by Naomi Klein
Leaders who are rooted in communities that are being egregiously failed by the current system, on the other hand, are liberated to take a very different approach. Their climate policies can embrace deep and systemic change because deep change is precisely what their bases need to thrive.
For decades, the biggest barrier to winning climate legislation has been a vast power mismatch. Opposition to action from fossil fuel companies was ferocious, creative, and tenacious. But when it came to the kinds of weak (and very often unjust) market-based climate policies that made it onto the political agenda, support was tepid at best.
The Green New Deal, however, is already showing that it has the power to mobilize a truly intersectional mass movement behind it—not despite its sweeping ambition, but precisely because of it. As climate justice organizations have been arguing for many years now, when the communities with the most to gain from change lead the movement, they fight to win.
8. IT WILL BUILD NEW ALLIANCES—AND UNDERCUT THE RIGHT
One of the knocks on the Green New Deal is that, by linking climate action with so many other progressive policy goals, conservatives will be more convinced that global warming is a plot to smuggle in socialism, and political polarization will deepen.
There is no question that Republicans in Washington will continue to paint the Green New Deal as a recipe for turning the United States into Venezuela—about that we can all be certain. But this worry misses one of the greatest benefits of approaching the climate emergency as a vast infrastructure and land regeneration project: nothing heals ideological divides faster than a concrete project bringing jobs and resources to hurting communities.
One person who understood this well was FDR. When he rolled out the network of camps that made up the Civilian Conservation Corp, for example, he purposely clustered many of them in rural areas that had voted against him for president. Four years later, when those communities had experienced the benefits of the New Deal up close, they were far less vulnerable to Republican fearmongering about a socialist takeover of government, and many voted Democrat.
We can expect a massive rollout of job-creating green infrastructure and land rehabilitation projects to have a similar effect today. Some people will still be convinced that climate change is a hoax—but if it’s a hoax that creates good jobs and detoxifies the environment, especially in regions where the only other economic development on offer is a supermax prison, who really cares?
9. WE WERE BORN FOR THIS MOMENT
By far the biggest obstacle we are up against is hopelessness, a feeling that it’s all too late, we’ve left it too long, and we’ll never get the job done on such a short time line.
And all of that would be true if the process of transformation were starting from scratch. But the truth is that there are tens of thousands of people, and a great many organizations, who have been preparing for a Green New Deal–style breakthrough for decades (centuries in the case of Indigenous communities that have been protecting their ways of life). These forces have been quietly building local models and road testing policies for how to put justice at the center of our climate response—in how we protect forests, generate renewable energy, design public transit, and much more.
“Who is society?” demanded then–British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987, justifying her relentless attacks on social services. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”
That bleak view of humanity—that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war—has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time. No wonder so many of us believed we could never rise to the climate challenge.
But more than thirty years later, as surely as the glaciers are melting and the ice sheets are breaking apart, that “free-market” ideology is dissolving, too. In its place, a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It’s a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society.
And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JONATHAN KARP AT SIMON & SCHUSTER saw this book through from conception to publication. I am grateful for his faith in me, for his many helpful editorial insights, and for his sense of urgency about the state of our world. Lake Bunkley helped us every step of the way and Jenna Dolan provided a careful copyedit. I am delighted to be working once again with my longtime editor, collaborator, and dear friend Louise Dennys at Penguin Random House Canada, who provided many insightful notes. We are all pleased to be working with the dedicated team at Penguin Random House UK.
My friend Anthony Arnove acted as my agent, finding happy homes for this book in translation around the world, as well as providing valuable editorial comments. Jackie Joiner kept all the moving pieces humming along, from website launch to tour planning. I would be lost without her colleagueship. We are both grateful to Julia Prosser, Shona Cook, Annabel Huxley, and too many others to name here.
Rajiv Sicora, my brilliant collaborator since This Changes Everything, assisted with research for most of the essays in this book. Sharon J. Riley was the researcher on “Season of Smoke” and “The Leap Years: Ending the Story of Endlessness.” Jennifer Natoli and Nicole Weber helped tremendously with new research and updates. I am grateful to Eyal Weizman for allowing me to use his map of the aridity line, as it appears in Forensic Architecture.
Johann Hari was a wonderfully astute first reader and kind friend. I am also grateful to the original editors on these pieces, especially my longtime colleagues and friends: Betsy Reed, Roger Hodge, Richard Kim, and Katharine Viner. I could not walk this road without the wisdom and support of other friends and family members including Kyo Maclear, Bill McKibben, Eve Ensler, Nancy Friedland, Andréa Schmidt, Astra Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Harsha Walia, Molly Crabapple, Janice Fine, Seumas Milne, Jeremy Scahill, Cecilie Surasky, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Bonnie Klein, Michael Klein, Seth Klein, Misha Klein, Christine Boyle, Michele Landsberg, and the indomitable Stephen Lewis. Courtney Butler and Fatima Lima protected space for me to work.
