On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein (PDF)

Description

#1 international and New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, makes the case for a Green New Deal—explaining how bold climate action can be a blueprint for a just and thriving society.For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet—and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices. These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis. An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Naomi Klein is the intellectual godmother of the Green New Deal —which just happens to be the most important idea in the world right now”—Bill McKibben“Naomi Klein’s work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations.”—Greta Thunberg, climate activist”If I were a rich man, I’d buy 245 million copies of Naomi Klein’s ‘On Fire’ and hand-deliver them to every eligible voter in America. . . . Klein is a skilled writer.” —Jeff Goodell, The New York Times”[In On Fire] Naomi Klein makes a keenly argued, well-researched and impassioned case. . . . [Y]ou need to read this book.” —David Grinspoon, The Washington Post“A critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow “Naomi is like a great doctor—she can diagnose problems nobody else sees.”—Alfonso Cuarón, Academy Award-winning director of Roma“Naomi Klein applies her fine, fierce and meticulous mind to the greatest, most urgent questions of our times. . . . I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today.”—Arundhati Roy, Man Booker Prize-winng author of The God of Small Things“Naomi Klein is a precious gift: every time I read her words, my heart leaps from sadness and anger to action. She takes us deep, down to the roots of what is wrong—and then up, up to a height from which we can see what must be done. Everything we love is at stake now: these writings are our best and brightest hope.”—Emma Thompson“The greatest theorist of climate change.”—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Hungry Tide”Masterful. . .What separates Klein from many other advocates for a Green New Deal is her balanced combination of idealism and politics-based realism. . .Another important addition to the literature on the most essential issue of our day.”—Kirkus ReviewsKlein’s passion for action reflects the political, social, and scientific gridlock that makes such sweeping, transformational legislation imperative. Her zeal and eloquence will inspire, engage, and motivate those who are concerned about the planet’s future to become even more involved in taking any and all possible steps to curb or reverse further disruption and destruction.”—Booklist“For a quarter century, now, Naomi Klein has been an outspoken and fearless voice on that which late-stage hyper-capitalism has wrought upon the world: income inequality, overreaching corporate power, for-profit empire building and, of course, the consequent climate crisis. Honestly, we don’t deserve her, and looking back at her seven books one can’t help but think of Cassandra, her warnings ever accurate yet unheeded… with her eighth book, On Fire, Klein collects her longform writing on the climate crisis—from the dying Great Barrier Reef to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico—and somehow manages to strike a hopeful note as she calls for a radical commitment to the Green New Deal, the kind of collective mobilization that saved us from the brink in WWII, and might be our only hope now.”—Lit Hub About the Author 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, reporter for Rolling Stone, 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. THE ART OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL “We didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane.” APRIL 2019 SOMETIMES A PROJECT TAPS INTO A FORCE THAT IS POWERFUL WELL BEYOND the expectations of its creators. So it was with A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a seven-minute video I executive-produced and conceived of with the artist Molly Crabapple. Narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Crabapple, the film is set a couple of decades from now. It begins with Ocasio-Cortez, a white streak in her hair, riding the bullet train from New York to Washington, DC. Rushing past the window is the future created by the successful implementation of a Green New Deal. The film project grew out of a conversation I had with Crabapple (a brilliant illustrator, writer, and filmmaker) shortly after the idea for a Green New Deal started gaining traction in the United States. We were brainstorming about how to involve more artists in the project. Most art forms are pretty low carbon, after all, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal led to a renaissance of publicly funded art, with artists of every stripe directly participating in the era’s transformations. We wanted to try to galvanize artists into that kind of social mission again, but not years down the road, if the Green New Deal became federal law. No, we wanted to see art right away, to help win the battle for hearts and minds that would determine whether the Green New Deal had a fighting chance in the first place. Crabapple suggested doing a film on the Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez as the narrator and herself as illustrator. The question was: How do we tell the story of something that hasn’t happened yet? As we threw ideas around, we realized that your standard “explainer” video wouldn’t cut it. The biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change that the Green New Deal envisions is not that people fail to understand what is being proposed (though there is certainly plenty of misinformation floating around). It’s that so many are convinced that humanity could never pull off something at this scale and speed. And a whole lot of people have come to believe that dystopia is a foregone conclusion. The skepticism is understandable. The idea that societies could collectively decide to embrace rapid foundational changes to transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, forestry, and more— precisely what is needed to avert climate breakdown—is not something for which most of us have any living reference. We have grown up bombarded with the message that there is no alternative to the crappy system that is destabilizing the planet and hoarding vast wealth at the top. From most economists, we hear that we are fundamentally selfish, gratification-seeking units. From historians, we learn that social change has always been the work of singular great men. Hollywood hasn’t been much help, either. Almost every vision of the future that we get from big budget sci-fi films takes some kind of ecological and social apocalypse for granted. It’s almost as if we have collectively stopped believing that the future is going to happen, let alone that it could be better, in many ways, than the present. Not all art takes collapse for granted, however. There have long been creators on the margins, from Afrofuturists to feminist fantasists, who have attempted to explode the idea that the future has to be like the present, only worse and with sex robots. One such visionary was the great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing speech upon receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, four years before her death. “Hard times are coming,” she said, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. . . . We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art The power of art to inspire transformation is one of the original New Deal’s most lasting legacies. And interestingly, back in the 1930s, that transformational project was also under relentless attack in the press, and yet it didn’t slow it down for a minute. From the start, elite critics derided FDR’s plans as everything from creeping fascism to closet communism. In the 1933 equivalent of “They’re coming for your hamburgers!” Republican senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia wrote to a colleague, “This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot.” A former DuPont executive complained that with the government offering decent-paying jobs, “five negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this spring . . . and a cook on my houseboat in Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.” Far-right militias formed; there was even a sloppy plot by a group of bankers to overthrow FDR. Self-styled centrists took a more subtle tack: In newspaper editorials and op-eds, they cautioned FDR to slow down and scale back. Historian Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, told me that the parallels with today’s attacks on the Green New Deal in outlets like the New York Times are obvious. “They didn’t outright oppose it, but in many cases, they would argue that you don’t want to make so many changes at once, that it was too big, too quick. That the administration should wait and study more.” And yet for all its many contradictions and exclusions, the New Deal’s popularity continued to soar, winning Democrats a bigger majority in Congress in the midterms and FDR a landslide reelection in 1936. The main reason that the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era’s transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.” Through programs that included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Writers Project (all part of the WPA), as well as the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and several others, tens of thousands of painters, musicians, photographers, playwrights, filmmakers, actors, authors, and a huge array of craftspeople found meaningful work, with unprecedented support going to African American and Indigenous artists. The result was an explosion of creativity and a staggering body of work. The Federal Art Project alone produced nearly 475,000 works of visual art, including more than 2,000 posters, 2,500 murals, and 100,000 canvases for public spaces. Its stable of artists included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Authors who participated in the Federal Writers’ Project included Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck. The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances, reaching some 150 million Americans. Much of the art produced by New Deal programs was simply about bringing joy and beauty to Depression-ravaged people— while challenging the prevalent idea that art belonged exclusively to the wealthy. As FDR put it in a 1938 letter to author Hendrik Willem van Loon, “I, too, have a dream—to show people in the out of the way places, some of whom are not only in small villages but in corners of New York City . . . some real paintings and prints and etchings and some real music.” Some New Deal art set out to mirror a shattered country back to itself and, in the process, make an unassailable case for why New Deal relief programs were so desperately needed. The result was iconic work, from Dorothea Lange’s photography of Dust Bowl families enveloped in clouds of filth and forced to migrate, to Walker Evans’s harrowing images of tenant farmers that filled the pages of the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to Gordon Parks’s pathbreaking photography of daily life in Harlem. Other artists produced more optimistic, even utopian creations, using graphic art, short films, and vast murals to document the transformation under way under New Deal programs—the strong bodies building new infrastructure, planting trees, and otherwise picking up the pieces of their nation. Just as Crabapple and I started mulling over the idea of a Green New Deal short film, inspired by the utopian art of the New Deal, The Intercept published a piece by Kate Aronoff that was set in the year 2043, after the Green New Deal had come to pass. It told the story of what life was like for a fictionalized “Gina,” who grew up in the world that Green New Deal policies had created: “She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.” After free college, “she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.” The