by Naomi Klein
cleaning polluted land and water, restoring damaged wildlife habitat and wilderness areas, and planting trees
upgrading homes, businesses, factories, and public buildings to make them more energy-efficient
teaching children, providing mental health support, caring for the sick and elderly, and making art—all of which are already low-carbon professions and can be made even more so with the right adjustments.
Would programs like these be expensive? Yes, but the New Deal and the Marshall Plan proved that governments can find resources when they have to. More recently, the US government spent enormous sums bailing out bankrupt financial institutions and buoying up the economy after a financial crisis and recession in 2008–2009 and again amid the COVID-19 economic downturn. The money is there—if the need is clear and people demand it.
And the need for climate action is clear. People and movements across the United States and around the world are calling for their governments to meet the climate crisis with sweeping programs of changes.
The forces that are failing us are our dependence on fossil fuels, the power of international energy and agribusiness corporations, and the stranglehold of business as usual. They are not just destroying our planet. They are destroying people’s quality of life.
People are hurt by the growing gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else; by the trampling on the rights of poor and Indigenous People; and by the crumbling of bridges, dams, and other public works; just as much as by the effects of climate change. Can our current economic system be relied on to change this? Unlikely. The rise of free-market ideas has weakened the notion that governments are responsible for regulating what corporations can do. And without regulations, corporations have no reason to act against their own interest—which is profit.
To make the deep transformation that is needed to ensure our best future, we need a plan that tackles climate change and reforms the economic model that drives it. We could have societies and economies that are built to protect and renew our planet’s life-support systems while also respecting and supporting all of us who depend on those systems.
Making a change this big and this broad is a huge task. As with the New Deal, the World War II effort, and the Marshall Plan, new laws and regulations will be needed to bring about a massive transformation. Governments will have to change their spending habits to pay for it. People have developed a number of visions of this transformation. To highlight the fact that we already have an example in our history, most of them are called a Green New Deal.
THE GREEN NEW DEAL—AND MORE
Young climate activists from a group called the Sunrise Movement made news in late 2018 when they held sit-ins at the office of the soon-to-be Speaker of the US House of Representatives. The youth-led movement felt that leaders of government were not doing enough about the climate crisis, so they brought the crisis to the government.
Even members of the Sunrise Movement who were too young to vote took a passionate interest in politics. They urged political candidates to refuse donations from the fossil-fuel industry. They supported candidates who favored renewable energy.
Above all, the young people of the Sunrise Movement called on political leaders to plan a Green New Deal. Such a plan would end the country’s dependence on fossil fuels while also creating environmentally safe jobs and guaranteeing social and climate justice.
Today’s young people join the call for a Green New Deal to build a livable future.
The idea of an environmental version of the New Deal has been around since the mid-2000s. Economists, environmentalists, and a few politicians raised the idea in the United States and Great Britain and at the United Nations. In the fall of 2018, though, it became a mainstream political issue after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its report detailing the actions needed to meet the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C (2.7°F) by 2100, as discussed in chapter 2.
In early 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey presented one possible plan to the US Congress as a Green New Deal resolution.
The resolution asked Congress to commit to moving the nation toward zero carbon emissions and commit to a goal of getting all energy from clean, renewable sources very rapidly. Ways to do this would include:
upgrading existing buildings, and constructing new ones to make efficient use of energy and water
supporting clean manufacturing practices, such as switching to different raw materials and techniques that would reduce pollution and greenhouse gases from industry and manufacturing
investing in more efficient power grids and working to make electricity affordable and clean
overhauling the nation’s transportation system, including investing in public transportation, high-speed trains, and vehicles that do not emit greenhouse gases.
The version of the Green New Deal offered by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey had goals that went beyond cutting carbon, into the realm of improving society through wide-reaching changes. It wanted guarantees that all Americans would be provided with jobs that pay enough to support a family; with education, including college; with high-quality health care; with safe, affordable housing; and with “access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.” It stressed that all these things were rights, not privileges, and should never be denied to people simply because they lack money.
This Green New Deal aimed at putting the ideals of fairness and justice into practice, as well as fighting climate change. The benefits would go far beyond limiting climate change. Jobs and environmental protection would receive a huge, lifesaving boost. Systems that lock in inequalities and injustices—between Black and white people, between citizens and immigrants, between women and men, between Indigenous People and non-Indigenous people—would start to crumble.
The resolution presented by Senator Markey and Representative Ocasio-Cortez did not pass in a Senate vote. But a number of US senators and representatives support some form of a Green New Deal, although some of them want to focus only on environmental and climate solutions. And public pressure for progress on climate change is not going away. Another Green New Deal proposal will come before Congress before long.
