Woman On Fire: Naomi Klein's latest collects ten years of climate writing, from Deepwater Horizon to the future

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal 
By Naomi Klein 
Simon & Schuster; September 2019

Despite the sub-title, journalist and author Naomi Klein's latest work is not a book-length argument in favor of passing a raft of legislation under the rubric for the Green New Deal...at least, not directly. Klein discusses the concept of a Green New Deal at some length and in some detail in the 50-page introduction, and again in the epilogue, the latter of which is entitled "The Capsule Case for a Green New Deal" and lists nine powerful arguments for it and concisely explains each ("It Will Be a Massive Job Creator", "It's Recession-Proof", etc).

What fills the pages between the introduction and the epilogue are 16 pieces of Klein's, ranging from articles to essays to speeches, from throughout the previous ten years, beginning with the 2010 explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which she vividly describes as open wound in the Earth, and concluding with a short piece on the making of A Message from the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a video Klein co-produced, and art's place in the original New Deal and its potential place in the new New Deal in general.

In different pieces, Klein tackles big issues and devastating problems, at times reporting from the front lines of the climate crisis...although, at this point, the front lines of the climate crisis are more or less everywhere.

She writes of her own family vacation in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, marred by smoke from faraway forest fires, and the difficulty of explaining the problem to her young son. She writes of the Vatican's awakening to the problem of a dying Earth, prompted by Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato, si. She criticizes Nathaniel Rich's 2018 New York Times Magazine article about the climate crisis, specifically for his blaming "human nature" for our failure to tackle it in the late 1980s, rather than placing the blame squarely where she believes it really belongs: The fossil fuel industries who prioritized profits over the well-being of the planet and the people on it, and the weak-willed politicians who refused to stand up on them. She writes of Puerto Rico's difficulties in recovering from Hurricane Maria, writing "There's nothing natural about Puerto Rico's disaster."

While not all were originally written to be read as part of a single argument, these pieces do at least each act as new pieces of evidence for the need for a Green New Deal, a phrase and a concept that didn't quite exist in its current form when the first articles in this book were originally published in The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times and elsewhere. Additionally, Klein writes powerfully, succinctly, persuasively and—maybe most importantly—readably about at-times complex science and daunting economic and social issues.

Some of it is actually tough to read from an emotional standpoint, if only because the truth isn't always all that heartening. We really do have to get our shit together right this second, which means electing Jay Inslee Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren Joe Biden president in November, making sure the House and the Senate are overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats and then hitting the ground running immediately in January of 2021, because the idea of  just getting started on tackling climate change in 2024 is, as Klein say at one point, a joke.

Here's another tough thing to hear:

The hard truth is that the answer to the question "What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?" is: nothing. You can't do anything. In fact, the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement. 

I don't think Klein is arguing not to do anything, and there are things individuals can do as individuals that, if they fail to solve the problem, at least can keep it from getting the tiniest bit worse, but those things will only have an impact if lots of individuals do them. I think it's more an argument for organization and collective action than against individual action.

 But there are parts of the book where Klein writes quite bluntly, and, at times, quite starkly, even harshly. I did almost cry at one point (page 136, during which she tells a heartbreaking story about Australian student and activist Zoe Buckley Lennox, which she concludes on an encouraging note: "[T]he weight of the world is not on any one person's shoulders: Not yours. Not Zoe's. Not mine. It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already party of.")

And then there's the passages about what the climate crisis will mean we do to one another, as richer, more comfortable people are spared the worst effects, while the poorer and more vulnerable are left to suffer and die in floods and storms, heat waves and droughts, from disease and resource wars. (It takes precious little imagination to imagine this. Just look at what has happened on the southern border during the Trump administration; now add people from the southern hemisphere fleeing heat and drought trying to enter the United States in addition to refugees and migrants seeking to escape violence or poverty. Look at how the influx of refugees from Syria and parts of the Middle East and Africa have caused a reactionary rise of the right in Europe in the past decade; multiply that by factors of ten.)

