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

by Naomi Klein

“But now everyone has gone back to business as usual and it makes me wonder what exactly it will take for people to . . . not do that.” What indeed?

The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate is objectively nuts.

This is not to belittle local activism. Local is critical. Local organizing is winning big fights against fracking and oil pipelines. Local is showing us what the postcarbon economy looks and feels like. And small examples inspire bigger ones.

The fear is that discussion of planetary overburden will lead to a weakening of the Church’s opposition to birth control and abortion. As the editor of a popular Italian Catholic website put it recently, “The road the church is heading down is precisely this: To quietly approve population control while talking about something else.”

Pope Francis comes to the conclusion that “the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures.”

Particularly in Latin America, with its large indigenous populations, Catholicism wasn’t able to fully displace cosmologies that centered on a living and sacred Earth, and the result was often a Church that fused Christian and indigenous worldviews.

Because for all Pope Francis’s courage in calling out world governments on their ecological dereliction and their brutal disregard for migrant life, the Vatican has still failed to hold its own leaders accountable for the systematic sexual abuse of children and nuns and the deliberate cover-ups of those crimes.

A recent paper in Nature Climate Change predicts that unless we radically lower emissions and lower them fast, large parts of the Middle East will likely “experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans” by the end of this century. And that’s about as blunt as climate scientists get. Yet environmental issues in the region still tend to be treated as afterthoughts, or luxury causes. The reason is not ignorance, or indifference. It’s just bandwidth.

There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks, and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish or simply to live.

Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands.

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. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the US government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated “national sacrifice areas.”

Fort McMurray, the town at the center of the tar sands boom, where many of the workers live and where much of the money is spent, was just decimated by an infernal blaze, entire neighborhoods burned to the ground. It’s that hot and that dry. And that excess heat has something to do with the interred substance being mined there.

Severing Indigenous people’s connection to their culture used to be state policy in Canada, imposed through the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families to boarding schools

So, even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s woke young prime minister, is bound and determined to build new fossil fuel projects—new mines, new pipelines, and new export terminals—against the express wishes of Indigenous communities who don’t want to risk their water, or participate in further destabilizing the climate.

humans are a single type,

Treadmills

This is why the project of Orientalism, of othering Arab and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from the start—and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback from fossil fuel dependence that is climate change.

Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves. Tomorrow’s climate refugees have been recruited into service as today’s prison guards.

Largely because of the diversity in the room, we were also conscious that if we wanted a genuinely broad “yes” coalition, we couldn’t fall back on a vision that was nostalgic or backward looking—a prelapsarian yearning for a seventies-era nation that never respected Indigenous sovereignty and that excluded the voices of so many communities of color, that often put too much faith in a centralized state and never actually reckoned with ecological limits.

When you have gone as badly off course as we have, moderate actions don’t lead to moderate outcomes. They lead to dangerously radical ones.

There is a long and painful history of environmentalists, whether implicitly or explicitly, sending the message that “Our cause is so big, and so urgent, and since it encompasses everyone and everything, it should take precedence over everything and everyone else.” Between the lines: “First we’ll save the planet and then we will worry about poverty, police violence, gender discrimination, and racism.”

So, we decided to deliberately extend the usual definition of a green job to anything useful and enriching to our communities that doesn’t burn a lot of fossil fuels. As one participant said, “Nursing is renewable energy. Education is renewable energy.”

poorest communities to bear a vastly disproportionate share of the environmental burdens while deriving far too little of the economic benefits. Which is why the Leap states that “Indigenous Peoples and others on the front lines of polluting industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects.”

A whole lot of people of different political persuasions read the Leap and thought it sounded eminently sensible, inspiring even. But our elites across party lines agreed that it sounded like the end of the world. So, what can we make of that chasm? It was really just one line in the Leap that caused most of the uproar, the one that said that we can’t build any more fossil fuel “infrastructure that locks us into increased extraction decades into the future.” The “no pipelines” line.

the words inexhaustible and infinite

This reliance on raw resources makes economies intensely vulnerable to monopolies and to outside economic shocks. It’s why the term banana republic is not considered a compliment.

Today in Canada, we have federal and provincial governments that talk a lot about “truth and reconciliation” for those crimes. But this will remain a cruel joke if nonindigenous Canadians do not confront the “why” behind those human rights abuses. And the why, as the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission report states, is simple enough: “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”

As we get clean, we have got to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery. Yes, the hardest stuff. Because we haven’t just been procrastinating climate action all these years. We’ve been procrastinating and delaying the most basic demands of justice and reparation.

“More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries. . . .

“The workers have been overworked, underfed, have not been hydrated enough, and this has been going on for weeks,” said Rosalinda Guillen, director of the advocacy group Community to Community Development.

Several Indigenous leaders raised concerns that during fire emergencies, their communities do not receive the same level of urgent response as nonindigenous ones, whether for fighting the flames or for rebuilding afterward. With this in mind, several Indigenous reserves directly threatened by fire refused to evacuate, and a portion stayed behind to fight the flames—some with their own teams of trained firefighters and equipment,

Part of the head trip in all this is the sheer scale of the disaster, both temporally and spatially.

Without regular natural burns, forests are chock-full of fuel, provoking fires to burn out of control. And there’s a hell of a lot more fuel as a result of bark beetle infestations, which have left behind huge stands of dry and brittle dead trees. There is compelling evidence that the bark beetle epidemic has been exacerbated by climate change–related heat and drought.

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.

“The health of our families and communities relies heavily on our ability to harvest wild salmon and access clean drinking water, both of which are at risk if the Kinder Morgan pipeline was ruptured or impacted by the fires.”

Canada’s prime minister loves being photographed frolicking in British Columbia’s spectacular wilderness (preferably shirtless), and his wife, Sophie Grégoire, recently unleashed a hurricane of emojis by posting a picture of herself surfing off Vancouver Island. (It was during the fires and the sky looked hazy.)

During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that’s not always good.

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.

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.

In all our countries, we can and must do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice, and gender injustice. We need to understand and explain how all those ugly systems that place one group in a position of dominance over another (based on skin color, religious faith, gender, and sexual orientation) consistently serve the interests of power and money, and always have. They do it by keeping us divided, and keeping themselves protected.

“Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it—and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course, “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face-to-face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of the planet. Why? Because the late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade,

“Human beings,” he writes, “whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” It seems we are wired to “obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”

that what at first seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing.

“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.”

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.

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.

We have seen nothing but more disaster capitalism using the trauma of the storm to push massive cuts to education, hundreds of school closures, wave after wave of home foreclosures, and the privatization of some of Puerto Rico’s most valuable assets.

So, either Trump is right and the Green New Deal is a losing political issue, one he can smear out of existence, or he is wrong and a candidate who makes the Green New Deal the centerpiece of their platform will take the Democratic primary and then defeat Trump in the general, with a clear democratic mandate to introduce wartime levels of investment to battle our triple crises from day one.

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.