On Fire

by Naomi Klein

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction: “We Are the Wildfire”

  A Hole in the World

  Capitalism vs. the Climate

  Geoengineering: Testing the Waters

  When Science Says That Political Revolution Is Our Only Hope

  Climate Time vs. the Constant Now

  Stop Trying to Save the World All by Yourself

  A Radical Vatican?

  Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World

  The Leap Years: Ending the Story of Endlessness

  Hot Take on a Hot Planet

  Season of Smoke

  The Stakes of Our Historical Moment

  Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

  There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster

  Movements Will Make, or Break, the Green New Deal

  The Art of the Green New Deal

  Epilogue: The Capsule Case for a Green New Deal

  Acknowledgments

  Publication Credits

  About the Author

  Index

  For

  ARTHUR MANUEL

  1951–2017

  The future isn’t cast into one inevitable course. On the contrary, we could cause the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, or we could create a prosperous civilization, sustainable over the long haul. Either is possible starting from now.

  —KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  INTRODUCTION: “WE ARE THE WILDFIRE”

  ON A FRIDAY IN MID-MARCH 2019, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an illicit act of truancy. The little streams emptied onto grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting and chatting children and teens, dressed in leopard leggings and crisp uniforms and everything in between.

  Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal.

  Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

  Some placards were more intricate. In New York City, a girl held up a lush painting of delicate bumble bees, flowers, and jungle animals. From a distance, it looked like a school project on biodiversity; up close, it was a lament for the sixth mass extinction: 45% OF INSECTS LOST TO CLIMATE CHANGE. 60% OF ANIMALS HAVE DISAPPEARED IN THE LAST 50 YEARS. At the center she had painted an hourglass rapidly running out of sand.

  For the young people who participated in the first ever global School Strike for Climate, learning has become a radicalizing act. In early readers, textbooks, and big-budget documentary films, they learned of the existence of ancient glaciers, dazzling coral reefs, and exotic mammals that make up our planet’s many marvels. And then, almost simultaneously—from teachers, older siblings, or sequels to those same films—they discovered that much of this wonder has already disappeared, and much of the rest of it will be on the extinction block before they hit their thirties.

  But it wasn’t only learning about climate change that moved these young people to march out of class en masse. For a great many of them, it was also living it. Outside the legislature building in Cape Town, South Africa, hundreds of young strikers chanted at their elected leaders to stop approving new fossil fuel projects. It was just one year ago that this city of four million people was in the clutches of such severe drought that three-quarters of the population faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out at all. CAPE TOWN IS APPROACHING DROUGHT “DAY ZERO,” read a typical headline. Climate change, for these kids, was not something to read about in books or to fear off in the distance. It was as present and urgent as thirst itself.

  The same was true at the climate strike on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, where residents live in fear of further coastal erosion. Their Pacific neighbor, the Solomon Islands, has already lost five small islands to rising water, with six more at severe risk of disappearing forever.

  “Raise your voice, not the sea level!” the students chanted.

  In New York City, ten thousand kids from dozens of schools found one another in Columbus Circle and proceeded to march to Trump Tower, chanting “Money won’t matter when we’re dead!” The older teens in the crowd had vivid memories of when Superstorm Sandy slammed into their coastal city in 2012. “My house got flooded and I was so confused,” recalled Sandra Rogers. “And it really made me look into it because you don’t learn these things in school.”

  New York City’s huge Puerto Rican community was also out in force on that unseasonably warm day. Some kids arrived draped in the island’s flag, a reminder of the relatives and friends still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the 2017 storm that knocked out electricity and water in large parts of the territory for the better part of a year, a total infrastructure breakdown that took the lives of roughly three thousand people.

  The mood was fierce, too, in San Francisco, when more than a thousand student strikers shared stories of living with chronic asthma because of polluting industries in their neighborhoods—and then getting a whole lot sicker when wildfire smoke choked the Bay Area just a few months before the strike. The testimonies were similar at walk-outs all over the Pacific Northwest, where smoke from record-breaking fires had blotted out the sun for two summers running. Across the northern border in Vancouver, young people had recently succeeded in pressuring their city council to declare a “climate emergency.”

  Seven thousand miles away, in Delhi, student strikers braved the ever-present air pollution (often the worst in the world) to shout through white medical masks, “You sold our future, just for profit!” In interviews, some spoke of the devastating floods in Kerala that killed more than four hundred people in 2018.

