by Naomi Klein
To hear Greta and her parents tell it, a big part of emerging from her dangerous depression was finding ways to reduce the unbearable cognitive dissonance between what she had learned about the planetary crisis and how she and her family were living their lives. She convinced her parents to join her in becoming vegan, or at least vegetarian, and, biggest of all, to stop flying. (Her mother is a well-known opera singer, so this was no small sacrifice.)
The amount of carbon kept out of the atmosphere as a result of these lifestyle changes was minute. Greta was well aware of that, but persuading her family to live in a way that began to reflect the planetary emergency helped ease some of the psychic strain. At least now, in their own small ways, they were not pretending that everything was fine.
The most important change Thunberg made, however, had nothing to do with eating and flying. It had to do with finding a way to show the rest of the world that it was time to stop acting like everything was normal when normal would lead straight to catastrophe. If she desperately wanted powerful politicians to put themselves on emergency footing to fight climate change, then she needed to reflect that state of emergency in her own life.
That’s how, at age fifteen, she decided to stop doing the one thing all kids are supposed to do when everything is normal: go to school to prepare for their futures as adults.
“Why,” Greta wondered, “should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society.”
So, in August 2018, at the start of the school year, Thunberg didn’t go to class. She went to Sweden’s parliament and camped outside with a handmade sign that read simply, SCHOOL STRIKE FOR THE CLIMATE. She returned every Friday, spending all day there. At first, Greta, in her thrift shop blue hoodie and tousled brown braids, was utterly ignored, like an inconvenient panhandler tugging at the conscience of stressed-out, harried people.
Gradually, her quixotic protest got a bit of press attention, and other students, and a few adults, started visiting with signs of their own. Next came the speaking invitations—first at climate rallies, then at UN climate conferences, at the European Union, at TEDxStockholm, at the Vatican, at the British Parliament. She was even invited to go up that famous mountain in Switzerland to address the rich and mighty at the annual World Economic Summit in Davos.
Every time she spoke, Greta’s interventions were short, unadorned, and utterly scathing. “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she told the climate change negotiators in Katowice, Poland. “Even that burden you leave to us children.” To British MPs she asked, “Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.”
To the rich and mighty at Davos who praised her for giving them hope, she replied, “I don’t want your hope . . . I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
To those in the rarified crowd of CEOs, celebrities, and politicians who spoke of climate disruption as if it were a problem of universal human shortsightedness, she shot back, “If everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame, and someone is to blame . . . Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular know exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.” She paused, took a breath, and said, “And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”
Her sharpest rebuke to the Davos set was wordless. Rather than staying in one of the five-star hotel rooms on offer, she braved -18°C temperatures (0°F) to sleep outside in a tent, snuggled in a bright yellow sleeping bag. (“I’m not a great fan of heat,” Greta told me.)
When she spoke to these rooms filled with adults in suits, who clapped and filmed her on their smartphones as if she were a novelty act, Thunberg’s voice rarely trembled. But the depth of her feeling—of loss, of fear, of love for the natural world—was always unmistakable. “I beg you,” Thunberg said in an emotional address to members of the European Parliament in April 2019. “Please do not fail on this.”
Even if the speeches did not dramatically change the actions of the policymakers in those stately rooms, they did change the actions of a great many people outside them. Nearly every video of the fiery-eyed girl went viral. It was as if by yelling “Fire!” on our crowded planet, she had given countless others the confidence they needed to believe their own senses and smell the smoke drifting in under all those tightly closed doors.
It was more than that, too. Listening to Thunberg speak about how our collective climate inaction had nearly stolen her will to live seemed to help others feel the fire of survival in their own bellies. The clarity of Greta’s voice gave validation to the raw terror so many of us have been suppressing and compartmentalizing about what it means to be alive amid the sixth great extinction and surrounded by scientific warnings that we are flat out of time.
Suddenly, children around the world were taking their cues from Greta, the girl who takes social cues from no one, and were organizing student strikes of their own. At their marches, many held up placards quoting some of her most piercing words: I WANT YOU TO PANIC, OUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE. At a massive school strike in Düsseldorf, Germany, demonstrators held aloft a giant papier-mâché puppet of Greta, brow furrowed and braids dangling, like the patron saint of pissed-off kids everywhere.
Greta’s voyage from invisible schoolgirl to global voice of conscience is an extraordinary one, and looked at more closely, it has a lot to teach about what it is going to take for all of us to get to safety. Thunberg’s overarching demand is for humanity as a whole to do what she did in her own family and life: close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave. The first stage is to name the emergency, because only once we are on emergency footing will we find the capacity to do what is required.
