On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  As we battled the floods, fires and droughts, we knew how lucky we were to have started acting when we did. And we didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane, too. By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other. And we found our shared purpose.

  The response was unlike any we were prepared for. The film went online on April 17. Within forty-eight hours, it had been viewed well over six million times. Within seventy-two hours it was being screened in rooms of more than a thousand people, as part of a national tour to build momentum for the Green New Deal organized by the Sunrise Movement. In the halls, people cheered for every other line. Within a week, we had heard from multiple teachers (from primary through university) who told us they had already showed it in class.

  “Our students are hungry for hope,” read a typical report. Hundreds of people wrote to us and told us they had wept at their desks—for everything that was already lost and for everything that could still be won.

  Looking back on this project, and the speed with which it traveled through the world, it strikes me that we are starting to see the true power of framing our collective response to climate change as a “Green New Deal,” despite all the limitations of that historical analogy. By evoking FDR’s real-world industrial and social transformation from nearly a century ago in order to imagine our world a half century from now, all of our time horizons are being stretched.

  Suddenly we are no longer prisoners of the never-ending present in our social media feeds. We are part of a long and complex collective story, one in which human beings are not one set of attributes, fixed and unchanging, but rather, a work in progress, capable of deep change. By looking decades backward and forward simultaneously, we are no longer alone as we confront our weighty historical moment. We are surrounded both by ancestors whispering that we can do what our moment demands just as they did, and by future generations shouting that they deserve nothing less.

  As much as the hopeful vision of the future presented by the Green New Deal, I think this lengthened time horizon is what many are responding to so powerfully. Because there is nothing more disorienting than finding yourself floating through time, unmoored from both future and past. Only when we know where we have come from, and where we want to go, will we have a sturdy place to plant our feet.

  Only then will we believe, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, that our future has not yet been written and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

  EPILOGUE: THE CAPSULE CASE FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL

  CRITICS OF THE GREEN NEW Deal have plenty of serious arguments for why all this is doomed. Political paralysis in Washington is real. Even in a world where climate change–denying Republicans were swept out of power, there would still be plenty of centrist Democrats convinced that their constituents had no appetite for radical change. The plans are expensive, and getting the budgets approved would be a herculean effort.

  A better course of action, we hear, would be to advance climate policies that appeal to many on the right, like a shift from coal to nuclear power, or a small tax on carbon that returns the revenues as a “dividend” to every citizen.

  The main trouble with these incremental approaches is that they simply won’t get the job done. In order to win support from Republicans soaked in fossil fuel money, the price on carbon would be too low to make much of an impact. Nuclear power is expensive and slow to roll out compared with renewables—and that is not to mention the risks associated with uranium mining and waste storage.

  The truth is, we cannot lower emissions as steeply and as rapidly as required to swerve off our perilous trajectory without a sweeping industrial and infrastructure overhaul. The good news is that the Green New Deal isn’t nearly as impractical or unrealistic as its many critics claim. I have made the case for why that is throughout this book, but what follows are nine more reasons the Green New Deal has a fighting chance—a chance that will increase every time we go out and make the case.

  1. IT WILL BE A MASSIVE JOB CREATOR

  Every part of the world that has invested heavily in renewables and efficiency has found these sectors to be much more powerful job creators than fossil fuels. When New York State made a commitment to get half its energy from renewables by 2030 (not fast enough), it immediately saw a spike in job creation.

  The accelerated time line of the US Green New Deal will turn it into a jobs machine. Even without federal support—indeed, with active sabotage from the White House—the green economy is already creating many more jobs than oil and gas. According to the 2018 US Energy and Employment Report (USEER), jobs in wind, solar energy efficiency, and other clean energy sectors outnumbered fossil jobs by a rate of three to one. That is happening because of a combination of state and municipal incentives and the plummeting costs of renewables. A Green New Deal would take the industry supernova while ensuring that the jobs have salaries and benefits comparable to those offered in the oil and gas sector.

  There is no shortage of research to support this. For instance, a 2019 study on the job impacts of a Green New Deal–style program in the state of Colorado found that many more jobs would be created than lost. The study, published by the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts–Amherst, looked at what it would take for the state to achieve a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. It found that roughly 585 nonmanagement jobs would be lost but that, with an investment of $14.5 billion a year in clean energy, “Colorado will generate about 100,000 jobs per year in the state.”

  There are many more studies with similarly striking findings. A plan put forward by the U.S. BlueGreen Alliance, a body that brings together unions and environmentalists, estimated that a $40 billion annual investment in public transit and high-speed rail for six years would produce more than 3.7 million jobs during that period. And according to a report for the European Transport Workers Federation, comprehensive policies to reduce emissions in the transport sector by 80 percent would create seven million new jobs across the continent, while another five million clean energy jobs in Europe could slash electricity emissions by 90 percent.

