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

by Naomi Klein

The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20 percent of people on the planet consume.

We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”

Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for a large portion of the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the “polluter pays” principle to be applied to climate change.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas, informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism, are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises. But imagine, for a moment, how all this looks to a guy like Heartland president Joseph Bast, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and described his personal calling to me as “freeing people from the tyranny of other people.” To him, it looks like the end of the world. It’s not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world. Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.

This refers to the process by which all of us, regardless of political leanings, filter new information in ways designed to protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to watch your worldview get shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate deniers today.

Overwhelmingly, climate deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher-than-average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much-discussed paper on this topic by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that confident conservative white men, as a group, were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” than the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”

But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from a new economic order; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change in the first place. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate disruption. Larry Bell, whose bio describes him as a “space architect,” drew plenty of laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn’t so bad: “I moved to Houston intentionally!” (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to be the state’s worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.” And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after a devastating 2003 heat wave killed fourteen thousand of their people: “they discovered Walmart and air-conditioning.” Listening to these zingers as an estimated thirteen million people in the Horn of Africa faced starvation on parched land was deeply unsettling. What makes this callousness possible is the firm belief that if the deniers are wrong about climate change, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry about. (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas congressman Joe Barton explained at...

How will we adapt to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? Will we open our borders, recognizing that we created the crisis from which they are fleeing? Or will we build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt ever more draconian anti-immigration laws? How will we deal with resource scarcity? We know the answers already. The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent.

As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback. These theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the Global South and in predominately African American cities like New Orleans.

That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, one embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary,” because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives—it is also the crisis of our species’ existence.”

in recent years, Anderson’s papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as “Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope,” he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast.

Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritizing GDP growth above all else.

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. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.

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.

If the ideas that rule our culture are stopping us from saving ourselves, then it is within our power to change those ideas.

At its core, it is a crisis born of overconsumption by the comparatively wealthy, which means the world’s most manic consumers are going to have to consume less so that others can have enough to live.

The problem is not “human nature,” as we are so often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases, happier) consuming significantly less. The problem is the inflated role that consumption has come to play in our particular era.

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement. The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power.

we have to do both: the local and the global.

LET THEM DROWN: THE VIOLENCE OF OTHERING IN A WARMING WORLD A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat.

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.

In March 2016, two major peer-reviewed studies warned that sea level rise could happen significantly faster than previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen, perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that, 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 not in thousands of years from now but as soon as this century. In other words, if we don’t demand radical change, we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.

But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of “othering,” what is described in his 1978 book Orientalism as “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.” And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction.

We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools—of ranking the relative value of humans—are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

this isn’t just about gasping at how ugly the vast tailing ponds are in Alberta. It’s about acknowledging that there is no clean, safe, nontoxic way to run an economy powered by fossil fuels. There never was.

In another bit of symbolism, Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea level rise. 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.

Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in southern and East Africa.

“Why,” a Telegraph editorial demanded, “should British taxpayers continue to pay for flood defenses abroad when the money is needed here?” I don’t know—maybe because Britain invented the coal-burning steam engine and has been burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale longer than any nation on earth?

Amid all the scapegoating and finger-pointing, I came across a post by a man called Liam Cox. He was upset by the way some in the media were using the disaster to rev up anti-foreigner sentiment, and he said so: I live in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, one of the worst affected areas hit by the floods. It’s shit, everything has gotten really wet. However . . . I’m alive. I’m safe. My family are safe. We don’t live in fear. I’m free. There aren’t bullets flying about. There aren’t bombs going off. I’m not being forced to flee my home and I’m not being shunned by the richest country in the world or criticized by its residents. All you morons vomiting your xenophobia . . . about how money should only be spent “on our own” need to look at yourselves closely in the mirror. I request you ask yourselves a very important question . . . Am I a decent and honourable human being? Because home isn’t just the UK, home is everywhere on this planet.

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.

Call it what you want: a Green New Deal, the Great Transition, a Marshall Plan for Planet Earth. 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.

It’s not just Canada that can’t seem to have a rational debate about ecological limits. The debate is equally unhinged in Australia and the United States, with large segments of the political and pundit class denying the science outright—and the more this happens, the more the rest of the world is held back. I’ve been puzzling over what accounts for these geographic discrepancies. And I think it comes back to where we started: those official national narratives that tell countries what values define them, and the kind of power structures that these narratives nurture and maintain.