  Australia’s coal-addled resource minister declared that “The best thing you’ll learn about going to a protest is how to join the dole queue.” Undeterred, 150,000 young people poured into plazas in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and other cities.

  This generation of Australians has decided it simply cannot pretend that everything is normal. Not when, at the start of 2019, the South Australian city of Port Augusta had reached an oven-worthy 121°F (49.5°C). Not when half the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest natural structure made up of living creatures, had turned into a rotting underwater mass grave. Not when, in the weeks leading up to the strike itself, they had seen bushfires combine into a massive blaze in the state of Victoria, forcing thousands to flee their homes, while in Tasmania, wildfires destroyed old-growth rain forests that are unlike any ecosystem in the world. Not when, in January 2019, a combination of extreme temperature swings and poor water management led the entire country to wake up to apocalyptic images of the Darling River clogged with the floating carcasses of one million dead fish.

  “You have failed us all so terribly,” said fifteen-year-old strike organizer Nosrat Fareha, addressing the political class as a whole. “We deserve better. Young people can’t even vote but will have to live with the consequences of your inaction.”

  There was no student strike in Mozambique; on March 15, the day of the global walkouts, the whole country was bracing for the impact of Cyclone Idai, one of the worst storms in African history, which drove people to take refuge at the tops of tre
es as the waters rose and would eventually kill more than one thousand people. And then, just six weeks later, while it was still clearing the rubble, Mozambique would be hit by Cyclone Kenneth, yet another record-breaking storm.

  Wherever in the world they live, this generation has something in common: they are the first for whom climate disruption on a planetary scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. And not in a few unlucky hot spots, but on every single continent, with pretty much everything unraveling significantly faster than most scientific models had predicted.

  Oceans are warming 40 percent faster than the United Nations predicted just five years ago. And a sweeping study on the state of the Arctic published in April 2019 in Environmental Research Letters, led by renowned glaciologist Jason Box, found that ice in various forms is melting so rapidly that the “Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th Century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but also beyond the Arctic.” In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published a report about the startling loss of wildlife around the world, warning that a million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said the Platform’s Chair, Robert Watson. “We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now.”

  And so, just as US schoolchildren now grow up practicing “active shooter drills” starting in kindergarten, many of these students have had school days cancelled because of wildfire smoke, or learned to pack an evacuation bag ahead of hurricanes. A great many children have been forced to leave their homes for good because prolonged drought destroyed their parents’ livelihood in Guatemala, or contributed to the outbreak of civil war in Syria.

  It has been over three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve “the children,” “the grandchildren,” and “generations to come.” We were told that we owed it to them to move swiftly and embrace change. We were warned that we were failing in our most sacred duty to protect them. It was predicted that they would judge us harshly if we failed to act on their behalf.

  Well, none of those emotional pleas proved at all persuasive, at least not to the politicians and their corporate underwriters who could have taken bold action to stop the climate disruption we are all living through today. Instead, since those government meetings began in 1988, global CO2 emissions have risen by well over 40 percent, and they continue to rise. The planet has warmed by about 1°C since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up; the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans didn’t exist.

  As for those children and grandchildren and generations to come who were invoked so promiscuously? They are no longer mere rhetorical devices. They are now speaking (and screaming, and striking) for themselves. And they are speaking up for one another as part of an emerging international movement of children and a global web of creation that includes all those amazing animals and natural wonders that they fell in love with so effortlessly, only to discover that it was all slipping away.

  And yes, as foretold, these children are ready to deliver their moral verdict on the people and institutions who knew all about the dangerous, depleted world they would inherit and yet chose not to act.

  They know what they think of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison in Australia and all the other leaders who torch the planet with defiant glee while denying science so basic that these kids could grasp it easily at age eight. Their verdict is just as damning, if not more so, for the leaders who deliver passionate and moving speeches about the imperative to respect the Paris Climate Agreement and “make the planet great again” (France’s Emanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and so many others), but who then shower subsidies, handouts, and licenses on the fossil fuel and agribusiness giants driving ecological breakdown.

  Young people around the world are cracking open the heart of the climate crisis, speaking of a deep longing for a future they thought they had but that is disappearing with each day that adults fail to act on the reality that we are in an emergency.