piece struck a nerve, in large part because it imagined a future tense that wasn’t some version of Mad Max warriors battling prowling bands of cannibal warlords. Crabapple and I decided that our film could do something similar, but this time from OcasioCortez’s vantage point. It would tell the story of how society decided to go bold rather than give up, and paint a picture of the world after the Green New Deal the congresswoman had championed became reality. The final result is a seven-minute postcard from the future, codirected by Crabapple’s longtime collaborators Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt, and cowritten by Ocasio-Cortez and filmmaker and climate justice organizer Avi Lewis (who also happens to be my husband). It’s a story about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Crabapple’s paintbrushes depict a country both familiar and entirely new. Cities are connected by bullet trains, Indigenous elders help young people restore wetlands, millions find jobs retrofitting low-cost housing—and when superstorms drown major cities, the residents respond not with vigilantism and recrimination but with cooperation and solidarity. Over those lush paintings, Ocasio-Cortez’s voice is heard: As we battled the floods, fires and droughts, we knew how lucky we were to have started acting when we did. And we didn’t just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things. We became a society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane, too. By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other. And we found our shared purpose. The response was unlike any we were prepared for. The film went online on April 17. Within forty-eight hours, it had been viewed well over six million times. Within seventy-two hours it was being screened in rooms of more than a thousand people, as part of a national tour to build momentum for the Green New Deal organized by the Sunrise Movement. In the halls, people cheered for every other line. Within a week, we had heard from multiple teachers (from primary through university) who told us they had already showed it in class. “Our students are hungry for hope,” read a typical report. Hundreds of people wrote to us and told us they had wept at their desks—for everything that was already lost and for everything that could still be won. Looking back on this project, and the speed with which it traveled through the world, it strikes me that we are starting to see the true power of framing our collective response to climate change as a “Green New Deal,” despite all the limitations of that historical analogy. By evoking FDR’s real-world industrial and social transformation from nearly a century ago in order to imagine our world a half century from now, all of our time horizons are being stretched. Suddenly we are no longer prisoners of the never-ending present in our social media feeds. We are part of a long and complex collective story, one in which human beings are not one set of attributes, fixed and unchanging, but rather, a work in progress, capable of deep change. By looking decades backward and forward simultaneously, we are no longer alone as we confront our weighty historical moment. We are surrounded both by ancestors whispering that we can do what our moment demands just as they did, and by future generations shouting that they deserve nothing less. As much as the hopeful vision of the future presented by the Green New Deal, I think this lengthened time horizon is what many are responding to so powerfully. Because there is nothing more disorienting than finding yourself floating through time, unmoored from both future and past. Only when we know where we have come from, and where we want to go, will we have a sturdy place to plant our feet. Only then will we believe, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, that our future has not yet been written and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I was looking for a book that discussed climate change. I wanted a very recent book by an author that had received good Amazon reviews. This book seemed to meet the requirements, and had the added advantage that it claimed to discuss the Green New Deal, and should therefore be relevant for understanding positions of Democratic candidates for president in 2020.This book is poorly written. It seems to be cobbled together from speeches given by the author in various venues. It is filled with bold statements that appear to be oversimplifications, are often vague and sometimes false.I was disappointed that there is very little discussion of the science behind climate change. Instead “On Fire” is a political manifesto arguing action without giving clear reasons for the action.Climate change is indeed the most urgent crisis confronting the world. Scientists now realize that global temperatures will rise by 3 to 5 degrees C over preindustrial levels by 2100. That will cause sea levels to rise, destroying some coastal cities (eg Miami), and may make parts of the tropics uninhabitable in summer months. Since excess carbon can stay in the atmosphere for several hundred years, warming temperatures may eventually lead to the extinction of humans.Naomi Klein is correct that the extent of the warming and the suffering that ensues are dependent on the actions we take now. But what should those actions be?The idea of the environment limiting the growth of populations is not new. An excellent book of 1972, Limits to Growth, by Randers et al, argued that population growth even as low as 1% or 2% per year would come to an end when the earth reached its carrying capacity. The argument was based on the mathematics of exponential growth as taught in university calculus, and models of dynamical systems. This argument seemed quite robust. The authors provided several scenarios describing what might happen if food, or oil were the limiting constraint, or if it was destruction of the environment that brought an end to population growth.The book was written before global warming was understood. We now know