On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  When I delved into this same climate change history some years ago, I concluded, as Rich does, that the key juncture when world momentum was building toward a tough, science-based global agreement was 1988. That was when James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that he had “99 percent confidence” in “a real warming trend” linked to human activity. Later that same month, hundreds of scientists and policymakers held the historic World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in Toronto, where the first emission-reduction targets were discussed. By the end of that same year, in November 1988, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the premier scientific body advising governments on the climate threat, held its first session.

  But climate change wasn’t a concern just for politicians and wonks back then—it was watercooler stuff, so much so that when the editors of Time magazine announced their 1988 “Man of the Year,” they went for “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth.” The cover featured an image of the globe held together with twine, the sun setting ominously in the background. “No single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated headlines more,” journalist Thomas Sancton explained, “than the clump of rock and soil and water and air that is our common home.”

  (Interestingly, unlike Rich, Sancton didn’t blame “human nature” for the planetary mugging. He went deeper, tracing it to the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of “dominion” over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that “the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature—the soil, forest, sea—was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it.”)

  When I surveyed the climate news from this period, it really did seem like a profound shift was within grasp—and then, tragically, it all slipped away, with the United States walking out of international negotiations and the rest of the world settling for nonbinding agreements that relied on dodgy “market mechanisms” like carbon trading and offsets and, in a few rare cases, a minor carbon tax. So, it really is worth asking, as Rich does: What the hell happened? What interrupted the urgency and determination that were emanating from all these elite institutions simultaneously by the end of the ’80s?

  Rich concludes, while offering no social or scientific evidence, that something called “human nature” kicked in and messed everything up. “Human beings,” he writes, “whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” It seems we are wired to “obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”

  When I looked at the same period, I came to a very different conclusion: that what at first seemed like our best shot at lifesaving climate action had in retrospect suffered from an epic case of historical bad timing. Because what becomes clear when you look back at this juncture is that just as governments were getting together to get serious about reining in the fossil fuel sector, the global neoliberal revolution went supernova, and that project of economic and social reengineering clashed with the imperatives of both climate science and corporate regulation at every turn.

  The failure to make even a passing reference to this other global trend that was unfolding in the late ’80s represents an unfathomably large blind spot in Rich’s piece. After all, the primary benefit of returning to a period in the not-too-distant past as a journalist is that you are able to see trends and patterns that were not yet visible to people living through those tumultuous events in real time. The climate community in 1988, for instance, had no way of knowing that they were on the cusp of the convulsive economic revolution that would remake every major economy on the planet.

  But we know. And one thing that becomes very clear when you look back on the late ’80s is that far from offering “conditions for success [that] could not have been more favorable,” 1988–89 was the worst possible moment for humanity to decide that it was going to get serious about putting planetary health ahead of profits.

  Recall what else was going on. In 1988, Canada and the United States signed their Free Trade Agreement, a prototype for NAFTA and countless deals that would follow. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, an event that would be successfully seized upon by right-wing ideologues in the United States as proof of “the end of history” and taken as license to export the Reagan-Thatcher recipe for privatization, deregulation, and economic austerity to every corner of the globe.

  It was this convergence of historical trends—the emergence of a global architecture that was supposed to tackle climate change and the emergence of a much more powerful global architecture to liberate capital from all constraints—that derailed the momentum Rich rightly identifies. Because, as he notes repeatedly, meeting the challenge of climate change would have required imposing stiff regulations on polluters while investing in the public sphere to transform how we power our lives, live in cities, and move ourselves around.

  All this was possible in the 1980s and ’90s—it still is today—but it would have demanded a head-on battle with the project of neoliberalism, which at that time was waging war on the very idea of the public sphere. (“There is no such thing as society,” Thatcher told us.) Meanwhile, the free trade deals being signed in this period were busily making many sensible climate initiatives (like subsidizing and offering preferential treatment to local green industry and refusing many polluting projects like fracking and oil pipelines) illegal under international trade law.

  As I wrote in This Changes Everything, “We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period that we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

  Why does it matter that Rich makes no mention of this clash and, instead, claims our fate has been sealed by “human nature”? It matters because if the force that interrupted the momentum toward action is “ourselves,” then the fatalistic headline LOSING EARTH really is merited. If an inability to sacrifice in the short term for a shot at health and safety in the near future is baked into our collective DNA, then we have no hope of turning things around in time to avert truly catastrophic warming.

  If, on the other hand, we humans really were on the brink of saving ourselves in the ’80s, but were swamped by a tide of elite, free-market fanaticism, one that was opposed by millions of people around the world, then there is something quite concrete we can do about it. We can confront that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place at its center the quest for growth and profit at all costs.

  And the good news—and, yes, there is some—is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green Democratic Socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative—it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

  Yet we have to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the Times tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the excellent eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

  Their point is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing es
sential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems. Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history, and many Indigenous cultures keep Earth-centered cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

  But simply blaming capitalism isn’t enough. It is absolutely true that the drive for endless growth and profits stands squarely opposed to the imperative for a rapid transition off fossil fuels. It is absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in the ’80s and ’90s has been the single greatest contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, and the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action since governments began meeting to talk (and talk and talk) about lowering emissions. And it remains the biggest obstacle today, even in countries that market themselves as climate leaders.

  But we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment, as evidenced most dramatically by the fact that carbon emissions briefly plummeted when the economies of the former Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. And Venezuela’s petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism.

  Let’s acknowledge this fact, while also pointing out that countries with strong democratic-socialist tradition (like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay) have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialism isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival.