People and political parties are calling for similar plans in other countries too. In Canada, Australia, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and other nations, voters and leaders will be asked to choose: commit to some version of a Green New Deal, or let “business as usual” keep adding carbon to the atmosphere.
When we do adopt a Green New Deal, we must avoid things that have failed us in the past. We must make sure that no one is excluded or left behind because they lack political power. We must recognize that when it comes to climate change, business interests are not the same as the interests of the people and the planet. We must not let corporate and business interests make all the decisions, although we must also work to sustain our economies, including businesses that want to be part of the solution. We must seek deep change based in shared, democratic decision-making, with all of our voices heard.
We need more than a New Deal painted green, or a Marshall Plan with solar panels.
Instead of the New Deal’s highly centralized dams and fossil-fuel power plants, we need wind and solar power that is produced by many sources and, where possible, owned by communities.
Instead of sprawling white suburbs and racially segregated inner-city housing projects, we need beautifully designed, racially integrated, zero-carbon sustainable urban housing, built with input from communities of color, rather than shaped entirely by real estate developers and investors whose only goal is profit.
Instead of handing over conservation of our natural resources and public lands to military and federal agencies, we need to empower Indigenous communities, small farmers and ranchers, and folk who practice sustainable fishing. They can lead a process of planting billions of trees, repairing wetlands, and renewing soil and reefs.
In other words, we need things we’ve neve
r tried on a large scale. We need to build society around the understanding that well-being for all matters more than economic growth. Only then can we truly move away from climate-changing pollution and climate injustice.
Another thing we haven’t yet tried is paying the climate debt you read about in chapter 3. This would benefit the whole world by helping poorer nations cut their carbon emissions and advance toward clean energy.
We could also try rejecting a way of life that centers on shopping. The world does not have enough resources and energy to give everyone a life of consumer luxury. We could, though, improve everyone’s quality of life in different ways.
The United States and many other societies have become trapped in the belief that “quality of life” means working harder, consuming more and more things, and gaining wealth. But if that were really making us happy, would we see such high levels of stress, depression, and substance abuse? What if the economy were set up for people to work less, so that they would have more time for friendship, recreation, being in nature, and making and enjoying art? Research has shown that these things—which demand far less energy and fewer resources than the constant stream of manufactured consumer objects—really do make people happier.
More than anything else, the health of our planet will determine the quality of all our lives. When hundreds of chanting young members of the Sunrise Movement lined the halls of Congress, they wore shirts that read WE HAVE A RIGHT TO A LIVABLE FUTURE AND GOOD JOBS. They held banners that read WE HAVE 12 YEARS. WHAT IS YOUR PLAN? And they offered much more than criticism of the problems. They offered a story about what the world could look like after a deep change, and they offered a plan for how to get there.
The climate movement is good at saying no—no to pollution and no to more drilling and extraction. The Green New Deal is something different. It’s a big, bold yes to go along with those no’s. It doesn’t just tell us what we can’t do. It shows us what we can do instead.
Your generation is spreading the vision of a Green New Deal. Young people are telling us that politicians can no longer avoid it, and they are right.
Buen Vivir, Living Well Together
If we turn away from the idea that nature is a thing to be conquered and depleted by humans, what ideas will take its place? Is there a different way to view the world and our place in it?
There is. One example is buen vivir, a Spanish expression for “living well.” Social movements in Ecuador and Bolivia use it to mean “living well together.” Buen vivir is a view of life rooted in the beliefs of Indigenous Peoples in those South American countries. It promotes harmonious relationships—not just harmony among individuals but harmony between people and the natural world. Buen vivir respects cultures, shared community values, and other living things. It sees humans as living in partnership with the land and its resources, not as their owners or masters.
Buen vivir is about the right to a good life, where everyone has enough, instead of the more-and-more life of constant consumerism. Movements across South America are taking buen vivir as a starting point for talking about social, economic, and environmental issues.
A victory in New Zealand reflects the values of buen vivir, even though it was won across the Pacific Ocean from South America.
The Maori are the Indigenous People in what is now called New Zealand. In 2017, after more than a century of petitions and legal actions, Maori people who live along the Whanganui River won legal “personhood” for the river. The New Zealand government officially recognized that the river nourishes the Maori, both physically and spiritually. It guaranteed the river the same rights in law as a person or a corporation. This act opened up new possibilities for expressing our values, protecting the natural world, and changing the way we interact with it.
MIGHTY MOVEMENTS
As we develop a vision for a Green New Deal, climate and justice activists today can learn valuable lessons from the original New Deal and the Marshall Plan. One lesson is that it is always possible to find a new approach to a crisis. In the 1930s the United States faced the emergency of economic depression and unemployment. In the 1940s and into the 1950s, it faced the disaster of European and Asian countries that had been broken by war.