  This is the power of the youth climate movement. Unlike so many adults in positions of authority, they have not yet been trained to mask the unfathomable stakes of our moment in the language of bureaucracy and overcomplexity. They understand that they are fighting for the fundamental right to live full lives—lives in which they are not, as thirteen-year-old climate striker Alexandria Villaseñor puts it, “running from disasters.”

  On that day in March 2019, organizers estimate, there were nearly 2,100 youth climate strikes in 125 countries, with 1.6 million young people participating. That’s quite an achievement for a movement that began just eight months earlier with a single fifteen-year-old girl in Stockholm, Sweden.

  GRETA’S “SUPERPOWER”

  The girl in question is Greta Thunberg, and her story has important lessons about what it will take to protect the possibility of a livable future—and not for some abstract idea of “future generations” but for billions of people alive today.

  Like many of her peers, Greta started learning about climate change when she was around eight years old. She read books and watched documentaries about species collapse and melting glaciers. She became obsessed. She learned that burning fossil fuels and eating a meat-based diet were major contributors to planetary destabilization. She discovered that there was a delay between our actions and the planet’s reactions, which means that more warming is already locked in, no matter what we do.

  As she grew up and learned more, she focused on the scientific predictions about how radically the earth is on track to change by 2040, 2060, and 2080 if we stay on our current course. She made mental calculations about what this would mean to her own life: the shocks she would have to endure, the death that could surround her, the other life forms that would disappear forever, the horrors and privations that would await her own children should she decide to become a parent.

  Greta also learned from climate scientists that the worst of this was not a foregone conclusion: that if we took radical action now, reducing emissions by 15 percent a year in wealthy countries like Sweden, then it would dramatically increase the chances of a safe future for her generation and the ones that followed. We could still save some of the glaciers. We could still protect many island nations. We might still avoid massive crop failure that would force hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people to flee their homes.

  If all this were true, she reasoned, then “we wouldn’t be talking about anything else . . . If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal?”

  It made no sense. Surely governments, especially in countries with resources to spare, should be leading the charge to achieve a rapid transition within a decade, so that by the time she was in her mid-twenties, consumption patterns and physical infrastructure would be fundamentally transformed.

  And yet her government, a self-styled climate leader, was moving much more slowly than that, and indeed, global emissions were continuing to rise. It was madness: the world was on fire, and yet everywhere Greta looked, people were gossiping about celebrities, taking pictures of themselves imitating celebrities, buying new cars and new clothes they didn’t need—as if they had all the time in the world to douse the flames.

  By age eleven, she had fallen into a deep depression. There were many contributing factors, some related to being different in a
school system that expects all kids to be pretty much the same. (“I was the invisible girl in the back.”) But there was also a feeling of great sorrow and helplessness about the fast deteriorating state of the planet—and the inexplicable failure of those in power to do much of anything about it.

  Thunberg stopped speaking and eating. She became very ill. Eventually, she was diagnosed with selective mutism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a form of autism that used to be called Asperger’s syndrome. That last diagnosis helped explain why Greta took what she was learning about climate change so much harder and more personally than many of her peers.

  People with autism tend to be extremely literal and, as a result, often have trouble coping with cognitive dissonance, those gaps between what we know intellectually and what we do that are so pervasive in modern life. Many people on the autism spectrum are also less prone to imitating the social behaviors of the people around them—they often don’t even notice them—and instead tend to forge their own unique path. This often involves focusing with great intensity on areas of particular interest, and frequently having difficulty putting those areas of interest aside (also known as compartmentalization). “For those of us who are on the spectrum,” Thunberg says, “almost everything is black or white. We aren’t very good at lying, and we usually don’t enjoy participating in this social game that the rest of you seem so fond of.”

  These traits explain why some people with Greta’s diagnosis become accomplished scientists and classical musicians, applying their super focus to great effect. It also helps explain why, when Thunberg trained her laser-like attention on climate breakdown, she was completely overwhelmed, with no way to protect herself from the fear and grief. She saw and felt the full implications of the crisis and could not be distracted from it. What’s more, the fact that other people in her life (classmates, parents, teachers) seemed relatively unconcerned did not send her reassuring social signals that the situation wasn’t really so bad, as such signals do for children who are more socially connected. The apparent lack of concern of those around her terrified Thunberg even more.