  These are the stakes in the surge of movement-grounded politicians and political candidates who are advancing a democratic eco-socialist vision, connecting the dots between the economic depredations caused by decades of neoliberal ascendency and the ravaged state of our natural world. Together they are calling for a Green New Deal that meets everyone’s basic material needs and offers real solutions to racial and gender inequities, all while catalyzing a rapid transition to 100 percent renewable energy. Many have also pledged not to take money from fossil fuel companies and are promising instead to prosecute them.

  This new generation of political leaders is rejecting the neoliberal centrism of the Democratic Party establishment, with its tepid “market-based solutions” to the ecological crisis, as well as Donald Trump’s all-out war on nature. And they are also presenting a concrete alternative to the extractivist socialists of both the past and present. Perhaps most important, this new generation of leaders isn’t interested in scapegoating “humanity” for the greed and corruption of a tiny elite. It seeks instead to help humanity, particularly its most systematically unheard and uncounted members, to find their collective voice and power so they can stand up to that elite.

  We aren’t losing the earth, but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It’s the moment to get the hell on that path.

  * * *

  I. When Rich expanded the article into a book in 2019, he corrected the omission.

  THERE’S NOTHING NATURAL ABOUT PUERTO RICO’S DISASTER

  When you systematically starve and neglect the very bones of a society, rendering it dysfunctional on a good day, that society has absolutely no capacity to weather a true crisis.

  SEPTEMBER 2018, ONE YEAR AFTER HURRICANE MARIA

  FOR A COUPLE OF DECADES, i’ve been investigating the ways that the already rich and powerful systematically exploit the pain and the trauma of collective shocks (like superstorms or economic crises) in order to build an even more unequal and undemocratic society.

  Long before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was a textbook example. Before those fierce winds came, the debt (illegitimate and much of it illegal) was the excuse used to ram through a brutal program of economic suffering, what the great Argentine author Rodolfo Walsh, writing about four decades earlier, famously called miseria planificada, “planned misery.”

  This program systematically attacked the very glue that holds a society together: all levels of education, health care, the electricity and water systems, transit systems, communication networks, and more.

  It was a plan so widely rejected that no elected representatives in Puerto Rico could be trusted to carry it out—which is why in 2016 the US Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, known as PROMESA. That law amounted to a financial coup d’état that put the territory’s economy directly in the hands of the unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board. In Puerto Rico, they call it La Junta.

  The term fits. As Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis puts it, governments used to be overthrown with tanks—“now it’s with banks.”

  It was in this context, with every Puerto Rican institution already trembling from La Junta’s assaults, that Maria’s ferocious winds came roaring through. It was a storm so powerful it would have sent even the sturdiest society reeling. But Puerto Rico didn’t just reel. Puerto Rico broke.

  Not the people of Puerto Rico, but all those systems that had already been deliberately brought to the brink: power, health, water, communication, food. All those systems collapsed. The latest research puts the numbers of lives lost as a result of Hurricane Maria at approximately three thousand, a figure now accepted by the governor of Puerto Rico. But let us be clear: Maria didn’t kill all those people. It was that combination of grinding austerity and an extraordinary hurricane that stole so many precious lives.

  A few lives were lost to wind and water, yes. But the vast majority died because when you systematically starve and neglect the very bones of a society, rendering it dysfunctional on a good day, that society has absolutely no capacity to weather a true crisis. That is what the research tells us, those studies Donald Trump so casually denies: The major causes of death were people being unable to plug in medical equipment because the electricity grid was down for months; health networks so diminished they were unable to provide medicine for treatable diseases. People died because they were left to drink contaminated water because of a legacy of environmental racism. People died because they were abandoned and left without hope for so long that suicide seemed the only option.

  Those deaths were not the result of an unprecedented “natural disaster” or even “an act of God,” as we so often hear.

  Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that there is nothing natural about this disaster. And if you believe in God, leave her out of this, too.

  God isn’t the one who laid off thousands of skilled electrical workers in the years before the storm, or who failed to maintain the grid with basic repairs. God didn’t give vital relief and reconstruction contracts to politically connected firms, some of whom didn’t even pretend to do their jobs. God didn’t decide that Puerto Rico should import 85 percent of its food—this archipelago blessed with some of the most fertile soil in the world. God didn’t decide Puerto Rico should get 98 percent of its energy from imported fossil fuels—these islands bathed in sun, lashed by wind, and surrounded by waves, all of which could provide cheap and clean renewable power to spare.

  These were decisions made by people working for powerful interests.

  Because for five hundred uninterrupted years, the role of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the world economy has been to make other people rich, whether with the extraction of cheap labor or cheap resources or by being a captive market for imported food and fuel.

  A colonial economy by definition is a dependent economy; a centralized, lopsided, and distorted economy. And as we have seen, an intensely vulne
rable economy.

  And it isn’t even right to call the storm itself a “natural disaster.” None of these record-breaking storms are natural anymore—Irma and Maria, Katrina and Sandy, Haiyan and Harvey, and now Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut. The reason we are seeing records shattered time after time is that the oceans are warmer and the tides are higher. And that’s not God’s fault, either.

  This is the deadly cocktail—not just a storm, but a storm supercharged by climate change slamming headlong into a society deliberately weakened by a decade of unrelenting austerity layered on top of centuries of colonial extraction, with relief efforts that make no attempt to disguise the fact that the lives of the poor exist within our global system at a sharp discount.

  Maria blew so hard that she tore all the genteel disguises off these brutal systems just as she blew the leaves off the trees, leaving them naked for the world to see. The hurricane and FEMA’s endless failures pushed Puerto Rico over the edge. But we have to face up to why the territory was teetering so precariously on the precipice in the first place.

  We also need to stop framing these failures as incompetence. Because if it were incompetence, there would be some effort to fix the underlying systems that produced the failures; to rebuild the public sphere, design a more secure food and energy system, and stop the carbon pollution that guarantees even more ferocious storms in the coming decades.