In a way, she is asking those of us whose mental wiring is more typical—less prone to extraordinary focus and more capable of living with moral contradictions—to be more like her. She has a point.
During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. All three of these mental tricks help us get through the day. It’s also extremely helpful to look unconsciously to our peers and role models to figure out how to feel and act—those social cues are how we form friendships and build cohesive communities.
When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.
In part, this is because if we were to decide to take climate disruption seriously, pretty much every aspect of our economy would have to change, and there are many powerful interests that like things as they are. Not least the fossil fuel corporations, which have funded a decades-long campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and straight-up lies about the reality of global warming.
As a result, when most of us look around for social confirmation of what our hearts and heads are telling us about climate disruption, we are confronted with all kinds of contradictory signals, telling us instead not to worry, that it’s an exaggeration, that there are countless more important problems, countless shinier objects to focus on, that we’ll never make a difference anyway, and so on. And it most certainly doesn’t help that we are trying to navigate this civilizational crisis at a moment when some of the most brilliant minds of our time are devoting vast energies to figuring out ever-more-ingenious tools to keep us running around in digital circles in search of the next dopamine hit.
&nb
sp; This may explain the odd space that the climate crisis occupies in the public imagination, even among those of us who are actively terrified of climate collapse. One minute we’re sharing articles about the insect apocalypse and viral videos of walruses falling off cliffs because sea ice loss has destroyed their habitat, and the next, we’re online shopping and willfully turning our minds into Swiss cheese by scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. Or else we’re binge-watching Netflix shows about the zombie apocalypse that turn our terrors into entertainment, while tacitly confirming that the future ends in collapse anyway, so why bother trying to stop the inevitable? It also might explain the way serious people can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as unserious and unrealistic.
“I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange,” Thunberg has said, adding that it helps not to be easily distracted or reassured by rationalizations. “Because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.” Living with autism is anything but easy—for most people, it “is an endless fight against schools, workplaces and bullies. But under the right circumstances, given the right adjustments it can be a superpower.”
The wave of youth mobilization that burst onto the scene in March 2019 is not the result of one girl and her unique way of seeing the world. Greta is quick to note that she was inspired by another group of teenagers who rose up against a different kind of failure to protect their futures: the students in Parkland, Florida, who led a national wave of class walkouts demanding tough controls on gun ownership after seventeen people were murdered at their school in February 2018.
Nor is Thunberg the first person with tremendous moral clarity to yell “Fire!” in the face of the climate crisis. It has happened multiple times over the past several decades; indeed, it is something of a ritual at the annual UN summits on climate change. But perhaps because these earlier voices belonged to brown and black people from the Philippines, the Marshall Islands, and South Sudan, those clarion calls were one-day stories, if that. Thunberg is also quick to point out that the climate strikes themselves were the work of thousands of diverse student leaders, their teachers, and supporting organizations, many of whom had been raising the climate alarm for years.
As a manifesto put out by British climate strikers put it, “Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we’re the wildfire.”
• • •
For a decade and a half, ever since reporting from New Orleans with water up to my waist after Hurricane Katrina, I have been trying to figure out what is interfering with humanity’s basic survival instinct—why so many of us aren’t acting like our house is on fire when it so clearly is. I have written books, made films, delivered countless talks and cofounded an organization (The Leap) devoted, in one way or another, to exploring this question and trying to help align our collective response to the scale of the climate crisis.
It was clear to me from the start that the dominant theories about how we had landed on this knife edge were entirely insufficient. We were failing to act, it was said, because politicians were trapped in short-term electoral cycles, or because climate change seemed too far off, or because stopping it was too expensive, or because the clean technologies weren’t there yet. There was some truth in all the explanations, but they were also becoming less true over time. The crisis wasn’t far off; it was banging down our doors. The price of solar panels has plummeted and now rivals that of fossil fuels. Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshaled for endless wars, bank bailouts, and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition. There had to be more to it.
This book, made up of long-form reporting, think pieces, and public talks written over the span of a decade, tracks my own attempt to probe a different set of barriers—some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin Western culture. The essays here return frequently to the kinds of responses that might succeed in toppling those narratives, ideologies, and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises (economic, social, ecological, and democratic) into a common story of civilizational transformation. Today, that kind of bold vision increasingly goes under the banner of a “Green New Deal.”
