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

by Naomi Klein

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.

Millennia of accumulated human wisdom about how to safeguard and regenerate everything from forests to fish runs were swept away in favor of a new idea that there was no limit to humanity’s ability to control the natural world, nor to how much wealth could be extracted from it without fear of consequence.

Pulling off this high-speed pollution phaseout, the report establishes, is not possible with singular technocratic approaches like carbon taxes, though those tools must play a part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move ourselves around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report’s summary states in its first sentence, is “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

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.