Naomi Klein: A Fundamentally New Economic System Is the Only Way to Save Society and the Planet

This is an excellent article. And I continue to highly recommend Naomi Klein's latest book and all her work. It is also no surprise that Naomi Klein has for the first time endorsed a president for the United States and that she is now actively campaigning for and with Bernie Sanders. Naomi is among the great authors, activists, and wise and courageous visionaries who has long known that our patriarchal neoliberal capitalist system is the root cause of so much suffering and death. Truly, a radically different economic system, a paradigm shift in our values and the stories we believe in, a deep collective dive into Revolutionary Love — these are indeed the only things that will save ourselves, other beings, and the planet. We are all needed in this struggle for a just, sustainable, peaceful, and caring world. Everything we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly

In her latest book, Naomi Klein continues the cause of her career: arguing that a fundamentally new economic system is the only way to save society and the planet.

By Alyssa Battistoni

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal opens with the image of schoolchildren going on strike for the climate, following the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose blunt challenges to political leaders around the world have rocketed her to global fame. It’s an opening that reflects the monumental shift in the conversation around climate change over the course of the past year, advanced by young people in particular — from Thunberg’s School Strikes for Climate to the Sunrise Movement’s sit-ins in the US— and the emergence of the Green New Deal (GND) as a central demand.

Yet rather than digging into the events of the past year or arguing for a particular set of policies or programs, On Fire makes the case for the Green New Deal by tracing the evolution of climate politics over the past decade. Setting the recent surge of GND momentum against ten years of Klein’s reporting — on the BP oil spill, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline protests, and wildfires in British Columbia — serves as a reminder of how much it has taken to get to this point. 

In 2011, Klein was protesting the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House. In October 2013, she wrote about the need for “political revolution” in response to increasingly dire climate science, and chronicled its opening flares — people taking action to stop fracking in England, disrupt oil drilling in Russian waters, and sue tar sands companies for violating indigenous sovereignty. Disruptive action, that is, didn’t start with Sunrise or Extinction Rebellion. Even the pieces that narrate her own alarming encounters with a warming world, like her unsettling account of two weeks spent anxiously vacationing on the British Columbia coast in 2017 while forests to the north burned, always turn in the end to politics — a refreshing change from the proliferating genre of anguished meditations on climate doom.

Amid the many authors publishing books on climate change in recent years, Klein remains the most prominent analyst of climate in relation to capitalism; this collection also serves as a reminder of how long she has been making that case.  

Her first major essay on climate change, 2011’s “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” argued that it is not a coincidence that many on the Right deny climate change: conservatives have correctly realised that climate change poses a severe challenge to the principles of capitalism.

For many conservatives, then, climate change appeared to be little more than a “Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some form of eco-socialism.” Klein argues that conservative deniers were perfectly reasonable: action on climate change will require public investment, wealth redistribution, strict regulation, and a host of other things that conservatives oppose.

She reiterates a similar argument at the start of On Fire, this time with reference not to conservative think tanks but “the specter of ecofascism.” Klein argues that “climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations.” Instead of denying climate change outright, the Right will now use it as a justification for hardening borders.

Please continue this article here: https://scoop.me/naomi-climate-change/