I have chosen to organize the pieces in the order in which they were written, with the original month and year appearing at the start. It’s a structure that, while involving the occasional return to a theme, reflects the evolution of my own analysis as I tested these ideas out in the world and worked in collaboration with countless friends and colleagues in the global climate justice movement. With the exception of the final essays specifically about the Green New Deal, which have been expanded significantly, I resisted the urge to modify the texts and instead left them pretty much intact, clarifying time frames and adding updates in footnotes and postscripts here and there.
Keeping the pieces in chronological order has one main benefit. It’s a nagging reminder that we are in a fast-moving crisis, even though it may not always seem so. In the short decade spanned by this book, the planet has undergone enormous and irreparable damage, from rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice to mass die-offs of coral reefs. The part of the world where my family is from, the west coast of British Columbia, has seen the collapse of certain species of Pacific salmon that hold entire magnificent ecosystems on their backs.
The political map has also changed dramatically over this decade. It has seen the resurgence of an increasingly violent hard right, a force that is gaining power across the globe by stoking hatred against ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, often manifesting as xenophobic hatred directed at the growing numbers of people who have been forced to leave their homelands. These planetary and political trends are, I am convinced, in a kind of lethal dialogue with one another.
For me, the temporal references throughout the book are like the hourglass on that student striker’s sign: relentless evidence that as our societies fail to act like our house is on fire, the house does not just sit there burning like some sort of fixed, looping GIF. The conflagration gathers more and more heat—and irreplaceable parts of the house actually do burn to the ground. Gone, forever.
My primary emphasis in this book is on the countries sometimes referred to as the Anglosphere (the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom) and on some non-English-speaking parts of Europe. In part, this is by happenstance—I currently live and work in the United States, have spent most of my life in Canada, and have participated extensively in climate change debates and initiatives in Australia, the United Kingdom, and other parts of western Europe.
This focus stems mainly, however, from my ongoing attempt to understand why the governments of these countries have proven particularly belligerent when it comes to meaningful climate action. There is still a significant (though thankfully shrinking) segment of the population in each of these nations that chooses to deny the basic fact that human activity is causing the planet to dangerously warm, a glaring truth that is uncontroversial and uncontested in most parts of the world.
Even when outright denial recedes and a more progressive environmental era seems to dawn (in the United States under Barack Obama, in Canada under Justin Trudeau), it is still extremely difficult for these governments to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that we need to stop extending the fossil fuel frontier and, in fact, need to start winding down existing production. Australia, despite its wealth, insists on massively expanding coal production in the teeth of the climate crisis; Canada has done the same with the Alberta tar sa
nds; the United States has done the same with Bakken oil, fracked gas, and deepwater drilling, becoming the world’s largest oil exporter; the United Kingdom has attempted to ram through fracking operations despite fierce opposition and evidence linking it to earthquakes.
In trying to make sense of this, I explore some of the specific ways that these nations led the way in forging the global supply chain that gave birth to modern capitalism, the economic system of limitless consumption and ecological depletion at the heart of the climate crisis. It’s a story that begins with people stolen from Africa and lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, two practices of brutal expropriation that were so dizzyingly profitable that they generated the excess capital and power to launch the age of fossil fuel–led industrial revolution and, with it, the beginning of human-driven climate change. It was a process that required, from the start, pseudoscientific as well as theological theories of white and Christian supremacy, which is why the late political theorist Cedric Robinson argued that the economic system birthed by the convergence of these fires should more aptly be called “racial capitalism.”
Alongside the theories that rationalized treating humans as raw capitalist assets to exhaust and abuse without limit were theories that justified treating the natural world (forests, rivers, land and water animals) in precisely the same way. Millennia of accumulated human wisdom about how to safeguard and regenerate everything from forests to fish runs were swept away in favor of a new idea that there was no limit to humanity’s ability to control the natural world, nor to how much wealth could be extracted from it without fear of consequence.
These ideas about nature’s boundlessness are not incidental to the nations of the Anglosphere; they are foundational myths, woven deep into national narratives. The huge natural wealth of the lands that would become the United States, Canada, and Australia were, from their very first contact with European ships, imagined as sort of body-double nations for colonial powers that were running out of nature to exhaust back home. No more. With the “discovery” of these seemingly limitless “new worlds,” God had granted a reprieve: New England, New France, New Amsterdam, New South Wales—proof positive that Europeans would never run out of nature to exhaust. And when one swath of this new territory grew depleted or crowded, the frontier would simply advance and new “new worlds” would be named and claimed.
