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

by Naomi Klein

Meanwhile, the price of solar has plummeted by 90 percent and is now a more viable option for electrification than coal, especially because it requires less infrastructure and lends itself so well to community control. Many communities are demanding it, but in India, as elsewhere, the biggest barrier is the nexus of Big Government and Big Carbon: When people can generate their own electricity from panels on their rooftops, and even feed that power back into a micro grid, they are no longer customers of giant utilities; they are competitors. No wonder so many roadblocks are being put up: Corporations love nothing more than a captive market.

our media give far more coverage to house pets rescued from wildfires in the United States and Canada than to the human lives lost because of infernos in, say, Indonesia and Chile. A global 2012 study estimated that more than three hundred thousand people die annually as a result of the smoke and air pollution from wildfires, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

the perennially hubristic attempt to reengineer natural forces far more powerful than we are. Fire is a crucial part of the forest cycle: Left to their own devices, forests burn periodically, clearing the way for new growth and reducing the amount of highly flammable underbrush and old wood (“fuel” in firefighter parlance). Many Indigenous cultures have long used fire as a key part of land care. But in North America, modern forest management has systematically supressed cyclical fires in order to protect profitable trees that were headed for sawmills, and out of fear that small fires could spread to inhabited areas (and there are more and more inhabited areas). Without regular natural burns, forests are chock-full of fuel, provoking fires to burn out of control.

What we do talk about is pollution, though on a scale Toma can understand. Like plastic, and why we have to pick it up and use less of it because it makes the animals sick. Or we look at the exhaust coming out of cars and trucks and talk about how you can get power from the sun and the wind and store it in batteries. A little kid can grasp concepts like these and know exactly what should happen (better than plenty of adults). But the idea that the entire planet has a fever that could get so high that much of life on Earth could be lost in the convulsions—that seems to me too great a burden to ask small children to carry.

The biggest danger, however, is the carbon being released as the forests burn. Three weeks after the smoke descended on the coast, we learn that the total annual greenhouse gas emissions for the province of British Columbia had tripled as a result of the fires, and it’s still going up. This dramatic increase in emissions is part of what climate scientists mean when they warn about feedback loops: burning carbon leads to warmer temperatures and long periods without rain, which leads to more fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere, which leads to even warmer and drier conditions, and even more fires. Another such lethal feedback loop is playing out with Greenland’s wildfires. Fires produce black soot (also known as “black carbon”), which settles on ice sheets, turning the ice gray or black. Darkened ice absorbs more heat than reflective white ice, which makes the ice melt faster, which leads to sea level rise and the release of huge amounts of methane, which causes more warming and more fires, which in turn create more blackened ice and more melting.

for all his gushing about British Columbia’s forests and coastal waters, Trudeau is slamming his foot on the accelerator when it comes to pipelines and tar sands expansion. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” he told a cheering crowd of oil and gas executives in Houston in March 2017.

Aren’t we all guilty, in one way or another, of sleepwalking toward apocalypse? The soft-focus quality the smoke casts over life here seems to make this collective denial more acute. Here on the coast in August, we all look like sleepwalkers, stumbling around doing our work and errands, having vacations in a thick cloud of smoke, pretending we don’t hear the alarm clanging in the background.

During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that’s not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.

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.

the vultures are now buzzing. The business press is filled with articles about how the only way for Puerto Rico to get the lights back on is to sell off its electricity utility. Maybe its roads and bridges, too. This is a phenomenon I have called the shock doctrine, the exploitation of wrenching crises to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite.

Many come out of social movements like Occupy Wall Street, and Spain’s Indignados. They began by saying no—to austerity, to bank bailouts, to wars and police violence, to fracking and pipelines. But they came to understand that the biggest challenge is overcoming the way neoliberalism has waged war on our collective imagination, on our ability to truly believe in anything outside its bleak borders.

let’s draw out the connections between the gig economy, which treats human beings like a raw resource from which to extract wealth and then discard, and the dig economy, in which the extractive companies treat the earth with the very same disdain. And let’s show exactly how we can move from that gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care and repair;

We can and must design a system in which the polluters pay a very large share of the cost of transitioning off fossil fuels, and where we keep green energy in public and community hands. That way, revenues stay in your communities, to pay for child care and firefighters and other crucial services. And it’s the only way to make sure that the green jobs that are created are union jobs that pay a living wage. The motto needs to be “Leave the oil and gas in the ground, but leave no worker behind.”

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period that we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

simply blaming capitalism isn’t enough. It is absolutely true that the drive for endless growth and profits stands squarely opposed to the imperative for a rapid transition off fossil fuels. It is absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in the ’80s and ’90s has been the single greatest contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, and the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action since governments began meeting to talk (and talk and talk) about lowering emissions. And it remains the biggest obstacle today, even in countries that market themselves as climate leaders. But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And Venezuela’s petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism.

also pointing out that countries with strong democratic-socialist tradition (like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay) have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival.

