrospect, it was a tiny bit like growing up in one of those Michael Moore films that show Canada as a utopian, alter-USA, where no one locks their doors, and no one gets shot, and no one waits to see a doctor, and everyone is super nice to each other all the time. It wasn’t quite that cartoonish. But there was a lot of stuff missing in the American-filtered stories of Canada that shaped my childhood and my own national pride. I now know, for instance, that while Canadians were feeling righteous about not joining the war in Vietnam and welcoming draft dodgers, Canadian companies were selling weapons and billions in other materials to supply the US war effort, including napalm and Agent Orange. Having it both ways is something of a Canadian military tradition. We did it again in 2003, when Canada very publicly did not participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq because the attack did not have UN approval—and then, far less publicly, supported the subsequent occupation with exchange officers and warships. It can be painful to look too closely at the stories that make us feel good, especially when they are part of the intimate narratives that mold our identities. I struggle with this still. I agree with my parents that our health care system and support for public media and the arts are part of what make us different from the United States. But it’s also true that these institutions and traditions are deeply diminished after decades of neglect. These days, my father spends m...

we decided to intervene in the debate and write a kind of people’s platform, the sort of thing we wished we could vote for but that wasn’t yet on offer. And as we sat in a circle for two days and looked each other in the eye, we realized that this was new territory for contemporary social movements. We had all, or most of us, been part of broad coalitions before, opposing a particularly unpopular politician’s austerity agenda, or coming together to fight against an unwanted trade deal or an illegal war. But those were “no” coalitions, and we wanted to try something different: a “yes” coalition. And that meant we needed to create a space to do something we never do, which is dream together about the world that we actually want.

One of the clearest themes was the need to move from the national narrative that many of us had grown up with, that was based on a supposedly divine right to endlessly extract from the natural world as if there were no limit and no such thing as a breaking point. What we needed to do, it seemed to us, was set that story aside and tell a different one based on a duty to care: to care for the land, water, air—and to care for one another.

“We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.”

Another key plank in the Leap Manifesto is what is known as “energy democracy,” the idea that renewable energy, whenever possible, should be public- or community-owned and controlled so that the profits and benefits of new industries are far less concentrated than they are with fossil fuels. We were inspired by Germany’s energy transition, which has seen hundreds of cities and towns taking back control over their energy grids from private companies,

Lowering emissions is hard enough, we are told—why weigh it down by trying to fix so much else at the same time? Our response is that if we are going to repair our relationship to the land by shifting away from endless resource extraction, why wouldn’t we begin to repair our relationships with one another in the process? For a very long time, we have been offered policies that amputate the ecological crises from the economic and social systems that are driving them. That is precisely the model that has failed to yield results. Holistic transformation, on the other hand, has never been tried on a national scale.

when people argue for climate policies that are guided by science and by our own government’s very publicly stated goals, they are basically told to shut up and stop destroying the country.

Other countries are moving ahead with some of the policies that actually reflect scientific realities. Germany and France have both banned fracking, for instance. They both have a long way to go to bring their emissions in line with Paris Agreement temperature targets, but the aversion to talking about leaving carbon in the ground is not nearly as powerful in Europe as it is here.

It’s not just Canada that can’t seem to have a rational debate about ecological limits. The debate is equally unhinged in Australia and the United States, with large segments of the political and pundit class denying the science outright—and the more this happens, the more the rest of the world is held back.

Because such enormous fortunes have been built in North America purely on the extraction of wild animals, intact forest, interred metals, and fossil fuels, our economic elites have grown accustomed to seeing the natural world as their God-given larder. What we discovered with the Leap is that when someone or something (like climate science) comes along and challenges that claim, it doesn’t feel like a difficult truth. It feels, as we learned, like an existential attack.

When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the “why” behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.

Ours is a culture of endless taking, as if there were no end and no consequences. A culture of grabbing and going. And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected a grabber in chief.

If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate.

within a culture that so systematically elevates some lives over others, anger makes many of those men, and women, putty in the hands of whatever demagogue of the moment is offering to deliver back an illusion of dominance, however fleeting. Build a wall. Lock ’em up. Deport them all. Grab ’em wherever you like and show ’em who’s boss.

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.

If we want to win against the likes of Trump—and every country has its homegrown Trump—we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny, in our culture, in our movements, in ourselves.

Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play “my crisis is more urgent than your crisis”—war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump. Either we fight for a future in which everyone belongs, starting with those being most battered by injustice and exclusion today, or we will keep losing.

And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected Donald Trump as its grabber in chief—a man who openly brags about grabbing women without their consent; who says about the invasion of Iraq, “We should have taken their oil,” international law be damned. This rampant grabbing is not just a Trump thing, of course. We have an epidemic of grabbing. Land grabbing. Resource grabbing. Even grabbing the sky by polluting so much that there is no atmospheric space left for the poor to develop. And now we are hitting the wall of maximum grabbing. That’s what climate change is telling us. That’s what our endless wars are telling us. That’s what Trump’s electoral victory is telling us. That it’s time to put everything we have into shifting from a culture of endless taking to a culture of consent and caretaking. Caring for the planet, and for one another.

The better news is that as we transform how we generate energy, how we move ourselves around, how we grow our food and how we live in cities, we have a historic opportunity to build a society that is fairer on every front, and where everyone is valued. Here’s how we do it. We make sure that, wherever possible, our renewable energy comes from community-controlled providers and cooperatives, so that decisions about land use are made democratically and profits from energy production are used to pay for much-needed services.