On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  By previous standards, the framework was shockingly bold and progressive, but there was so much momentum for it, particularly among young voters, that in short order it became a litmus test for large parts of the party. By May 2019, with the race to head the Democratic Party in full swing, the majority of leading presidential hopefuls claimed to support it, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand. It had been endorsed, meanwhile, by 105 members of the House and Senate.

  The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the IPCC targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law. The plan is pretty straightforward: elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).

  If the IPCC report was the clanging fire alarm that grabbed the attention of the world, the Green New Deal is the beginning of a fire safety and prevention plan. And not a piecemeal approach that merely trains a water gun on a blazing fire, as we have seen so many times in the past, but a comprehensive and holistic plan to actually put out the fire. Especially if the idea spreads around the world—which is already beginning to happen.

  Indeed, in January 2019, the political coalition European Spring (an outgrowth of a project called DiEM25, where I serve on the advisory panel) launched a Green New Deal for Europe, a sweeping and detailed plan to embed an agenda of rapid decarbonization within a broader social and economic justice agenda: “From a green investment programme to drive through the world’s ecological transition to clear action on ending the scandal of tax havens; from humane and effective migration policy to a clear plan to tackle poverty in our continent; from a Workers’ Compact to a European Convention on Women’s Rights and much more, the Green New Deal is the go-to document for anyone wishing to break the dogma of ‘There Is No Alternative’ and bring back hope to our continent,” the coalition announced.

  In Canada, a broad coalition of organizations has come together to call for a Green New Deal, with the leader of the New Democratic Party adopting the frame (if not its full ambition) as one of his policy planks. The same is true in the United Kingdom, where the opposition Labour Party is, as I write, in the midst of intense negotiations over whether to adopt a Green New Deal–style platform similar to the one being proposed in the United States.

  The various versions of a Green New Deal that have emerged in the past year have something in common. Where previous policies were minor tweaks to incentives that were designed to cause minimal disruption to the system, a Green New Deal approach is a major operating system upgrade, a plan to roll up our sleeves and actually get the job done. Markets play a role in this vision, but markets are not the protagonists of this story—people are. The workers who will build the new infrastructure, the residents who will breathe the clean air, who will live in the new affordable green housing and benefit from the low-cost (or free) public transit.

  Those of us who advocate for this kind of transformative platform are sometimes accused of using the climate crisis to advance a socialist or anticapitalist agenda that predates our focus on the climate crisis. My response is a simple one. For my entire adult life, I have been involved in movements confronting the myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit. My first book, No Logo, published almost exactly twenty years ago, documented the human and ecological costs of corporate globalization, from the sweatshops of Indonesia to the oil fields of the Niger Delta. I have seen teenage girls treated like machines to make our machines, and seen mountains and forests turned to trash heaps to get at the oil, coal, and metals beneath.

  The painful, even lethal, impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and color.

  I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localized market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

  None of this means that every climate policy must dismantle capitalism or else it should be dismissed (as some critics have absurdly claimed)—we need every action possible to bring down emissions, and we need them now. But it does mean, as the IPCC has so forcefully confirmed, that we will not get the job done unless we are willing to embrace systemic economic and social change.

  HISTORY AS TEACHER—AND WARNING

  There are, among emission-reduction experts, long-running debates about which precedents from history to invoke to help inspire the kind of sweeping, economy-wide transformations the climate crisis demands. Many clearly favor FDR’s New Deal, because it showed how radically both a society’s infrastructure and its governing values can be altered in the span of one decade. And the results are indeed striking. During the New Deal decade, more than 10 million people were directly employed by the government; most of rural America got electricity for the first time; hundreds of thousands of new buildings and structures were built; 2.3 billion trees were planted; 800 new state parks were developed; and hundreds of thousands of public works of art were created.

  In addition to the immediate benefits of pulling millions of Depression-ravaged families out of poverty, this period of frenetic public investment left behind a lasting legacy that, despite decades of attempts to dismantle it, survives to this day. Historian Neil Maher, in his book Nature’s New Deal, provides a helpful snapshot:

  Today, we drive on roads laid out by the Works Progress Administration, drop off our children and pick up books at schools and libraries built by the Public Works Administration, and even drink water flowing from reservoirs constructed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. These and other New Deal Programs . . . dramatically transformed the natural environment. They also altered American politics by introducing the New Deal to the American public in ways that raised popular support for Roosevelt’s liberal welfare state.

