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

by Naomi Klein

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

“climate Keynesianism”:

create new opportunities for people to improve quality of life and derive pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle,

the health of our planet is the single greatest determining factor in the quality of all our lives.

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.

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climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mind-set, by a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy

the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion.

grabbing

will need the skills and expertise of many different kinds of storytellers: artists, psychologists, faith leaders, historians, and more.

“promise and peril.”

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.

The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of visual art,

The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances, reaching some 150 million Americans.

Suddenly we are no longer prisoners of the never-ending present in our social media feeds.

“we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

Steady ground

Nuclear power is expensive and slow to roll out compared with renewables—and that is not to mention the risks associated with uranium mining and waste storage.

nine more reasons

9 reasons

Direct fossil fuel subsidies are worth about $775 billion a year globally, and more than $20 billion in the United States alone.

governments can insist on getting a much fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax,

1 percent billionaire’s tax could raise $45 billion a year globally, according to the United Nations—not

the scientific deadline for deep transformation is so short that if radical change doesn’t roll out every year for the next thirty years, we will have lost the tiny window we have to avert truly catastrophic warming.

Time...

nothing heals ideological divides faster than a concrete project bringing jobs and resources to hurting communities.

By far the biggest obstacle we are up against is hopelessness, a feeling that it’s all too late, we’ve left it too long, and we’ll never get the job done on such a short time line.

a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It’s a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.