One aspect of the book that I particularly appreciated was the section of the introduction dealing with just what it is we should call our response to the climate crisis, and whether "Green New Deal" is the right branding. Certainly the Republican Party, subsumed as it now is by Trump and the farthest fringes of the right, has been able to rather badly damage that branding with their baseless smears about how it would outlaw cows and airplanes. Even House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi doesn't seem too enchanted with it, referring to it as  recently as February as "The green dream or whatever." 

So what is the proper way to think about an organized United States governmental response to the climate crisis, which needs to be addressed immediately?

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, in which various programs, projects, reforms and regulations remade much of the American economy and society throughout the 1930s in an attempt to recover from the Great Depression?

The moon shot of the 1960s, in which money and political will were poured into conquering a seemingly-impossible feat?

The Marshall Plan, in which the government invested some $12 billion in 1948 dollars (the equivalent of about $128.5 billion in 2020 dollars, according to Wikipedia) to rebuild much of Europe to establish a newer, more stable world order?

The U.S. response to World War II, which involved everyone in the country voluntarily accepting such austerity measures as rationing and conserving and going without, while the government committed unimaginable resources into addressing a global problem?

Perhaps the fighting of the Cold War, in which the government did the heavy-lifting, spending amounts of money that dwarfed that spent on the World Wars, while citizens were mostly free of sacrifice, with some pretty obvious and glaring exceptions?

There are problems with each metaphor, of course, and Klein details a few of them. With World War II-related analogies, be it the fighting of the war or the reconstruction and the Cold War that followed, there's the inescapable fact those conflicts involved tangible enemies that were human like ourselves rather than faceless, impersonal disasters like extreme weather and disease and pollution and heat. 

And even the New Deal analogy is problematic. For one thing, it was very much a top-down initiative, and it doesn't look like we're going to have the sort of government that can make such changes without fucking things up pretty badly in the process. For another, the Americans who benefited the most from the New Deal were the white ones, and, this being 2020, we're going to want a new New Deal that's a lot more progressive than the one from 90 years ago.

FDR's New Deal also lead to what Klein calls a high-carbon lifestyle, including suburban sprawl and encouraging of consumerism, whereas a Green New Deal would include the opposite of that. So there really is no example in post-Industrial Revolution human history with which we can use to explain what needs to happen now. Although the New Deal might end up being the best we can come up with.

Writes Klein:

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 directly employed by the the government; most of America got electricity for the first time; hundreds of thousands of new building 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.

 A lot of those are things that we need now, and things the critics of the Green New Deal say are impossible to accomplish (Like, for example, guaranteeing good jobs to people who lose their jobs because we allow the market to close unprofitable coal mines and related businesses, rather than propping them up with government subsidies).

So yeah, I don't know if Republican and Fox News efforts to make the words "Green New Deal" sound appalling have worked well enough to ruin it as a bit of branding (I thought Governor Inslee's "Evergreen Economy", a campaign document which has outlived his actual campaign, was pretty good branding, myself), but the New Deal does seem to be the best example, even if it's imperfect.

In the first 100 days of his administration, FDR pushed through 15 major pieces of legislation, and that's the sort of speed that President Warren or President Sanders President Biden is going to need to move during the first few months of 2021.

I'd highly recommend Klein's On Fire. It's a very well-written book, it's rhetorically persuasive and, as I mentioned, it is very much written for a general audience, rather than for people with science backgrounds, environmental backgrounds, or even for those who are already dyed-in-the-wool environmental or leftist activists. And, of course, it tackles various pressing environmental issues from various directions throughout.

But the introduction and the epilogue I'd especially recommend to everyone. I wish there was a way to get all politicians to read those (Same goes with Paul Hawken's 2017 Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which features an introduction by some guy named—huh—Tom Steyer.)

The last time I was in a book store (which granted, was now months ago, thanks to the pandemic), I noticed a few books with rather similar titles: Ann Pettifor's The Case For The Green New Deal and Jeremy Rifkin's The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth. Have any of you read either of them? I'm curious about both, but my to-read pile is so enormous now, I think I need a solid recommendation to add another book to it.