  Others insist that the only precedents that show the scale and speed of change required in the face of the climate crisis are the World War II mobilizations that saw Western powers transforming their manufacturing sectors and consumption patterns to fight Hitler’s Germany. It was certainly a dizzying level of change: Factories were retooled to produce ships, planes, and weapons. To free up food and fuel for the military, citizens changed their lifestyles dramatically: in Britain, driving for anything other than necessity virtually ceased; between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit went up by 87 percent in the United States and by 95 percent in Canada. In 1943 in the United States, twenty million households (representing three-fifths of the population) had “Victory gardens” in their yards, growing fresh vegetables that accounted for 42 percent of all those consumed that year.

  Some argue that a better analogy than the war effort was the reconstruction afterward—specifically, the Marshall Plan, a kind of New Deal for Western and southern Europe. In West Germany, the US government spe
nt billions to rebuild a mixed economy that would have broad-based support and would undercut the rising support for socialism (while providing a growing market for US exports). That meant direct job creation by the state, huge investment in the public sector, subsidies for German firms, and support for strong labor unions. The effort was widely regarded as Washington’s most successful diplomatic initiative.

  Each precedent has its own glaring weaknesses and contradictions. The US military alone is, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world.” And warfare, with its devastating costs to humanity, nature, and democracy, is no model for social change. The climate threat, moreover, will never feel as menacing as Nazis on the march—at least not until it is significantly too late for our behaviors to have a meaningful impact.

  The wartime mobilizations, and the huge rebuilding efforts afterward, were certainly ambitious, but they were also highly centralized, top-down transformations. If we defer to central governments in that way in the face of the climate crisis, we should expect highly corrupt measures that further concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few big players, not to mention systemic attacks on human rights, a phenomenon I have traced repeatedly in my work on disaster capitalism in the aftermath of wars, economic shocks, and extreme weather events. A climate change shock doctrine is a real and present danger, the first signs of which I discuss in these pages.

  The New Deal makes a far-from-ideal analogy as well. Most of its programs and protections were designed in a push and pull with social movements, as opposed to merely handed down from on high like the wartime measures. But the New Deal fell short of pulling the US economy out of economic depression, its main goal, and its programs overwhelmingly favored white, male workers. Agricultural and domestic workers (many of them black) were left out, as were many Mexican immigrants (some one million of whom faced deportation in the late 1920s and 1930s), and the Civilian Conservation Corps segregated African American participants and excluded women (except at one camp, where the latter learned canning and other domestic tasks). And while Indigenous peoples won some gains under New Deal programs, land rights were violated by both massive infrastructure projects and some conservation efforts. New Deal relief agencies, particularly in the southern states, were notorious for their biases against unemployed African American and Mexican American families.

  The Ocasio-Cortez/Markey Green New Deal resolution goes to considerable lengths to outline how it plans to avoid repeating these injustices, listing as one of its core goals “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” As Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said at a town hall in Boston, “This is not just an opportunity to fix . . . the first New Deal, but also to transform the economy.”

  The biggest limitation with all these historical comparisons, from the New Deal through to the Marshall Plan, is that, together, they succeeded in kick-starting and massively expanding the high-carbon lifestyle of suburban sprawl and disposable consumption that is at the heart of today’s climate crisis. The tough truth, as the IPCC’s bombshell report stated explicitly, is that “there is no historical precedent for the scale of the necessary transitions, in particular in a socially and economically sustainable way”—a reference to the fact that global emissions have only ever dropped significantly during times of deep economic crisis, such as the Great Depression and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the wars that spurred rapid fire societal transformations were humanitarian and ecological disasters.

  My own view is that as flawed as each historical analogy necessarily is, each is still useful to study and invoke. Every one, in its own way, presents a sharp contrast to how governments have responded to climate breakdown thus far. Over two and a half decades, we have seen the creation of complex carbon markets; the occasional small carbon tax; the replacement of one fossil fuel (coal) with another (gas); various incentives for consumers to buy different kinds of lightbulbs and energy-efficient home appliances; and offers from companies to opt for greener alternatives if we are willing to pay more for them. Yet, only a few countries (most significantly, Germany and China) have made serious enough investments in the renewable sector to see a rollout at anything like the speed required.

