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

by Naomi Klein

much of this wonder has already disappeared, and much of the rest of it will be on the extinction block before they hit their thirties.

“We deserve better. Young people can’t even vote but will have to live with the consequences of your inaction.”

disruption on a planetary scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. And not in a few unlucky hot spots, but on every single continent, with pretty much everything unraveling significantly faster than most scientific models had predicted.

million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction.

(France’s Emanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and

future they thought they had but that is disappearing with each day that adults fail to act on the reality that we are in an emergency.

yet been trained to mask the unfathomable stakes of our moment in the language of bureaucracy and overcomplexity.

charge to achieve a rapid transition within a decade, so that by the time she was in her mid-twenties, consumption patterns and physical infrastructure would be fundamentally transformed.

quixotic

our collective climate inaction had nearly stolen her will to live seemed to help others feel the fire of survival in their own bellies. The clarity of Greta’s voice gave validation to the raw terror so many of us have been suppressing and compartmentalizing about what it means to be alive amid the sixth great extinction and surrounded by scientific warnings that we are flat out of time.

demand is for humanity as a whole to do what she did in her own family and life: close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave. The first stage is to name the emergency, because only once we are on emergency footing will we find the capacity to do what is required.

less prone to extraordinary focus and more capable of living with moral contradictions—to be more like her. She has a point.

social cues are how we form friendships and build cohesive communities.

are many powerful interests that like things as they are. Not least the fossil fuel corporations, which have funded a decades-long campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and straight-up lies about the reality of global warming.

One minute we’re sharing articles about the insect apocalypse and viral videos of walruses falling off cliffs because sea ice loss has destroyed their habitat, and the next, we’re online shopping and willfully turning our minds into Swiss cheese by scrolling through Twitter or Instagram.

common story of civilizational transformation. Today, that kind of bold vision increasingly goes under the

banner of a “Green New Deal.”

why the governments of these countries have proven particularly belligerent when it comes to meaningful climate action.

modern capitalism, the economic system of limitless consumption and ecological depletion at the heart of the climate crisis.

they are foundational myths, woven deep into national narratives. The huge natural wealth of the lands that would become the United States, Canada, and Australia were, from their very first contact with European ships, imagined as sort of body-double nations for colonial powers that were running out of nature to exhaust back home.

parts about the right of supposedly superior white Christians to inflict tremendous violence on those they have decided to classify as beneath them in a brutal hierarchy of humanity.

successful globalization of the high consumer lifestyle birthed in the nations I write about in this book. These are, moreover, the nations that have been polluting at extremely high levels for centuries and that, therefore, had an obligation, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that their governments all signed, to lead the way on emission reduction before the developing world. As US officials used to say during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “We broke it, we bought it.”

one part having to do with a mounting sense of peril, the other with a new and unfamiliar sense of promise.

part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move ourselves around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report’s summary states in its first sentence, is “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

off. Because of this laborious process, IPCC projections have been notoriously conservative, often dangerously underestimating risk.

humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.

millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more.

economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.

Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.

ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times.

the United States to launch a moon shot approach to decarbonization, attempting to reach net-zero emissions in just one decade, in line with getting the entire world there by mid-century.

Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party: free universal health care, child care, and higher education.

clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law.

FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).

major operating system upgrade, a plan to roll up our sleeves and actually get the job done. Markets

play a role in this vision, but markets are not the protagonists of this story—people are.

myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit.

always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But

that we will not get the job done unless we are willing to embrace systemic economic and social change.

radically both a society’s infrastructure and its governing values can be altered in the span of one decade.

of frenetic public investment left behind a lasting legacy that, despite decades of attempts to dismantle it, survives to this day. Historian Neil Maher, in his book Nature’s New Deal,

the American public in ways that raised popular support for Roosevelt’s liberal welfare state. Others insist that the only precedents that

In 1943 in the United States, twenty million households (representing three-fifths of the population) had “Victory gardens” in their yards, growing fresh vegetables that accounted for 42 percent of all those consumed that year.

And warfare, with its devastating costs to humanity, nature, and democracy, is no model for social change.

highly centralized, top-down transformations.

rights, a phenomenon I have traced repeatedly in my work on disaster capitalism in the aftermath of wars, economic shocks, and extreme weather events.

wealthy country has been willing to have a frank discussion about the need for high consumers to consume less or for fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up the mess they created.

systematically weakening the power of the public sphere, unmaking regulatory bodies, lowering taxes for the wealthy, and selling off essential services to the private sector.

public has been trained in helplessness: no matter how big the problem, we have been told, it’s best to leave it to the market

or billionaire philanthro-capitalists, to get out of the way, to stop trying to fi...