that it is the environment through global warming that will be the limiting factor. The book Limits to Growth described “overshoot and collapse” as a characteristic of many of the models. That means that population temporarily exceeds carrying capacity because some effects of population growth occur after a delay. Overshoot and collapse will likely occur with a vengeance as global warming brings an end to population growth, as regions near the equator become uninhabitable decreasing the carrying capacity of earth.We have two choices: We can use birth control to limit population ourselves. This would ameliorate climate change to some extent, and would surely limit suffering in places like Africa which is expected to double its current population by 2050. The other possibility is to watch death rates rise until the population overshoots the new carrying capacity of earth, and then falls back to the new lower level. The second alternative may bring in its wake a new Dark Ages, and wars over resources.Klein does not share my view that population growth is the primary cause of climate change. Her description of the causes is found on page 99 of the book: “The biggest big green groups have avoided … any serious debate on the blindingly obvious roots of the climate crisis: globalization, deregulation, and contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth.”Klein does not make a convincing argument that globalization is one of the culprits. Maybe deregulation is a factor, but Klein’s argument for this is also weak.On the other hand, it is true that growth must eventually come to an end, particularly population growth. But it is not capitalism that causes global warming, but rather the need for ever-increasing consumption of energy to meet the needs of a growing population.If we don’t limit population growth ourselves, we will enter the collapse phase of overshoot and collapse, population will fall, and economic growth will be replaced by contraction.In addition to blaming capitalism, Klein demonizes free trade, because it uses too much carbon to transport goods, and argues for “relocalizing” production, which means (among other things) going from large industrial farms to small family farms and gardens.But as the world’s population has increased, cities have become necessary for much of humanity, and residents are dependent on trucks which use oil (hopefully to be replaced by electricity) to bring in food. Klein’s argument to reverse this trend would be appealing if we could all live on our own farms in the country, but that is only possible for a small elite.She is defying experts from other fields when she argues against free trade. Most economists believe that both countries benefit when they engage in trade, each economy producing the goods which they can make most efficiently.When you destroy efficiency, living standards go down. Klein seems to accept lower living standards, suggesting that people should be happy to consume less and be satisfied with less “stuff.” But I was left wondering how this would affect the growing number of homeless in the US, already living on the brink.On page 199, Klein writes “we must … carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century.” But she gives no convincing explanation of how to achieve that. With current technology, coal is cheaper than solar panels, and poorer countries with trouble feeding their poor can’t take on the added expense.Klein wants to solve the problem of redistributing the world’s assets from rich to poor at the same time as we find ways of lessening carbon emission. On pages 240-241 she writes, “we need to up our ambition and show exactly how battling climate change is a once in a century chance to build a more democratic economy.” Instead of focusing just on climate change, much of the book argues for social justice, and the Green New Deal includes not just actions on climate change but a host of other liberal issues.For example, universal health care is included in the Green New Deal. But to make this possible we must recognize the limits to our resources, and in particular we would need to train new doctors to provide the additional health care. This is one aspect of universal health care that has not been adequately discussed in the media.The problem is that illegal immigration could overwhelm attempts to extend health care to millions of uninsured. The population of Guatemala has quadrupled since 1960, and increased population in Guatemala and other Latin American countries could make universal health care unaffordable in the long run, even with heavy taxes on the wealthy. Better than continued illegal immigration would be economic aid for Latin American countries along with family planning that helps those who choose to limit family size.China took the lessons of Limits to Growth to heart in 1979 when it introduced its one child policy. India has had no such policy, and comparison of the results is stark. China is now vying with the US for leadership of the world economy, while poverty within India is still oppressive. The video Klein cites with Ocasio-Cortez dreams of bullet trains in the video of a better America she envisions seven years in the future. China already has 18,000 miles of such high speed rail connecting major cities, contributing to a greener future for China, and possibly enabling China to extend high speed rail technology to much of the rest of the world, while India’s trains are still slow and inefficient.If a Democratic president tried to implement the approach outlined in this book to halt climate change, along with providing universal health care without also achieving zero population growth to limit growth in expenses, there is a real danger that resource constraints would make the changes impossible to achieve. The consequence might be the election of a Trump clone in 2024. Democrats need to get the climate change issue right.Potential readers of this book should look to other sources for both the science on climate change and realistic policies for addressing it.