  We are slowly starting to see a shift to a more aggressive regulatory approach in a handful of countries, invariably as a result of strong social movement pressure. A few countries, states, and provinces have placed bans or moratoriums on fracking for gas. The government of New Zealand, significantly, has announced it will no longer issue leases for offshore oil drilling. Norway’s government has announced plans to prohibit the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2025, a move that will certainly accelerate a shift to electric vehicles if its aggressive targets spread to other countries. But no national government of a wealthy country has been willing to have a frank discussion about the need for high consumers to consume less or for fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up the mess they created.

  And how could it have been otherwise? The past forty years of economic history have been a story of systematically weakening the power of the public sphere, unmaking regulatory bodies, lowering taxes for the wealthy, and selling off essential services to the private sector. All the while, union power has been dramatically eroded and the public has been trained in helplessness: no matter how big the problem, we have been told, it’s best to leave it to the market or billionaire philanthro-capitalists, to get out of the way, to stop trying to fix problems at their root.

  That, most fundamentally, is why the historical precedents from the 1930s through to the 1950s are still useful. They remind us that another approach to profound crisis was always possible and still is today. Faced with the collective emergencies that punctuated those decades, the response was to enlist entire societies, from individual consumers to workers to large manufacturers to every level of government, in deep transitions with clear common goals.

  Past problem solvers did not look for a single “silver bullet” or “killer app”; nor did they tinker and wait for the market to trickle-down fixes for them. In each instance, governments deployed a barrage of robust policy tools (from direct job creation on public infrastructure to industrial planning to public banking) all at once. These historical chapters show us that when ambitious goals and forceful policy mechanisms are aligned, it is possible to change virtually all aspects of society on an extremely tight deadline, just as we need to do in the face of climate breakdown today. The failure to do so is a choice, not an inevitability of human nature. As Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says, “We’re not doomed (unless we choose to be).”

  These precedents remind us of something equally important: we don’t need to figure out every detail before we begin. Every one of these earlier mobilizations contained multiple false starts, improvisations, and course corrections. And as we will see later on, the most progressive responses happened only because of relentless pressure from organized populations. What matters is that we begin the process right away. As Greta Thunberg says, “We cannot solve an emergency without treating it like an emergency.”

  That does not mean we simply need a New Deal painted green, or a Marshall Plan with solar panels. We need changes of a different quality and character. We need wind and solar power that is distributed and, where possible, community owned, rather than the New Deal’s highly centralized, monopolistic river-damming hydro and fossil fuel power. We need beautifully designed, racially integrated, zero-carbon urban housing, built with democratic input from communities of color—rather than the sprawling white suburbs and racially segregated urban housing projects of the postwar period. We need to devolve power and resources to Indigenous communities, smal
lholder farmers, ranchers, and sustainable fishing folk so they can lead a process of planting billions of trees, rehabilitating wetlands, and renewing soil—rather than handing over control of conservation to the military and federal agencies, as was overwhelmingly the case in the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

  And even as we insist on naming an emergency as an emergency, we need to constantly guard against this state of emergency becoming a state of exception, in which powerful interests exploit public fear and panic to roll back hard-won rights and steamroll profitable false solutions.

  In other words, we need something we’ve never tried, and to pull it off, we will have to recapture the sense of possibility and the can-do spirit that have been sorely missing since Ronald Reagan announced that “the nine most dangerous words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” By reviving the historical memory of these (and other) periods of rapid collective change, we can extract both soaring inspiration and sobering warnings.

  One warning from the 1930s and ’40s we would be wise to remember is that when systemic crises cause political and ideological vacuums to open up, as they have today, it is not only humane and hopeful ideas like the Green New Deal that find oxygen. Violent and hateful ideas do, too. It was a truth that pierced through the first global school strikes with terrifying force on March 15, 2019.

  THE SPECTER OF ECO-FASCISM

  In Christchurch, New Zealand, the School Strike for Climate started in much the same way as in so many other cities and towns: rowdy students poured out of their schools in the middle of the day, holding up signs demanding a new era of climate action. Some were sweet and earnest (I STAND 4 WHAT I STAND ON), some less so (KEEP EARTH CLEAN. IT’S NOT URANUS!).