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

by Naomi Klein

This may explain the odd space that the climate crisis occupies in the public imagination, even among those of us who are actively terrified of climate collapse. 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. Or else we’re binge-watching Netflix shows about the zombie apocalypse that turn our terrors into entertainment, while tacitly confirming that the future ends in collapse anyway, so why bother trying to stop the inevitable?

It’s a story that begins with people stolen from Africa and lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, two practices of brutal expropriation that were so dizzyingly profitable that they generated the excess capital and power to launch the age of fossil fuel–led industrial revolution and, with it, the beginning of human-driven climate change.

After years of recycling, carbon offsetting, and lightbulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action.

We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South.

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.

many of the biggest big green groups have avoided, with phobic precision, any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation, and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth (the same forces that are responsible for so much destruction in the rest of the economy).

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

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.

Only a bold and genuinely redistributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs: to the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

You can turn your Labour-controlled cities into beacons for the world transformed. A good start would be divesting your pensions from fossil fuels and investing that money in low-carbon social housing and green-energy cooperatives. That way people can begin to experience the benefits of the next economy before the next election, and know in their bones that, yes, there is, and always has been, an alternative.

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.