What happened in each case? Entire societies—consumers, workers, manufacturers, and every level of government—were part of the response. Many parts of society came together to bring about deep change. They shared clear goals: to rescue the economy by creating jobs for unemployed people during the Depression, and to lift up a continent crushed by World War II.
Another lesson is that the problem solvers of the past did not look for only a single answer to the problem. And they did not simply tinker with surface fixes. In both the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, the solution was a broad range of actions. People were given jobs on public projects. Government and industry worked together on planning. Banks were encouraged to make certain kinds of investments. Individual consumers changed their habits.
It’s easy to get discouraged about how much change is needed to battle the climate crisis, especially when we face so many other urgent crises, including racism and public health emergencies such as COVID-19. But these examples from history show us that when ambitious goals and strong policies come together, almost all aspects of a society can change to meet a common goal on a tight deadline.
The examples of the New Deal and the Marshall Plan show us something else. Each of them involved false starts, experiments, and course corrections along the way. The lesson from this is that we don’t have to figure out every detail before we start. We can jump in and take action on a big, urgent project—such as a Green New Deal to fight climate change and bring about social justice.
But we can’t do it if we don’t start.
History has another lesson for us. It might be the most important of all. It is this: most of the changes that moved society toward greater sharing and fairness happened only because of one thing. That was the relentless pressure of large, organized groups of people. In other words, movements, such as the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States that ended legalized separation by race in schools and public life.
Movements will make, or break, the Green New Deal. Any presidents or governments that try to make a Green New Deal a reality will need powerful social movements backing them up, demanding change, and resisting efforts to hang on to harmful old ways. These movements will need to go beyond just supporting leaders and governments that steer their countries toward change—they will have to push those leaders and governments to do more. As Navarro Llanos said when urging a Marshall Plan for the Earth, we humans need to do something on a bigger scale than ever before.
We need to exercise our political power to campaign and vote for politicians who will fight for real climate action. But the big questions are not going to be settled by elections alone. Pressure from social and climate movements in the coming years will decide whether a Green New Deal pulls us back from the climate cliff.
Movements are groups of people who come together around two things. One is a shared goal or purpose, and the other is a determination to make their ideas heard, even if existing power structures try to drown them out or ignore them. A movement can be small—maybe three students who want to convince their school to create a pollinator garden to nourish bees and birds. It can be vast, like the waves of protest marches that fill city streets.
A movement can start out as small as a single Swedish schoolgirl sitting on a step, holding a sign that warns of climate change, then grow to cover the world.
CHAPTER 9 A Toolkit for Young Activists
Are you in school now? If so, you will be a young adult in 2030. By that time, the world should have cut its total carbon pollution by almost half. Just twenty years later, in 2050, carbon pollution should be down to zero.
As you’ve seen throughout this book, meeting this timetable gives us our best chance of keeping Earth’s temperature from going up more than 1.5°C by the end of this century.<
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Decisions about whether or not we make those carbon cuts will shape your entire lives. Those decisions will be made before many of you are old enough to vote. But through your actions today, you can keep reminding political leaders and candidates that you will vote someday soon. In the meantime, no one is too young to join the fight for a livable future.
The rest of this chapter has a number of suggestions for activism. Depending on how old you are, some of them will be more useful to you than others.
Maybe you’re already doing one of the things in this chapter, or even more. If so, good for you! Every bit of activism helps, so you should feel empowered.
If you haven’t yet found a path into activism, I hope one of these tools sounds like something you want to use. And because you are adventurous, open-minded, and creative, you may invent other ways to use these tools—or completely new tools!
CLIMATE CHANGE GOES TO SCHOOL
If you are a young person, chances are you spend a good amount of time in school. Does your school teach climate studies? For how long, and in what grades? Is climate change part of your earth science classes?
A study in the United Kingdom in 2018 showed that more than two thirds of students wanted to learn more at school about climate change and the environment. It also showed that about the same percentage of teachers wanted to do more teaching on those subjects. But many teachers didn’t feel well prepared to teach them.
Now climate change education is becoming part of the school day in a number of countries. In 2019, Italy’s top education official said that students in every grade would soon begin studying sustainability and climate change. The Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia also said that it is adding climate change to a new science curriculum for high school students.
In the United States, nineteen states and Washington, DC, have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This program was introduced in 2013. It is a set of standards that spells out what students at various levels should be expected to know about science. The NGSS requires that climate change be taught as part of the science curriculum in the states that have adopted it. Students in middle school and high school, for example, would be taught about the connection between human activities and rising temperatures. They also learn about energy alternatives that produce less pollution than fossil fuels.