When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the “why” behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.

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.

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. And there is nothing wrong in itself with being mad—there’s lots to be mad about. But within a culture that so systematically elevates some lives over others, anger makes many of those men, and women, putty in the hands of whatever demagogue of the moment is offering to deliver back an illusion of dominance, however fleeting. Build a wall. Lock ’em up. Deport them all. Grab ’em wherever you like and show ’em who’s boss.

Many people said they voted for him despite his objectionable race and gender pronouncements. They liked what he had to say about trade and bringing back manufacturing and that he wasn’t a “Washington insider.” Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. You cannot cast a ballot for someone who is so openly riling up race-, gender-, and physical ability–based hatreds unless, on some level, you think those issues aren’t that important. You just can’t do it. You can’t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice “the other” for your (hoped-for) gain.

And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected Donald Trump as its grabber in chief—a man who openly brags about grabbing women without their consent; who says about the invasion of Iraq, “We should have taken their oil,” international law be damned.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground. What we must instead do is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy—in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water. The better news is that as we transform how we generate energy, how we move ourselves around, how we grow our food and how we live in cities, we have a historic opportunity to build a society that is fairer on every front, and where everyone is valued. Here’s how we do it. We make sure that, wherever possible, our renewable energy comes from community-controlled providers and cooperatives, so that decisions about land use are made democratically and profits from energy production are used to pay for much-needed services.

The bottom line is this: 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. And we are out of time on every front.

Many communities are demanding it, but in India, as elsewhere, 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. No wonder so many roadblocks are being put up: Corporations love nothing more than a captive market.

It’s tough to know how to adequately sum him up. So, let me try a local example. You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers, I believe you call it the “fatberg?” Well, Trump—he’s the political equivalent of that: a merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy, and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very, very hard to dislodge. It gets so grim that we have to laugh. But make no mistake: whether it’s climate change or the nuclear threat, Trump represents a crisis that could echo through geologic time.

Moments of crisis do not have to go the shock doctrine route—they do not need to become opportunities for the already obscenely wealthy to grab still more. They can also go the opposite way. They can be moments when we find our best selves, when we locate reserves of strength and focus that we never knew we had.

Many come out of social movements like Occupy Wall Street, and Spain’s Indignados. They began by saying no—to austerity, to bank bailouts, to wars and police violence, to fracking and pipelines. But they came to understand that the biggest challenge is overcoming the way neoliberalism has waged war on our collective imagination, on our ability to truly believe in anything outside its bleak borders.

so, these movements started to dream together, laying out bold and different visions of the future, and credible pathways out of crisis. And most important, they began engaging with political parties, to try to win power. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’s historic campaign in the 2016 US Democratic primaries, which was powered by Millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.

we have to do more to keep it front of mind that we are in a state of climate emergency, the roots of which are found in the same system of bottomless greed that underlies our economic emergency. But states of emergency, let’s recall, can be catalysts for deep progressive victories.

For instance, during this epic hurricane season, we’ve heard a lot of talk of the “British Virgin Islands,” the “Dutch Virgin Islands,” the “French Caribbean,” and so on. Rarely was it seen as relevant to observe that these are not reflections of where Europeans like to holiday. They are reflections of the fact that so much of the vast wealth of empire was extracted from these islands as a direct result of human bondage—wealth that supercharged Europe’s and North America’s Industrial Revolution, setting us up as the super-polluters we are today. And that is intimately connected to the fact that the very future of these island nations is now at grave risk from the triple-threat of superstorms, sea level rise, and dying coral reefs. What should this painful history mean to us today? It means welcoming migrants and refugees. And it means paying our fair share to help many more countries ramp up justice-based green transitions of their own. Trump going rogue is no excuse to demand less of ourselves in the United Kingdom and Canada or anywhere else, for that matter. It means the opposite: that we have to demand more of ourselves, to pick up the slack until the United States manages to get its sewer system unclogged.

(Imagine tobacco executives being repeatedly invited by the US government to come up with policies to ban smoking. When those meetings failed to yield anything substantive, would we conclude that the reason was that humans just want to die? Might we perhaps determine instead that the political system is corrupt and busted?)

When the Times tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the excellent eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*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.”

We aren’t losing the earth, but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.