On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  But within a culture that so systematically elevates some lives over others, anger makes many of those men, and women, putty in the hands of whatever demagogue of the moment is offering to deliver back an illusion of dominance, however fleeting. Build a wall. Lock ’em up. Deport them all. Grab ’em wherever you like and show ’em who’s boss.

  What other lessons can we take from our two-day-old reality that we now live in a world with a President Trump?

  One lesson: that the economic pain is real and not going anywhere. Four decades of corporate neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, free trade, and austerity have made sure of that.

  Another lesson: Leaders who represent that failed consensus are no match for the demagogues and neofascists who claim to be toppling it. They have nothing tangible to offer, and they are seen, quite correctly, as the people responsible for much of this economic dislocation.

  Only a bold and genuinely redistributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs: to the politician-purchasing elites who benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

  But there is a deeper lesson that we must urgently learn from this week’s events: If we want to win against the likes of Trump—and every country has its homegrown Trump—we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny, in our culture, in our movements, in ourselves. This cannot be an afterthought; it cannot be an add-on. It is central to how someone like Trump could rise to power. Many people said they voted for him despite his objectionable race and gender pronouncements. They liked what he had to say about trade and bringing back manufacturing and that he wasn’t a “Washington insider.”

  Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. You cannot cast a ballot for someone who is so openly riling up race-, gender-, and physical ability–based hatreds unless, on some level, you think those issues aren’t that important. You just can’t do it. You can’t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice “the other” for your (hoped-for) gain.

  But this isn’t just about Trump voters and the stories they may have told themselves. We have arrived at this dangerous moment also because of the stories about “the other” told on the progressive side of the political spectrum. Like the one that holds that when we fight against war and climate change and economic inequality, it will benefit black people and Indigenous people the most because they are most victimized by the current system.

  That doesn’t work, either. There is too long and too painful a track record of left movements for economic justice leaving workers of color, Indigenous people, and women’s labor out in the cold.

  To build a truly inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts with and is led by the most brutalized and excluded. Rinaldo Walcott, a great Canadian writer and intellectual, issued a challenge a couple of months ago to white liberals and leftists. He wrote:

  Black people are dying in our cities, crossing oceans, in resource wars not of our making. . . . Indeed, it is obvious that Black peoples’ lives are disposable in a way and fashion that is radically different from other groups globally.

  It is from this stark reality of marginalization that I want to propose that any new policy actions in the North American context ought to pass what I will call the Black test. The Black test is simple: it demands that any policy meet the requirement of ameliorating the dire conditions of Black peoples’ lives. . . . When a policy does not meet this test, then it is a failed policy, from the first instance of its proposal.

  That’s worth thinking hard about. I know that my work has too often failed to pass that test. But now more than ever, those of us who talk about peace, justice, and equality must rise to that challenge.

  When it comes to climate action, it’s abundantly clear that we will not build the power necessary to win unless we embed justice—particularly racial but also gender and economic justice—at the center of our low-carbon policies. Intersectionality, the term coined by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the only path forward. We cannot play “my crisis is more urgent than your crisis”—war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.

  Either we fight for a future in which everyone belongs, starting with those being most battered by injustice and exclusion today, or we will keep losing. And there is no time for that. Moreover, when we make these connections among issues (climate, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny), there is a kind of relief. Because it actually is all connected, all part of the same story.

  I was feeling this very intensely last week when I visited the Great Barrier Reef. I was there making a short film with the Guardian about this natural wonder, currently in the midst of a vast die-off, one directly linked to warming oceans.I Looking at a whole lot of bleached and dead coral, I found that most of my thoughts were about my four-year-old son, Toma, who still can’t quite swim and will very likely never see a thriving reef in his lifetime.

  There is no question that the strongest emotions I have about the climate crisis have to do with him and his generation—the tremendous intergenerational theft under way. I have flashes of sheer panic about the extreme weather we have already locked in for these kids. Even more intense than this fear is the sadness about what they won’t ever know. They are growing up in a mass extinction, robbed of the cacophonous company of so many fast-disappearing life forms. It feels so desperately lonely.

  But that wasn’t all I was thinking about. Floating in the waters off Port Douglas, I also found myself thinking, as one does, about Captain James Cook. Thinking about all these forces that came together right around the time that the HMS Endeavour navigated those very waters.