The major causes of death were people being unable to plug in medical equipment because the electricity grid was down for months; health networks so diminished they were unable to provide medicine for treatable diseases. People died because they were left to drink contaminated water because of a legacy of environmental racism. People died because they were abandoned and left without hope for so long that suicide seemed the only option. Those deaths were not the result of an unprecedented “natural disaster” or even “an act of God,” as we so often hear. Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that there is nothing natural about this disaster. And if you believe in God, leave her out of this, too. God isn’t the one who laid off thousands of skilled electrical workers in the years before the storm, or who failed to maintain the grid with basic repairs. God didn’t give vital relief and reconstruction contracts to politically connected firms, some of whom didn’t even pretend to do their jobs. God didn’t decide that Puerto Rico should import 85 percent of its food—this archipelago blessed with some of the most fertile soil in the world. God didn’t decide Puerto Rico should get 98 percent of its energy from imported fossil fuels—these islands bathed in sun, lashed by wind, and surrounded by waves, all of which could provide cheap and clean renewable power to spare. These were decisions made by people working for powerful interests.

The Ocasio-Cortez and Markey resolution is a loose framework, and as much as it has been criticized in the press for including too much, the reality is that it still leaves a lot out. For instance, a Green New Deal needs to be more explicit about keeping carbon in the ground, about the central role of the US military in driving up emissions, about nuclear and coal never being “clean,” and about the debts wealthy countries like the United States and powerful corporations like Shell and Exxon owe to poorer nations that are coping with the impacts of crises they did almost nothing to create. Most fundamentally, any credible Green New Deal needs a concrete plan for ensuring that the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates aren’t immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions—a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.

policymakers are still dancing around the question of whether we are talking about slapping solar panels on the roof of Walmart and calling it green, or whether we are ready to have a more probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community, and culture. That conversation is intimately connected to the kinds of investments we prioritize in our Green New Deals. What we need are transitions that recognize the hard limits on extraction and that simultaneously create new opportunities for people to improve quality of life and derive pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle, whether through publicly funded art and urban recreation or access to nature through new protections for wilderness. Crucially, that means making sure that shorter work weeks allow people the time for this kind of enjoyment, and that they are not trapped in the grind of overwork requiring the quick fixes of fast food and mind-numbing distraction. We already know that these are the kinds of lifestyle changes and leisure activities that tangibly increase happiness and fulfillment but, particularly in the US, debates about climate action remain trapped in a paradigm that equates quality of life with personal prosperity and wealth accumulation. If the political roadblocks to a Green New Deal are to be broken, this equation will need to be broken too. As the Guardian’s George Monbiot puts it, our planet’s resources can provide us with “private...

Opponents of the Green New Deal can be counted on to continue spreading fear that what is being proposed is an austere future marked by nonstop deprivation and government controls. The response cannot be to deny that there will be changes to the way the wealthiest 10–20 percent of humanity has come to live. There will be changes, there will be areas where we in this category must contract—including air travel, meat consumption, and profligate energy use—but there will also be new pleasures and new spaces where we can build abundance.

We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the “other” fundamentally reshape us.

Those complaining about climate policy being weighed down by supposedly unrelated demands for child care and free postsecondary education would do well to remember that the caring professions (most of them dominated by women) are relatively low carbon and can be made even more so with smart planning. In other words, they deserve to be seen as “green jobs,” with the same protections, the same investments, and the same living wages as male-dominated workforces in the renewables, efficiency, and public transit sectors.

A job guarantee, far from an unrelated socialist addendum, is a critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition. It would immediately lower the intense pressure on workers to take the kinds of jobs that destabilize our planet because all would be free to take the time needed to retrain and find work in one of the many sectors that will be dramatically expanding. All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change.

Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people—while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy.

there are all kinds of ways to raise financing, including ways that attack untenable levels of wealth concentration and shift the burden to those most responsible for climate pollution. And it’s not hard to figure out who that is. We know, thanks to research from the Climate Accountability Institute, that a whopping 71 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 can be traced to just one hundred corporate and state fossil fuel giants, dubbed the “Carbon Majors.”

It isn’t only the fossil fuel companies who have put their own super profits ahead of the safety of our species for decades; so have the financial institutions that underwrote their investments, in full knowledge of the risks. Which is why, in addition to eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, governments can insist on getting a much fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax, which could raise $650 billion globally, according to the European Parliament. And then there is the military. If the military budgets of the top ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion annually, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute—funds that could be spent on energy transition and preparing communities for the extreme weather ahead. Meanwhile, a mere 1 percent billionaire’s tax could raise $45 billion a year globally, according to the United Nations—not to mention the money that would be raised through an international effort to close down tax havens. In 2015 the estimated private financial wealth of individuals stashed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $24 trillion and $36 trillion,

One of the great strengths of a Green New Deal approach is that it will not generate this kind of backlash. Nothing about its framework forces people to choose between caring about the end of the world and the end of the month. The whole point is to design policies that allow us all to care about both, policies that simultaneously lower emissions and lower the economic strain on working people—by making sure that everyone can get a good job in the new economy; that they have access to basic social protections like health care, education, and daycare; and that green jobs are good, unionized, family-supporting jobs with benefits and vacation time.

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.