⭐Thank the ‘Great White North’ for Naomi Klein and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; Klein for her succinct summaries of almost 10 years of environmental analysis in this gem of a brief book – – and Trudeau his very human response to change. Like Rachel Carson and ‘Silent Spring’, Klein will be remembered for explaining the attitudes, inactions and complacency that will shape our environment over the next century. Her book is a concise gem. Likewise, we can thank Trudeau for helping make it happen. Had her warnings been heeded over the past four years, he’d now be bouncing about boasting, “We’re No. 1! We’re No.!” – – instead of worrying about being “bounced” in his re-election bid. Let’s start with Trudeau who, in 2017, told a cheering crowd of oil executives in Houston, “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave it there.” (If Trudeau loses his re-election bid, his outlook will seem benign compared to the likely fate of the Alberta tar sands in the hands of Conservative cretins.) Klein succinctly outlines the impact of such decisions. (However, on a personal basis, I think humans are a “super virus” that is ravaging our planet. But, I’m also an optimist. After a few billion deaths, the planet and enough humans will survive in a new mutual understanding of Mama Nature. Am I right? Well, consider the May 6 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report, based on 15,000 research papers. It predicts the extinction of a million species of animals, insects and plants by the end of the century. In other words, at the present of pollution and exploitation, almost everything but ‘Indifference’ is threatened.) It’s time to listen. What is possible? Well, consider the impact of the ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson, the early disaster warning in 1962 that is becoming the reality cited by Klein. People always ignore the impact of pending disaster; it’s why there have been 10,000 “civilizations” in the last 5,000 years and none have survived its forecast of demise. Carson’s working title for the manuscript? ‘Man Against the Earth’. Instead of Klein’s “Green” response, it’s likely people will use the tradition approach – – engineering. It will be called ‘geo engineering’, and if it’s very expensive, ‘Brilliant Engineering’. It may shield the planet with a near-space blanket of chemicals (or dust) as an umbrella to block sunlight. Brilliant engineering created our modern world, but its dark side is always the “unknown unknowns.” Unk! Unk!! Just how does “life” deal with a “virus” such as humanity? If the past offers any guidance – – the first response will be a ‘DDT’ quickfix solution. It’s nice to invent the future; it’s something else to make it work. On that note: Where are the flying cars we were promised in 1945? We don’t even have ‘smart’ cars yet. Granted, she’s optimistic. It’s the saving grace of her book, and a reason for all to trust in “just a bit of global disaster, nothing too serious.” In engineering we trust, all else is rust, dust and bust. Remember the old saying from the 1930’s Dust Bowl devastation? “In God We Trusted, In Kansas We Busted.” Let’s do it again?

