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

by Naomi Klein

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. Because for five hundred uninterrupted years, the role of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the world economy has been to make other people rich, whether with the extraction of cheap labor or cheap resources or by being a captive market for imported food and fuel. A colonial economy by definition is a dependent economy; a centralized, lopsided, and distorted economy. And as we have seen, an intensely vulnerable economy.