  2. PAYING FOR IT WILL CREATE A FAIRER ECONOMY

  As the 2018 IPCC report on keeping warming below 1.5°C made clear, if we don’t take transformative action to lower emissions, the costs will be astronomical. The panel’s estimate is that the economic damages of allowing temperatures to increase by 2°C (as opposed to 1.5°C) would hit $69 trillion globally.

  Of course, rolling out a Green New Deal would have large costs as well, and the plan’s advocates have pointed to a variety of ways this can be financed. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that the US version should be financed the way any previous emergency spending has been: by the US Congress simply authorizing the funds, backstopped by the Treasury of the world’s currency of last resort. According to New Consensus, the think tank closely associated with her policy proposals, because “the Green New Deal will produce new goods and services to keep pace with and absorb new expenditures, there is no more reason to let fear about financing halt progress here than there was to let it halt wars or tax cuts.”

  The European Spring proposal for a Green New Deal, meanwhile, calls for a global minimum corporate tax rate to capture the tax revenue that the Apples and Googles of the world currently dodge with transnational schemes. It also calls for a reversal of monetary orthodoxy, with public investment floating green bonds, supported by central banks. “To address the true existential threat that we face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this brink. Austerity means extinction.” Some analysts, like Christian Parenti, have emphasized that federal governments can drive the transition with their purchasing policies.

  In short, there are all kinds of ways to raise financing, including ways that attack untena
ble levels of wealth concentration and shift the burden to those most responsible for climate pollution. And it’s not hard to figure out who that is. We know, thanks to research from the Climate Accountability Institute, that a whopping 71 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 can be traced to just one hundred corporate and state fossil fuel giants, dubbed the “Carbon Majors.”

  In light of this, there are a variety of “polluter pays” measures that can be taken to ensure that those most responsible for this crisis do the most to underwrite the transition—through legal damages, through higher royalties, and by having their subsidies slashed. Direct fossil fuel subsidies are worth about $775 billion a year globally, and more than $20 billion in the United States alone. The very first thing that should happen is these subsidies should be shifted to investments in renewables and efficiency.

  It isn’t only the fossil fuel companies who have put their own super profits ahead of the safety of our species for decades; so have the financial institutions that underwrote their investments, in full knowledge of the risks. Which is why, in addition to eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, governments can insist on getting a much fairer share of the financial sector’s massive earnings by imposing a transaction tax, which could raise $650 billion globally, according to the European Parliament.

  And then there is the military. If the military budgets of the top ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion annually, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute—funds that could be spent on energy transition and preparing communities for the extreme weather ahead.

  Meanwhile, a mere 1 percent billionaire’s tax could raise $45 billion a year globally, according to the United Nations—not to mention the money that would be raised through an international effort to close down tax havens. In 2015 the estimated private financial wealth of individuals stashed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $24 trillion and $36 trillion, according to James S. Henry, a senior adviser with the UK-based Tax Justice Network. Shutting down some of those havens would go a very long way toward covering the price tag of this desperately needed industrial transition.

  3. IT TAPS THE POWER OF EMERGENCY

  A Green New Deal approach does not treat the climate crisis as one issue on a checklist of worthy priorities. Rather, it heeds Greta Thunberg’s call to “act like your house is on fire. Because it is.” The truth is that the scientific deadline for deep transformation is so short that if radical change doesn’t roll out every year for the next thirty years, we will have lost the tiny window we have to avert truly catastrophic warming. Treating an emergency like an emergency means all our energies can go into action, rather than into screaming about the need for action, which what is happening now.

  That, in turn, would liberate us all from the debilitating cognitive dissonance that living in a culture that is denying the reality of so profound a crisis requires. The Green New Deal puts us all on emergency footing: as scary as that would be for some, the catharsis and relief for many others, particularly young people, would be a potent source of energy.

  4. IT’S PROCRASTINATION-PROOF

  Some have criticized the Green New Deal resolution for stating that the United States must get off fossil fuels in just a decade. Scientists have said the world needs to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, so why the rush? The first answer is “justice”: wealthy countries that became that way by polluting without limit need to decarbonize fastest, so that poorer countries where majorities still lack the basics of clean water and electricity can have a more gradual transition.