  As all you good students of Australian history know, Cook arrived in Queensland in 1770. Just six years later, the Watt commercial steam engine went on the market, a machine that massively accelerated the Industrial Revolution, now powered by a potent combination of slave labor in the colonies and coal fed into those commercial steam engines. That same year, 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the foundational text of contemporary capitalism—just in time for the United States to declare its independence from Britain.

  Colonialism, slavery, coal, capitalism—all tightly bound up together in the span of six years, creating the modern world.

  This country called Australia was born precisely at the dawn of fossil-fueled capitalism. We should connect the dots because they are connected—the land grabs, the fossil fuels that began changing our climate, the economic and social theories that rationalized it all. We are all living, in a very real sense, in Captain Cook’s climate, or at least the one his fateful ocean voyages played an absolutely central part in creating.

  One detail that particularly struck me in my research for this lecture: The HMS Endeavour didn’t start life as a navy or scientific vessel, tasked with unlocking astrological and biological mysteries—and, in its spare time, claiming vast swaths of territory for the British Crown without Indigenous consent. No, the HMS Endeavour was built in 1764 to haul coal through British waterways. When the navy bought it, the boat had to be extensively (and expensively) retrofitted to be suited for Cook and Joseph Banks’s voyage. It seems somehow fitting that the ship that laid claim to New South Wales and Queensland started life as a coal vessel.

  Is it any wonder your government has an unnatural love affair with coal? Is it any wonder that not even the catastrophic bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the wonders of the world, has inspired Queensland’s government to rethink its reliance on that black rock?

  As Vandana Shiva said when accepting this prize six years ago, the roots of our crisis lie “in an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits.” Limits are a problem for our economic system. Ours is a culture of endless taking, as if there were no end and no consequences. A culture of grabbing
and going.

  And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected Donald Trump as its grabber in chief—a man who openly brags about grabbing women without their consent; who says about the invasion of Iraq, “We should have taken their oil,” international law be damned.

  This rampant grabbing is not just a Trump thing, of course. We have an epidemic of grabbing. Land grabbing. Resource grabbing. Even grabbing the sky by polluting so much that there is no atmospheric space left for the poor to develop.

  And now we are hitting the wall of maximum grabbing. That’s what climate change is telling us. That’s what our endless wars are telling us. That’s what Trump’s electoral victory is telling us. That it’s time to put everything we have into shifting from a culture of endless taking to a culture of consent and caretaking.

  Caring for the planet, and for one another.

  • • •

  When I learned that I had been awarded the Sydney Peace Price for my climate work, I was incredibly honored. This is a prize that has gone to some of my personal heroes—Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu, among so many others. It’s a very nice tribe to be a part of.

  So, I was thrilled to receive the call. But after that wore off a bit, the doubts surfaced. One was: Why me? My writing builds on the work of so many thousands of climate justice activists around the world, many who have been at it for far longer than I. Another doubt was more practical: Can I really justify the transportation pollution required to accept an award for doing my bit to fight pollution? To be perfectly honest with you, I’m still not sure it can be justified.

  But I consulted with Australian friends and colleagues. They pointed out that your government is the number-one coal exporter in the world, selling directly to those countries whose emissions are growing most rapidly. That you are well on your way to playing the same leading role for liquefied natural gas.

  Even as other countries freeze and wind down their coal production, your prime minister is defiant. He says the plan is to stay the course with coal “for many, many decades to come”—long past the time when we all need to be off that dirty fuel if the Paris climate goals have a chance of being met. Earlier this week, I said that Australia stands increasingly alone in raising its sooty middle finger to the world. Unfortunately, I now have to amend that statement: Starting in January, when Donald Trump moves into the White House, Malcolm Turnbull will have some company. Ouch.

  The Australian friends whom I consulted told me that having the megaphone that comes with this prize could help support their work—crucial efforts to stop new fossil fuel projects like the gargantuan Carmichael coal mine on Wangan and Jagalingou territory. And to stop the Northern Gas Pipeline, which would open up vast areas of the Northern Territory to industrial fracking.

  This resistance is of global importance, because these mega projects concern massive pools of what we now call “unburnable carbon,” carbon dioxide and methane that, if extracted and burned, will not only blow past Australia’s paltry climate commitments but blow the global carbon budget as well. The math on this is very clear: In Paris, our governments (even yours) agreed to a goal of keeping warming below 2°C while pursuing “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”

  That goal—and it’s an ambitious one—places all of humanity within the confines of a carbon budget. That’s the total amount of carbon that can be emitted if we want to hit those targets and give island nations a fighting chance of surviving. And what we now know, thanks to breakthrough research from Oil Change International in Washington, DC, is that if we were to burn all the oil, gas, and coal from fields and mines already in production, we would very likely pass 2°C of warming and would certainly pass 1.5°C.

