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| A resident cries as the Thomas Fire approaches the town of La Conchita early Thursday morning. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images) |
Excerpts from the Introduction of
On Fire by Naomi Klein
Oceans are warming 40% faster than the United Nations
predicted just fiver years ago.
It has been over three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve "the children," "the grandchildren," and "generations to come." We were told that we owed it to them to move swiftly and embrace change. We were warned that we were failing in our most sacred duty to protect them. It was predicted that they would judge us harshly if we failed to act on their behalf.
Well, none of those emotional pleas proved at all persuasive, at least not to the politicians and their corporate underwriters who could have taken bold action to stop the climate disruption we are all living through today. Instead, since those government meetings began in 1988, global CO2 emissions have risen by well over 40%, and they continue to rise. The planet has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up; the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans didn't exist.
As for those children and grandchildren and generations to come who were invoked so promiscuously? They are no longer mere rhetorical devices. They are now speaking (and screaming and striking) for themselves. And they are speaking up for one another as part of an emerging international movement of children and a global web of creation that includes all those amazing animals and natural wonders that they fell in love with so effortlessly, only to discover that it was all slipping away.
And yes, as foretold, these children are ready to deliver their moral verdict on the people and institutions who knew all about the dangerous, depleted world they would inherit and yet chose not to act.
They know what they think of Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison in Australia and all the other leaders who torch the planet with defiant glee while denying science so basic that these kids could grasp it easily at age eight. Their verdict is just as damning, if not more so, for the leaders who deliver passionate and moving speeches about the imperative to respect the Paris Climate Agreement and "make the planet green again" (France's Emanuel Macron, Canada's Justin Trudeau, and so many others), but who then shower subsidies, handouts, and licenses on the fossil fuel and agribusiness giants driving ecological breakdown.
Young people around the world are cracking open the heart of the climate crisis, speaking of a deep longing for a future they thought they had but that is disappearing with each day that adults fail to act on the reality that we are in an emergency.
"I don't want your hope... I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if your house is on fire, because it is."
— Greta Thunberg
Greta's voyage from invisible schoolgirl to global voice of conscience is an extraordinary one, and looked at more closely, it has a lot to teach about what it is going to take for all of us to get to safety. Thunberg's overarching demand is for humanity as a whole to do what she did in her own family and life: close the gap between what we know about the urgency of the climate crisis and how we behave. The first stage is to name the emergency, because only once we are on emergency footing will we find the capacity to do what is required.
In a way, she is asking those of us whose mental wiring is more typical — less prone to extraordinary focus and more capable of living with moral contradictions — to be more like her. She has a point.
During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism....
When it comes to rising to the reality of the climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.
In part, this is because if we were to decide to take climate disruption seriously, pretty much every aspect of our economy would have to change, and there are many powerful interests that like things as they are. Not least the fossil fuel corporations, which have funded a decades-long campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and straight-up lies about the reality of global warming....
"I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange," Thunberg has said, adding that it helps not to be easily distracted or reassured by rationalizations. "Because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don't. We have to change." Living with autism is anything but easy — for most people, it "is an endless fight against schools, workplaces and bullies. But under the right circumstances, given the right adjustments it can be a superpower....
Nor is Thunberg the first person with tremendous moral clarity to yell, "Fire!" in the face of the climate crisis. It has happened multiple times over the past several decades; indeed, it is something of a ritual at the annual UN summits on climate change. But perhaps because these earlier voices belonged to brown and black people from the Philippines, the Marshall Islands, and South Sudan, those clarion calls were one-day stories, if that....
As a manifesto put out by British climate strikers put it, "Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we're the wildfire."
Racial Capitalism
My primary emphasis in this book is on the countries sometimes referred to as the Anglosphere (the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom) and on some non-English speaking parts of Europe....
This focus stems mainly, however, from my ongoing attempt to understand why the governments of these countries have proven particularly belligerent when it comes to meaningful climate action....
Even when outright denial recedes and a more progressive environmental era seems to dawn (in the United States under Barack Obama, and in Canada under Justin Trudeau), it is still extremely difficult for these governments to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that we need to stop extending the fossil fuel frontier and, in fact, need to start winding down existing production...
