by Naomi Klein
In these pages, I explore this original imaginative sin as it relates to the climate crisis from many different vantage points: the black death of BP’s oil spreading through the Gulf of Mexico; the Vatican under Pope Francis’s “ecological conversion”; Trump’s grab-and-go America; the die-off in the Great Barrier Reef, where Captain James Cook’s ship (a converted coal barge) once ran aground; and more. I also try to understand the intersection of these collapsing mythologies, as nature reveals itself to be anything but infinitely exhaustible and abusable, and the terrifying resurgence of the ugliest and most violent parts of these colonial narratives throughout the Anglosphere—the parts about the right of supposedly superior white Christians to inflict tremendous violence on those they have decided to classify as beneath them in a brutal hierarchy of humanity.
I am not arguing that these nations are the sole drivers of our ecological breakdown, not by any means. Our crisis is global, and many other countries have polluted recklessly during this same period. (Pick your petrostate, or watch China’s and India’s emissions soar.) But rapid acceleration of climate breakdown has occurred simultaneous to, and as a direct result of, the successful globalization of the high consumer lifestyle birthed in the nations I write about in this book. These are, moreover, the nations that have been polluting at extremely high levels for centuries and that, therefore, had an obligation, under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that their governments all signed, to lead the way on emission reduction before the developing world. As US officials used to say during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “We broke it, we bought it.”
A PEOPLE’S EMERGENCY
Yet, as deep as our crisis runs, something equally deep is also shifting, and with a speed that startles me. As I write these words, it is not only our planet that is on fire. So are social movements rising up to declare, from below, a people’s emergency. In addition to the wildfire of student strikes, we have seen the rise of Extinction Rebellion, which exploded on the scene and kicked off a wave of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, including a mass shutdown of large parts of Central London. Extinction Rebellion is calling on governments to treat climate change as an emergency, to rapidly transition to 100 percent renewable energy in line with climate science, and to democratically develop the plan for how to implement that transition through citizens’ assemblies. Within days of its most dramatic actions in April 2019, Wales and Scotland both declared a state of “climate emergency,” and the British Parliament, under pressure from opposition parties, quickly followed suit.
In this same period in the United States, we have seen the meteoric rise of the Sunrise Movement, which burst onto the political stage when it occupied the office of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, DC, one week after her party had won back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. Wasting no time on congratulations, the Sunrisers accused the party of having no plan to respond to the climate emergency. They called on Congress to immediately adopt a rapid decarbonization framework, one as ambitious in speed and scope as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the sweeping package of policies designed to battle the poverty of the Great Depression and the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.
As a writer and organizer, I have been part of the global climate movement for years, and it has taken me to many large marches and mass actions, including the four-hundred-thousand-strong People’s Climate March in New York City in 2014. I have covered and participated in major UN climate summits that made lofty promises to rise to humanity’s existential challenge (Copenhagen in 2009, Paris in 2014). As a board member of the climate campaign group 350.org, I was part of kick-starting the fossil fuel divestment movement, which, as of December 2018, succeeded in getting $8 trillion in investment wealth to commit to selling off its holdings in fossil fuel companies. And I have been part of several movements, some of them successful, to stop the laying of new oil pipelines.
The activism we are seeing today builds on this history and also changes the equation completely. Though many of the efforts just described were large, they still engaged primarily with self-identified environmentalists and climate activists. If they did reach beyond those circles, the engagement was rarely sustained for more than a single march or pipeline fight. Outside the climate movement, there was still a way that the planetary crisis could be forgotten for months on end or go barely mentioned during pivotal election campaigns.
Our current moment is markedly different, and the reason for that is twofold: one part having to do with a mounting sense of peril, the other with a new and unfamiliar sense of promise.
THE RADICALIZING POWER OF CLIMATE SCIENCE
One month before the Sunrisers occupied the office of soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report that had a greater impact than any publication in the thirty-one-year history of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning organization.
The report examined the implications of keeping the increase in planetary warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7°F). Given the worsening disasters we are already seeing with about 1°C of warming, it found that keeping temperatures below the 1.5°C threshold is humanity’s best chance of avoiding truly catastrophic unraveling.
