Feeling the Burn: Ian Borsuk Reviews Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal

What Matters Now

Naomi Klein’s new collection of essays and speeches is her fourth book this decade. While all four focus on the climate crisis to some degree, Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate set the terms for thinking about the problem of ecological catastrophe in relation to a capitalist economy. Her new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, is best read as our best hope for a solution to environmental collapse.  

Naomi Klein On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Knopf Canada. $32.00. 320 pp., ISBN: 9780735279223

The Green New Deal (GND) means different things to different people. To Klein, it refers to the overarching, integrative response to “seemingly disparate crises (economic, social, ecological, and democratic).” It weaves together complex threads of experience “into a common story of civilizational transformation.” The GND is the ever-evolving solution to the ever-expanding catastrophe of contemporary global systems.

The burning case for the GND, says Klein, is the state of the environment itself. The world is on fire. Our capitalist economic and political systems have thrown the planet into existential crisis. You may think we’d all be doing everything possible to avoid worst-case scenarios. However, the very systems that produced the crisis in the first place have awarded untold wealth and privilege to those in power. Economic and political elites benefit (at least in the short term) not from simply doing nothing, but from ramping up the very extractive and exploitative actions that need to cease and be reversed wherever possible. Klein reminds us again and again that in addition to physical solutions to the climate crisis, we also need political ones. 

On Fire is primarily composed of essays and speeches by Klein that were published or delivered over the past decade. Substantial new essays at the book’s front and back frame the reprinted material, and draw out the key features of Klein’s emergent policy agenda.

The fifteen chapters of the book are laid out in chronological order, starting with a 2010 piece on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, an event long predating the entrance of the term “Green New Deal” into public debate. The final chapter, written in April 2019, grapples with concepts and arguments explicitly designed to perfect “The Art of the Green New Deal.” Despite much of the material being several years old, none of the arguments in On Fire feels dated. Considering how rapidly climate science and public discourse on the environment change, it’s remarkable that Klein’s older pieces remain so fresh.

Although previously published material appears without changes, Klein comments on her earlier writing at several points. Notable is the postscript now attached to the chapter “A Radical Vatican?” which expresses doubt in her original point of view. The piece first appeared in The New Yorker in 2015. It voices respect and gratitude for the work Pope Francis did to orient the Catholic Church towards climate justice. In the postscript added in 2019, Klein says she finds it troubling that her original essay ignores the Vatican’s failure to account for the Church’s systemic abuse of children and nuns. The acknowledgement of her mistakes in this case seems to inform her later argument for the GND, which Klein embraces, in part, because it does not “pick and choose which urgent crisis to take seriously.” 

Even readers familiar with Klein’s work will be struck by how the collection shows her political focus shifting from critique towards advocacy. The shift becomes especially evident when tracing the arc of the speeches included in On Fire. Three speeches in particular – “Stop Trying to Save the World All By Yourself” (delivered as The College of the Atlantic commencement address in 2015), “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World” (a lecture delivered in London in 2016, later published in the London Review of Books), and “The Leap Years: Ending The Story of Endlessness” (a lecture delivered in Toronto in 2016) – stand out as calls to arms issued after the publication of This Changes Everything but before the language of Green New Deal took off. In a footnote, Klein calls the “Leap Manifesto” (issued in fall 2015), which she was instrumental in writing and pressing into Canadian politics, a “proto-Green New Deal plan.” 

Efforts to stop the worst effects of climate change are often dismissed for being impractical. Many people who claim to believe in economic, social, and environmental justice object to robust GND plans on the grounds that change is too difficult, and too scary for most people to support. In “The Capsule Case for the Green New Deal,” the epilogue to On Fire, Klein describes nine key points showing why the Green New Deal is not just physically necessary, but politically possible. The GND “taps the power of emergency […] it will be a massive job creator [… and] paying for it will create a fairer economy.” This is not just about appealing to the eco-devout fringe, says Klein. The GND “can raise an army of supporters.”

Knowing what we know about the trajectory of global heating, the material necessity of the Green New Deal is clear. Forget what our world leaders say about being able to avoid climate catastrophe within the political-economic status quo. Our current political-economic system is the biggest threat to ecological justice. This is why Klein’s “capsule case” turns on its head the perception of what is possible. It is precisely because the Green New Deal is such a grand vision, a truly alternative future, that it’s the only real chance we have. 

Only by starting and continuing the work for a better, radically different world right now can we avert the catastrophe on the horizon. As an activist and organizer, I applaud Klein’s latest literary contribution for inspiring those already on side, and for helping to convert GND doubters into devotees of the cause.

Ian Borsuk is an organizer and activist. He is the climate campaign coordinator at Environment Hamilton. He has written for Rabble, VICE Canada, and other venues.