⭐As a lifelong environmentalist who was vastly impressed by her earlier book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, I’m a big fan of Naomi Klein. I was not disappointed with this newer book. I wish everyone everywhere would read it and embrace the Green New Deal. On Fire certainly makes an excellent case for the cause it espouses.

⭐As I’m sitting in CT on January 12th… it is 70 degrees and feels like Summer. Last year at this time I was shoveling my driveway every morning. Watching the fires burning in CA and Australia mainly on social media, not cable news, has been a shock.. However it’s just what Naomi talks about in her book. At the same time, governments continue to hide climate truths from the general public. Most people still don’t take it seriously in America. We are going down a path that is not good unless we stand up to big oil, chemical corporations and corrupt governments. It’s scary to see how late we are to confronting the climate crisis. It’s a battle for all life on earth and every plant and creature. Thank you Naomi for your honest and truthful book. I will continue to buy more books from this author.

⭐Many of Naomi clients ideas are fantastic! The problem here is the omission of nuclear power. Many of the problems that she obsesses about are entirely achievable at low cost given the 30 or so companies with new designs for nuclear power plants. These respond to the challenge of Fukushima by making such accidents impossible by design. They can be built at a scale compatible with today’s funding. But the traditional anti-nuclear sentiment outweighs an honest assessment of the contribution these new solutions can offer. It’s easy to be hopeful about the future of our planet, if you understand that ubiquitous clean renewable nuclear energy is just around the corner.

⭐I enjoy reading Naomi Klein but I know I will be getting into something invariably polemical. It is true that current economic growth paradigm is not sustainable, but I do not believe the current model is best described as ‘neoliberal’, certainly not outside America. nor is there much evidence that the government is the leading light for change. Most of the world is already some kind of mixed economy. And the ‘corporations bad, government good’ line (also ‘globalism bad, localism good’) doesn’t bare basic scrutiny. Of the top 100 CO2 polluting organisations in the world (responsible for 70% co2 emissions), the majority are state owned. This suggests ownership structures (private vs public) is not the crux of the issue.Her praise of Germany’s energy transition policy shows a blatant disregard for facts. Germany committed to shutting down nuclear following Fukushima (again this fits with her ideological opposition to nuclear), and ‘localism’ (which she favours) has put meant no onshore wind is currently being built because the NIMBYs do not want it. Germany has contributed nothing to decarbonisation since 2010. She glosses over the slow pace of coal shutdowns in Germany as if it’s a minor footnote with only passing relevance to her main point. It is not. Further, the reason coal is being shutdown slowly is to support employment in the coal sectors, and to manage the socio-economic implications of the transition for real people. In her world, this conflict simply does not exist.Compare Germany with the UK strategy, which barely gets a mention. This is largely private sector and markets based (with highly successful auction based subsidy regime for renewables), and with legally enshrined decarbonisation targets. UK (and other European) offshore wind subsidies have largely paid for development of the technology, now being developed globally. Again, the innovation is being delivered by large, profit-seeking corporations. The government is providing market structure but it is not delivering the investment or the change.I guess the biggest question for me is what political structure she is actually advocating. What if there is no democratic mandate for the kind of change she thinks is required?

⭐Astonishingly it is 20 years since Naomi Klein wrote No Logo which focused on the how big brands simultaneously control the lives of consumers in the developed world and exploit workforces in the poorer countries who manufacture their products. This shook many people into action and affected the public profile of at least some of the global companies who adjusted their ways as a result.Naomi Klein is now focused on wider issues associated with the climate change emergency and, in this book, she echoes the voice of Greta Thunberg (who was not even born when No Logo came out), to appeal for us all to act as if this was an emergency. Klien calls for a Green New Deal similar to FD Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930’s that turned the United States from the depths of economic depression to a global superpower in less than a generation. The book consists of a series of essays that Klein has written between 2016 and 2019 in response to the current issues and, in particular, the obvious candidates who are the non believers who continue to plough on with destructive fossil fuels.The case for a Green New Deal is compelling and this book is as relevant as anything written on the subject of the climate emergency. If this book is as successful as No Logo in changing both public perception and that of those in power then there might just be a chance. We live in hope.

⭐If the climate action, the climate emergency and the idea of a green new deal are still subjects on which you feel shaky, then this book isn’t a bad place to start, in looking at the politics of climate change. There are other books which go deeper into the scientific basis for various scenarios or which go into the technological options for mitigation and for a more sustainable future. This book, does what it says on the cover: it makes the case for a green new deal – in essence, pointing the way to the politics and economics of the future, in a way which will leave you excited and curious to learn more – rather than in a way that gives all the answers in great detail. It’s an effective argument, not a manual.

⭐This seems to be a collection of transcriptions of talks Naomi Klein has given over the past few years. She addresses the many causes for our current climate crisis and outlines some solid ways we can pull ourselves back from the brink. If only everyone would read this book maybe we could all pull together because that’s what’s needed.

⭐Why is Climate Crisis happening, what can we do, what are the options? Why the systems of the western world have to change for the sake of our very existence on the planet. Why the Crisis is as much a crisis of capitalism as of Climate, the two intertwined. Klein’s clear and un-fussy language gives you the information up to the date the book was published.

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