But doing that would be extremely difficult. According to the UN World Meteorological Organization, we are on a path to warming the world by 3–5°C by the end of the century. Turning our economic ship around in time to keep the warming below 1.5°C would require, the IPCC authors found, cutting global emissions approximately in half in a mere twelve years—that’s eleven years as this book goes to press—and getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Not just in one country but in every major economy. And because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already dramatically surpassed safe levels, it would also require drawing a great deal of that down, whether through unproven and expensive carbon capture technologies or the old-fashioned ways: by planting billions of trees and other carbon-sequestering vegetation.
Pulling off this high-speed pollution phaseout, the report establishes, is not possible with singular technocratic approaches like carbon taxes, though those tools must play a part. Rather, it requires deliberately and immediately changing how our societies produce energy, how we grow our food, how we move ourselves around, and how our buildings are constructed. What is needed, the report’s summary states in its first sentence, is “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
This was not the first terrifying climate report by any means, nor the first unequivocal call from respected scientists for radical emission reduction. My bookshelves are crowded with these findings. But like Greta Thunberg’s speeches, the starkness of the IPCC’s call for root-and-branch societal change, and the shortness of the time line it laid out for pulling it off, focused the public mind like nothing before.
A big part of that has to do with the source. After governments came together to recognize the threat of global warming in 1988, the United Nations created the IPCC to provide policymakers with the most reliable information possible to inform their decisions. For this reason, the panel synthesizes all the best science to come up with projections that a great many scientists need to agree on before anything is made public—and even then, nothing can go out before the governments themselves sign off.
Because of this laborious process, IPCC projections have been notoriously conservative, often dangerously underestimating risk. And yet here was a report, drawing on some six thousand sources, created by nearly one hundred authors and review editors, saying in no uncertain terms that if governments did as little to cut emissions as they were currently pledging to do, we were headed toward consequences including sea level rise that would swallow coastal cities, the total die-off of coral reefs, and droughts that would wipe out crops in huge parts of the globe.
Today’s high school students will still be in their twenties when global emissions need to have already been cut in half to avo
id those outcomes. And yet the fateful decisions about whether those cuts will happen—decisions that will shape their entire lives—are being made well before most of them even have the right to vote.
It was against this backdrop that 2019’s cascade of large and militant climate mobilizations unfolded. Again and again at the strikes and protests, we heard the words “We have only twelve years.” Thanks to the IPCC’s unequivocal clarity, as well as direct and repeated experience with unprecedented weather, our conceptualization of this crisis is shifting. Many more people are beginning to grasp that the fight is not for some abstraction called “the earth.” We are fighting for our lives. And we don’t have twelve years anymore; now we have only eleven. And soon it will be just ten.
ENTER THE GREEN NEW DEAL
As powerful a motivator as the IPCC report has proven to be, perhaps an even more important factor has to do with this book’s subtitle: the calls coming from many different quarters in the United States and around the world for governments to respond to the climate crisis with a sweeping Green New Deal. The idea is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion. Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.
In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them. It would also strive for something more amorphous but equally important: at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even about what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together. In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.
The various plans that have emerged for a Green New Deal–style transformation envision a future where the difficult work of transition has been embraced, including sacrifices in profligate consumption. But in exchange, day-to-day life for working people has been improved in countless ways, with more time for leisure and art, truly accessible and affordable public transit and housing, yawning racial and gender wealth gaps closed at last, and city life that is not an unending battle against traffic, noise, and pollution.
Long before the IPCC’s 1.5°C report, the climate movement had focused on the perilous future we faced if politicians failed to act. We popularized and shared the latest terrifying science. We said no to new oil pipelines, gas fields, and coal mines; no to universities, local governments, and unions investing endowments and pensions in the companies behind these projects; no to politicians who denied climate change and no to politicians who said all the right things but did the wrong ones. All this was critical work, and it remains so. But while we raised the alarm, only the relatively small “climate justice” wing of the movement focused its attention on the kind of economy and society we wanted instead.
