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

by Naomi Klein

So, what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed.

in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-pedaling the implications of their research.

the “antibodies” rising up to fight the planet’s “spiking fever.”

we are ruled by a class of politicians who know only how to dismantle and starve public institutions just when they most need to be fortified and reimagined.

And little wonder: just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating; just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able to see only the immediate present, trapped in the forever now of our constantly refreshed social media feeds.

Climate Mismatch

And little wonder: just when we needed to gather, our public sphere was disintegrating; just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up; and just when we needed longer time horizons, we were able to see only the immediate present, trapped in the forever now of our constantly refreshed social media feeds.

Wonder

Late capitalism teaches us to create ourselves through our consumer choices: shopping is how we form our identities, find community, and express ourselves.

Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness.

“Stop somewhere,” he replied. “And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place.” That’s good advice on lots of levels, because in order to win this fight of our lives, we all need a place to stand.

Germany’s energy transition has created four hundred thousand jobs in renewables in just over a decade, and not just cleaned up energy but made it fairer, so that many energy grids are owned and controlled by hundreds of cities, towns, and cooperatives.

We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers.

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.

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.

The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call “green colonialism.”

Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations.

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Green Colonialism

on our current emissions trajectory, we face the “loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history”—and

if we don’t demand radical change, we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.

Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe.

no clean, safe, nontoxic way to run an economy powered by fossil fuels. There never was.

1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role.

Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought.

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.

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Perspektiv paa hjem

“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.”

But make no mistake: This is not an add-on, one more item on a governmental to-do list; nor is the planet some special interest to satisfy. The kind of transformation that is now required will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.

basic principles of a justice-based transition.

“energy democracy,”

THE BACKLASH

Svar paa The Leap

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.

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.

Trump

If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the power of direct appeals to power over “the other”—the migrant, the Muslim, black people, women. Especially during times of economic hardship. Because when large numbers of white men find themselves frightened and insecure, and those men were raised in a social system built on elevating their humanity over all these others’, a lot of them get mad.

When it comes to climate action, it’s abundantly clear that we will not build the power necessary to win unless we embed justice—particularly racial but also gender and economic justice—at the center of our low-carbon policies.

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.

Intersectionality

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.

economic justice, racial justice, gender justice, migrant justice, historical justice. Not as afterthoughts but as animating principles.

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

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.

The biggest danger, however, is the carbon being released as the forests burn.

greenlight Arctic drilling in the Beaufort Sea.

Trump arctic oil

Aren’t we all guilty, in one way or another, of sleepwalking toward apocalypse?

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.

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 late ’80s was the absolute zenith of the neoliberal crusade, a moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action in the name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life.

CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

Capitalism

autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment,

Socialism

the decisive questions are not going to be settled through elections alone. At their core, they are about building political power—enough to change the calculus of what is possible.

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.