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

by Naomi Klein

“I REALLY DON’T LIKE THEIR policies of taking away your car, TAKING AWAY your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!’ ” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, in his first campaign-style salvo against Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a one-term president who wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth gaps), and surging white supremacy.

If there is a new administration ready to leap into that role in January 2021, meeting those targets will still be extraordinarily difficult, but it will be technically possible—especially if large cities and states like California and New York continue to escalate their ambitions in the interim, along with the European Union, which is in the midst of its own Green New Deal debate. Losing another four years to a Republican or a corporate Democrat, and starting in 2026 is, quite simply, a joke.

As the Guardian’s George Monbiot puts it, our planet’s resources can provide us with “private sufficiency and public luxury,” in the forms of “wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks.” The earth cannot, however, sustain the impossible dream of private luxury for all. This is what economist Kate Raworth calls for in her book Doughnut Economics: “meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet” through economies that “make us thrive, whether or not they grow.”

We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. 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.

Right now, the Green New Deal is being characterized as an unrelated grab bag because most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much every crisis our system produces (economic inequality, violence against women, white supremacy, unending wars, ecological unraveling) into walled-off silos. From within that rigid mind-set, it’s easy to dismiss a sweeping and intersectional vision like the Green New Deal as a green-tinted “laundry list” of everything the left has ever wanted. For this reason, one of the most pressing tasks ahead is to use every tool possible to make the case for how our overlapping crises are indeed inextricably linked—and can be overcome only with a holistic vision for social and economic transformation. We can point out, for instance, that no matter how fast we move to lower emissions, it is going to get hotter and storms are going to get fiercer. When those storms bash up against health care systems that have been starved by decades of austerity, thousands pay the price with their lives, as they so tragically did in post-Maria Puerto Rico. That’s why putting universal health care in the Green New Deal is not an opportunistic add-on—it’s an essential part of how we will keep our humanity in the stormy future ahead.

Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public imagination will take a massive exercise in participatory democracy. A first step is for workers in every sector (hospitals, schools, universities, tech, manufacturing, media, and more) to make their own plans for how to rapidly decarbonize while furthering the Green New Deal’s mission to eliminate poverty, create good jobs, and close the racial and gender wealth divides. The Green New Deal resolution explicitly calls for this kind of democratic, decentralized leadership, and making it happen would go a long way toward building the broad base of support this framework will need to take on the powerful elite forces that are already lining up against it.

The signs of fracture are all around—from the rise of fake news and unhinged conspiracy theories to the hardened arteries of our body politic. In this context, a Green New Deal, precisely because of its sweeping scale, ambition, and urgency, could be the collective purpose that finally helps overcome many of these divides. It’s not a magic cure for racism or misogyny or homophobia or transphobia—we still have to confront those evils head on. But if it became law, despite all the powers arrayed against it, it would give a great many of us a sense of working together toward something bigger than ourselves. Something we are all a part of creating. And it would give us a shared destination—somewhere distinctly better than where we are now. That kind of shared mission is something our late capitalist culture badly needs right now.

Not all art takes collapse for granted, however. There have long been creators on the margins, from Afrofuturists to feminist fantasists, who have attempted to explode the idea that the future has to be like the present, only worse and with sex robots. One such visionary was the great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, four years before her death. “Hard times are coming,” she said, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. . . . We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.

The truth is, we cannot lower emissions as steeply and as rapidly as required to swerve off our perilous trajectory without a sweeping industrial and infrastructure overhaul.

There is no shortage of research to support this. For instance, a 2019 study on the job impacts of a Green New Deal–style program in the state of Colorado found that many more jobs would be created than lost. The study, published by the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts–Amherst, looked at what it would take for the state to achieve a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It found that roughly 585 nonmanagement jobs would be lost but that, with an investment of $14.5 billion a year in clean energy, “Colorado will generate about 100,000 jobs per year in the state.”