I have been supported throughout this writing by my new community of colleagues at Rutgers University, including Jonathan Potter, Dafna Lemish, Juan Gonzáles, Mary Chayko, Lisa Hetfield, and especially Kylie Davidson. I am indebted to Gloria Steinem whose lifelong work created the position I now hold. I am grateful to everyone at The Intercept for engaging in fearless journalism and providing such a welcome home for my work; same goes for Type Media Institute (formerly The Nation Institute) where I am a fellow. The kick-ass team at The Leap works all day, every day to turn the vision in these pages into a lived reality for all of us. They inspire me beyond measure, and our management team of Leah Henderson, Katie McKenna, and Bianca Mugyenyi lead us with unflagging ambition and confidence.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend and teacher Arthur Manuel, whose absence has left an unfillable hole in my life and in the global movements for climate justice and Indigenous sovereignty. I am grateful to the members of the entire Manuel family who keep his legacy alive and show us all what true leadership looks like.
My husband, Avi Lewis, provided stellar editorial advice, as he has for every book I have written. The fact that he was busily making films about the Green New Deal and helping to get new Green New Deal coalitions off the ground in more than one country was extremely distracting. Our son, Toma, reminds us both daily that failure is not an option.
PUBLICATION CREDITS
Versions of several of these essays appeared in modified forms under the following titles:
“Gulf Oil Spill: A Hole in the World,” The Guardian, June 18, 2010.
“Capitalism vs. the Climate,” The Nation, November 9, 2011.
“Geoengineering: Testing the Waters,” New York Times, October 27
, 2012.
“How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt,” New Statesman America, October 29, 2013.
“Climate Change Is the Fight of Our Lives—Yet We Can Hardly Bear to Look at It,” The Guardian, April 23, 2014.
“Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together,” College of the Atlantic 2015 Commencement Address, Bar Harbor, ME, June 6, 2015.
“A Radical Vatican,” The New Yorker, July 10, 2015.
“Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” 2016 Edward W. Said London Lecture, April 5, 2016. Published in the London Review of Books, June 2, 2016.
“We Are Hitting the Wall of Maximum Grabbing,” 2016 Sydney Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, November 11, 2016. Published in The Nation, December 14, 2016.
“Season of Smoke: In a Summer of Wildfires and Hurricanes, My Son Asks ‘Why Is Everything Going Wrong?’ ” The Intercept, September 9, 2017, Research assistance: Sharon J. Riley.
“Speech to the 2017 Labour Party Conference,” 2017 Labour Party Annual Conference, Brighton, UK, September 26, 2017.
“Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not ‘Human Nature,’ ” The Intercept, August 3, 2018.
“There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster,” The Intercept, September 21, 2018. Piece based on remarks given September 20 at “One Year Since Maria,” a rally in Union Square Park in New York City, organized by UPROSE and OurPowerPRnyc.
“The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal,” The Intercept, February 13, 2019.
More from the Author
This Changes Everything
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© KOUROSH KESHIRI
NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author of the New York Times and international bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything, and No Is Not Enough. A senior correspondent for The Intercept, Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center, and contributor for both The Nation and The Guardian, Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is cofounder of the climate justice organization The Leap.
WWW.NAOMIKLEIN.ORG
@naomiaklein
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Naomi-Klein
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INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Abolition movement, 111
Abram, David, 126–127
Academy Awards, 76
Afghanistan, 162
Africa, 19, 45, 96, 97, 165
After the Last Sky (Said), 149
Air quality warnings, 209–210
Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, New Zealand, 42–45, 48–49
Alberta, Canada, 19, 76–77, 156–157, 159, 160, 170, 200, 215, 218, 228
Algae bloom, 105–106, 109, 243
Alinsky, Saul, 71
Amazon, 204n