That was the game changer of the Green New Deal bursting into the political debate in November 2018. Wearing shirts that read WE HAVE A RIGHT TO GOOD JOBS AND A LIVABLE FUTURE, hundreds of young members of the Sunrise Movement chanted for a Green New Deal as they lined the halls of Congress shortly after the 2018 midterms. There was finally a big and bold “yes” to pair with the climate movement’s many “no’s,” a story of what the world could look like after we embraced deep transformation, and a plan for how to get there.
The Green New Deal’s roots-up approach to the climate crisis is not itself new. This kind of “climate justice” framework (as opposed to the more generic “climate action”) has been attempted locally for many years, with its origins in the Latin American and US environmental justice movements. And the concept of a Green New Deal has made it into the platforms of a few small Green parties around the world.
My 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, explored this kind of holistic approach in depth. The historical precedent I used back then came from a Bolivian climate negotiator named Angélica Navarro Llanos, who delivered a blistering address to a 2009 UN climate summit: “We need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth,” she declared, invoking the ways that the United States, fearing an ascendant Soviet Union, had helped rebuild large parts of Europe after World War II. “This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce emissions while raising people’s quality of life. We have only a decade.”
We wasted the entire decade following that call with tinkering and denial, and we will never get back the wonders that are gone as a result—or the lives and livelihoods destroyed because of it. Navarro Llanos and her fellow Bolivians have watched the majestic glaciers that provide fresh water for the metropolitan area of La Paz (home to 2.3 million people) recede with alarming speed. In 2017, reservoirs ran so low that water rationing was introduced for the first time in the capitol and a state of emergency had to be declared across the country.
But that lost decade does not make Navarro Llanos’s prescient call less relevant—it makes it far more so, given that, as the IPCC report made so clear, hundreds of millions of lives hang in the balance with every half degree of warming we either enable or avoid.
• • •
Something else has changed since that call was issued a decade ago. Before, when social movements and small country governments made these demands, it felt as if we were screaming into a political void. There was really no cohort in the governments of the wealthiest countries on the planet willing to entertain this kind of emergency approach to the climate crisis. Trickle-down market mechanisms were the only ones on offer. And when there was an economic downturn, even those inadequate offerings evaporated.
That is no longer the case today. There is now a bloc of politicians in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, some just a decade older than the young climate activists in the streets, ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times. Most prominent among this new political breed is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress.
Introducing a Green New Deal was part of the platform she ran on. Quickly after winning the elections, several members of the small group of young congresswomen sometimes referred to as the “squad” pledged their support for the bold initiative, particularly Rashida Tlaib of Detroit and Ayanna Pressley of Boston.
So, when hundreds of members of the Sunrise Movement came to Washington after the midterms to hold demonstrations and sit-ins, these newly elected representatives did not keep a safe distance from the rabble-rousers. Instead, they joined them, with Tlaib speaking at one of their rallies (and bringing candy for the crowd to help keep their energy up) and Ocasio-Cortez dropping by their sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office.
“I just want to let you all know how pr
oud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future,” she told the demonstrators, reminding them that “my journey here started at Standing Rock,” a reference to her decision to run for Congress after participating in the anti-pipeline protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux.
Then, three months later, Ocasio-Cortez, along with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, stood in front of the Capitol and launched a formal resolution for a Green New Deal, a rough outline of the key planks of the transformation. The Green New Deal resolution begins with the terrifying science and short time lines in the IPCC report and calls for the United States to launch a moon shot approach to decarbonization, attempting to reach net-zero emissions in just one decade, in line with getting the entire world there by mid-century.
As part of this sweeping transition, it calls for huge investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean transportation. It states that workers moving from high-carbon industries to green ones should have their wage levels and benefits protected, and it guarantees a job to all who want to work. It also calls for the communities who have borne the toxic brunt of dirty industries, so many of them Indigenous, black, and brown, not only to benefit from the transitions but to help design them at the local level. And as if all this weren’t enough, it folds in key demands from the growing Democratic Socialist wing of the Democratic Party: free universal health care, child care, and higher education.