  What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground.

  What we must instead do is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy—in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

  The better news is that as we transform how we generate energy, how we move ourselves around, how we grow our food and how we live in cities, we have a historic opportunity to build a society that is fairer on every front, and where everyone is valued. Here’s how we do it. We make sure that, wherever possible, our renewable energy comes from community-controlled providers and cooperatives, so that decisions about land use are made democratically and profits from energy production are used to pay for much-needed services.

  We know that our reliance on dirty energy over the past couple hundred years has taken its highest toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people, overwhelmingly people of color, many Indigenous. That’s whose lands have been stolen and poisoned by mining. And it’s poor urban communities who get the most polluting refineries and power plants in their neighborhoods.

  So, we can and must insist that Indigenous and other front-line communities be first in line to receive public funds to own and control their own green energy projects—with the jobs, profits, and skills staying in those communities. This has been a central demand of the climate justice movement, led by communities of color. This is already starting to happen on an ad hoc basis. But too often, it is left to already underfunded communities to raise the finances. That is upside down: Climate justice means these communities are owed public funds as a drop in the ocean of reparation.

  Climate justice also means that workers in high-carbon sectors, many of whom have sacrificed their health in coal mines and oil refineries, must be full and democratic participants in this justice-based transition. The guiding principle must be: No worker left behind.

  Here are a couple of examples from my country. There is a group of oil workers in the Alberta tar sands who have started an organization called Iron and Earth. They are calling on our government to retrain laid-off oil workers and put them back to work installing solar panels, starting with public buildings like schools. It’s an elegant idea, and almost everyone who hears about it supports it.

  Our postal workers union, meanwhile, has been facing a push to shut down post offices, restrict mail delivery, and maybe even sell off the whole service to FedEx. Austerity as usual. But instead of fighting for the best deal they can get under this failed logic, they have put together a visionary plan for every post office in the country to become a hub for the green transition—a place where you can recharge electric vehicles and do an end-run around the big banks and get a loan to start an energy co-op; and where the entire delivery fleet is not only electric and made in Canada but also does more than deliver mail: It delivers locally grown produce and checks in on the elderly.

  These are bottom-up, democratically conceived plans for a justice-based transition off fossil fuels. And we need them developed in every sector (from health care to education to media) and multiplied around the world.

  Sounds pricey, you say? Good thing we live in a time of unprecedented private wealth. For starters, we can and must take the profits from the dying days of fossil fuels and spend them on climate justice. To subsidize free public transit and affordable renewable power. To help poor nations leapfrog over fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. To support migrants displaced from their lands by oil wars, bad trade deals, drought, and other worsening impacts of climate change, and by the poisoning of those lands by mining companies, many based in wealthy countries like yours and mine.

  The bottom line is this: As we get clean, we have got to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can b
egin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery. Yes, the hardest stuff. Because we haven’t just been procrastinating climate action all these years. We’ve been procrastinating and delaying the most basic demands of justice and reparation. And we are out of time on every front.

  All this should be done because it’s right and just, but also because it’s smart. The hard truth is: Environmentalists can’t win the emission-reduction fights on our own. It’s not a slight against anyone; the lift is just too heavy. This transformation represents a revolution in how we live, work, and consume.

  To win that kind of change, it will take powerful alliances with every arm of the progressive coalition: trade unions, migrant rights, Indigenous rights, housing rights, transit, teachers, nurses, doctors, artists. To change everything, it takes everyone.

  And to build that kind of coalition, it’s got to be about justice: economic justice, racial justice, gender justice, migrant justice, historical justice. Not as afterthoughts but as animating principles. That will only happen when we take real leadership from those most impacted. Murrawah Johnson, an amazing young Indigenous leader who is at the heart of the struggle against the Carmichael mine, put it very well the other night here in Sydney: “People need to learn to be led.”

  Not because it’s “politically correct,” but because justice in the here and now is the only thing that has ever motivated popular movements to throw heart and soul into struggle. I’m not talking about going to a march or signing a petition, though there is a place for that. I’m talking about the sustained, daily, and long-haul work of social transformation. It’s the thirst for justice—the desperate bodily need for justice—that builds movements like that.