American Geophysical Union meeting (2012), 110–111
Anderson, Kevin, 113–117
Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 161
Anthropocentrism, 141
Apophenia, 44
Appalachia, 156
Aquarius (rescue ship), 164n
Arctic drilling, 135–136, 227
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 62
Arctic sea ice, 5, 18
Arctic terns, 120
Aridity line, 161–162
Aroneanu, Phil, 102
Aronoff, Kate, 277
Artists, role of, 271, 273, 275–277
Asperger’s syndrome, 9
Atlantic, The, 230, 231
Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 93
Attawapiskat, Canada, 157
Augustine, Saint, 144
Australia, 3–4, 18–20, 47–48, 163–164, 184, 185, 188, 195–198, 202–205
Autism, 9–10, 15
Ayn Rand Institute, 91
Bachmann, Michele, 72
Bacon, Sir Francis, 59
Bakken oil, 19
Balcombe, England, 118
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, 218
Bangladesh, 126, 207
Ban Ki-moon, 139
Bank of America, 101
Banks, Joseph, 196
Barghouti, Omar, 152–153
Bark beetle epidemic, 221
Barton, Joe, 96
Bast, Joseph, 73, 78, 91–92
Batt, Jim, 278
Beaufort Sea, 76, 227
Beijing, China, 210, 212
Bell, Larry, 71, 95
Benedict XVI, Pope, 141
Berlin Wall, 248
Berry, Wendell, 83, 127–128
Black carbon, 224
Black Lives Matter, 131
Blake, William, 99
Blockades, 111
Blue-Green Alliance, 282
Boekbinder, Kim, 277
Bolivia, 28, 46, 90, 265
Bolsonaro, Jair, 6, 204n
Bonaparte Indian Band, 216
Bonaventura, Saint, 141
Booker, Cory, 30
Bows, Alice, 114–116
Box, Jason, 5, 112, 220
Boyd, Ian, 117
BP (British Petroleum), 20, 54–68, 88, 89, 125, 126, 161, 218, 229
Brazil, 204n, 212
Breakthrough Institute, 100
Breivik, Anders, 46–47
Brexit, 235, 237
British Columbia, 18, 104, 208–214, 216–218, 222–233
British Parliament, 11, 22
British Virgin Islands, 241
British West Indies, 187
Brulle, Robert, 94n
Buen vivir, concept of, 265
Cabot, John, 185
Cáceres, Berta, 159
Calais, France, 163
California, 3, 212, 219, 223, 233
Cameron, James, 110
Canadian Labour Congress, 182
Cancer, 156
“Canticle of the Creatures” (Francis of Assisi), 140
Cap-and-trade schemes, 50, 73, 285, 289
Cape Town, South Africa, 2
Capitalism, 33, 46, 70–72, 77, 88, 90–91, 95, 99, 111, 119, 120, 122, 159, 194, 196, 249–251, 267
Carbon audits, 266
Carbon capture technologies, 24
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, 115
Carbon offset, 152
Carbon taxes, 24, 37, 50, 247, 280
Caribou, 120
Carmichael coal mine, Australia, 198, 202
Carolan, Patrick, 144, 146
Carroll County, Maryland, 70
Cartagena, Dalma, 257–258
Carter, Bob, 95
Cartier, Jacques, 185
Caterpillars, 119–120
Catholic Bishops of the Philippines, 143
Catholic Church, 137–148
Cato Institute, 71, 94
Cell phones, 126
Center for American Progress, 88
Center for Naval Analyses, 162
Charlevoix, Father, 185
Charlottesville, Virginia, 232
Chemical contamination, 112
Chile, 216, 220
China, 21, 37, 80, 85, 115, 123n, 133, 203, 230, 243
Chomsky, Noam, 197
Civil disobedience, 21, 170
; Civil rights movement, 111
Civilian Conservation Corp, 36, 39, 290
Cleveland, Ohio, 83
Climate Accountability Institute, 283
Climate agenda
consumerism/consumption, 81, 85–88, 90, 121–122, 126, 264
corporate regulation, 81, 83–84, 90, 120
economic planning, 81, 82–83, 90
international, 81, 84–85
public infrastructure, 81–82, 90
renewable energy and, 22, 80, 81, 84, 89, 102, 130, 160, 176, 179, 199, 201, 255, 266, 281, 284
taxation, 81, 88–90, 284
(see also Green New Deal)
Climate barbarism, 49–53
Climate Central, 219
Climate change
climate justice movement, 17, 27–28, 51, 99, 130, 156, 178, 181, 200, 201, 206, 289
climate refugees, 154–155, 164
denialism, 70–78, 92–97, 100
emission reduction and, 8, 9, 24, 28, 30, 33, 45–46, 78, 82, 84–86, 107, 113–117, 130, 150, 155, 177, 178, 183, 246, 249, 251, 260, 264, 266, 271, 281, 282, 285
fossil fuels and, 2, 7, 8, 14, 17, 19, 37–39, 51–52, 59, 73, 74n, 76, 78, 82–84, 88–89, 94, 134, 156, 158, 160, 161, 165, 166, 196, 199, 202–203, 241, 244, 247, 251, 260–261, 280
global warming and, 14, 19, 23–24, 70, 72, 74n, 75, 78, 79, 89, 92, 94, 96, 100, 105, 115, 116, 155, 165, 183, 198, 199, 249, 282, 290
greenhouse gas emissions and, 5, 114–115, 126, 133, 181, 223, 270, 283
human migration and, 124–125
“Laudato sì” by Pope Francis and, 137–143, 145–147
Middle East and, 149–153, 161, 162
mismatch/mistiming, 119–121
Rich, Nathaniel on, 243–250
science of, 22–25, 47, 72, 74–76, 78, 89, 91–92, 96, 99, 110–118
shock doctrine, 36
speed of, 123–124
temperatures, 6, 72, 76, 78, 95, 97, 113–114, 150, 165, 183, 198, 209, 220, 221, 224, 260