In trying to make sense of this, I explore some of the specific ways that these nations have led the way in forging the global supply chain that gave birth to modern capitalism, the economic system of limitless consumption and ecological depletion at the heart of the climate crisis. It's a story that begins with people stolen from Africa and lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, two practices of brutal expropriation that were so dizzyingly profitable that they generated the excess capital and power to launch the age of fossil fuel-led industrialization and, with it, the beginning of human-driven climate change. It was a process that required, form the start, pseudoscientific as well as theological theories of white and Christian supremacy, which is why the late politician theorist Cedric Robinson argued that the economic system birthed by the convergence of these fires should more aptly be called "racial capitalism."
Alongside the theories that rationalized treating humans as raw capitalist assets to exhaust and abuse without limit were theories that justified treating the natural world (forests, rivers, land and water animals) in precisely the same way. Millennia of accumulated wisdom about how to safeguard and regenerate everything from forests to fish runs were swept away in favor of a new idea that there was no limit to humanity's ability to control the natural world, or to how much wealth could be extracted from it without fear of consequence.
These ideas about nature's boundlessness are not incidental to the nations of the Anglosphere; they are foundational myths, woven deep into national narratives. The huge natural wealth of the lands that would become the United States, Canada, and Australia were, from their very first contact with European ships, imagined as a sort of body-double nations for colonial powers that were running out of nature to exhaust back home. No 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 more 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....
... 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....
The Radicalizing Power of Climate Science
One month before the Sunrisers [Sunrise Movement] occupied the office of the 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 degrees F). Given the worsening disasters we are already seeing with about 1 degree Celsius of warming, it found that keeping the 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 degrees Celsius 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 from unproven and carbon capture technologies or the old-fashioned ways: by planting billions of trees and other carbon-sequestering vegetation....
What is needed, the report's summary states in its first sentence, is "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."....
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
.... 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 to both 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 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....
Angela Navarro Llanos [a Bolivian climate negotiator] 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... 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....
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....
The emergence of the Green New Deal means that there is now not only a political framework for meeting the IPCC targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law. The plan is pretty straight forward: elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous "first 100 days," when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress.)
If the IPCC report was the clanging fire alarm that grabbed the attention of the world, the Green New Deal is the beginning of a fire safety and prevention plan. And not a piecemeal approach that merely trains a water gun on a blazing fire, as we have seen so many times in the past, but a comprehensive and holistic plan to actually put out the fire. Especially if the idea spreads around the world — which is already beginning to happen....
We Need a Whole New Way of Thinking
Climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations. And a growing number of people on the hard right realize this all too well, which is why they are developing various twisted rationales for why none of this can take place....
The goal of this fortification around Europe and the Anglosphere is all too clear: convince people to stay where they are, no matter how miserable it is, no matter how deadly. In this worldview, the emergency is not people's suffering, it is their inconvenient desire to escape that suffering....
Let there be no mistake: this is the dawn of climate barbarism. And unless there is a radical change not only in politics but in the underlying values that govern our politics, this is how the wealthy world is going to "adapt" to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing the toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity. And what starts as brutality at the border will most certainly infect societies as a whole.
These supremacist ideas are not new; nor have they ever gone away. For those of us in the Anglosphere, they are deeply embedded in the legal basis for our nations' very existence (from the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to terra nullius). Their power has ebbed and flowed throughout our histories, depending on what immoral behaviors demanded ideological justification. And just as these toxic ideas surged when they were required to rationalize slavery, land theft, and segregation, they are surging once more now that they are needed to justify climate recalcitrance and the barbarism at our borders.
The rapidly escalating cruelty of our present moment cannot be overstated; nor can the long-term damage to the collective psyche should this go unchallenged. Beneath the theater of some governments denying climate change and others claiming to be doing something about it while they fortress their borders from its effects, there is one overarching question facing us. In the rough and rocky future that has already begun, what kind of people are we going to be? Will we share what's left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to attempt to hoard what's left, look after "our own," and lock everyone else out?....
"Once you have done your homework," Greta Thunberg says, "you realize that we need a new politics. We need a new economics, where is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking... We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way."
Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It's too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many species, too. Let's put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.
Let's forge a Global Green New Deal — for everyone this time.
— Naomi Klein
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