  But the second answer is strategic: a ten-year deadline means there can be no more procrastination. Up until the Green New Deal, every political response to the climate crisis set the most ambitious targets decades in the future, long after the politicians making these pledges would leave office. The tasks these politicians gave to themselves, though, were in comparison relatively easy, like introducing cap-and-trade schemes or retiring old coal plants and replacing them with natural gas. The tough work of confronting the fossil fuel industry’s entire business model was perennially offloaded onto successors.

  Embracing a ten-year-transition time line does not mean absolutely everything has to get done in a decade. The resolution sets an ambitious deadline but repeatedly adds “to the extent technologically feasible.” Fundamentally, this means that we are no longer kicking the can down the road. The current crop of politicians introducing a Green New Deal would finally be saying, “We are the ones who are going to get the job done. Not someone else.”

  Given the damage that the temptation to procrastinate has already done to our planet, that is a very big deal.

  5. IT’S RECESSION-PROOF

  Over the past three decades, one of the greatest obstacles to making sustained progress on climate action has been the volatility of the market. During good economic times, there is usually some willingness to entertain environmental policies that mean paying a bit more for gas, electricity, and “green” products. But again and again, this willingness has understandably evaporated as soon as the economy hit a painful downturn.

  And that may be the greatest benefit of modeling our climate approach after FDR’s New Deal, the most famous economic stimulus of all time, one born in the teeth of the worst economic crisis in modern history. When the global economy enters another downturn or crisis, which it surely will, support for a Green New Deal will not plummet as has been the case with every other major green initiative during past recessions. Instead, support can be expected to increase, since a large-scale stimulus with the power to create millions of jobs will become the greatest hope of addressing people’s economic pain.

  6. IT’S A BACKLASH BUSTER

  Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust—and the public responds accordingly. Look, for example, at France under Emmanuel Macron, derided by his opponents as the “president for the rich.” Macron has pursued a classic “free-market” agenda for France, cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, rolling back hard-won labor protections, making higher education less accessible—all after years of austerity under previous administrations.

  It was in this context that, in 2018, he introduced a fuel tax designed to make driving move expensive, thereby reducing consumption and raising some funds for climate programs.

  Except it didn’t work like that. Huge numbers of working people in France, already under intense economic stress from Macron’s other policies, saw this market-based approach to the climate crisis as a direct attack on them: Why should they pay more to drive themselves to work when the super-rich were free to fuel up their private jets to visit their tax havens? Tens of thousands took to the streets in anger, many of them wearing yellow safety vests (gilets jaunes), with several protests turning into full-scale riots.

  “The government cares about the end of the world,” many gilets jaunes chanted. “We care about the end of the month.” Desperately trying to regain control over the country, Macron rolled back his fuel tax and introduced a minimum wage hike, among other concessions—at the same time that he brutally repressed the movement.

  One of the great strengths of a Green New Deal approach is that it will not generate this kind of backlash. Nothing about its framework forces people to choose between caring about the end of the world and the end of the month. The whole point is to design policies that allow us all to care about both, policies that simultaneously lower emissions and lower the economic strain on working people—by making sure that everyone can get a good job in the new economy; that they have access to basic social protections like health care, education, and daycare; and that green jobs are good, unionized, family-supporting jobs with benefits and vacation time. There will certainly have to be a price on carbon, but it has a much better chance of survival if the people who pay the increased costs are
n’t hanging on by their fingernails.

  7. IT CAN RAISE AN ARMY OF SUPPORTERS

  Since its launch, the most frequent criticism of the Green New Deal is that, by focusing so much on economic and social justice, it is making climate action a harder sell than a plan more narrowly trained on carbon emissions. “My heart is with the greens,” Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times. “But my head says you can’t transform our energy system and our social/economic one at scale all at once. We have to prioritize energy/climate. Because for the environment, later will be too late. Later is officially over.”

  This assumes that the social/economic components of the Green New Deal are weighing it down. In fact, they are precisely what is lifting it up.

  Unlike approaches that pass on the costs of transition to working people, the Green New Deal is squarely focused on marrying pollution reduction to the top priorities of the most vulnerable workers and the most excluded communities. This is the game changer of having representatives in Congress rooted in working-class struggles for living wage jobs and for nontoxic air and water—women like Rashida Tlaib, who helped fight a successful battle against Koch Industries’ noxious petroleum coke mountain in Detroit.

  If you are part of the economy’s winning class and funded by even bigger winners, as so many politicians are, then your attempts to craft climate legislation tend to be guided by the idea that change should be as minimal and as unchallenging to the status quo as possible. After all, the status quo is working just fine for you and your donors. That was the approach that failed to get cap-and-trade through the Senate during the Obama years, and it’s the approach that blew up in Macron’s face in France.