Klein herself says, “This kind of ‘climate justice’ framework. But, as many have pointed out, the Green New Deal (GND) is not new. What has changed in these recent years? Obviously one aspect is the “game changer of the Green New Deal” that inspires the title of this collection. it’s the moment to get the hell on that path.” It is only in the essays written in 20 where Klein’s writing starts to coalesce around a larger political shift toward “a democratic eco-socialist vision, connecting the dots between the economic depredations caused by decades of neoliberal ascendency and the ravaged state of the natural world.” It is this broader movement that Klein suggests gives us a chance: “In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. But what a winning strategy looks like was not always clear. In the context of failure, Klein rightly disposes of false solutions like capital-led geo-engineering schemes or lifestyle changes. Yet these early chapters were written in a political context where the climate movement was still grasping for what a winning strategy would look like. The bulk of the chapters read as an onslaught of disasters - the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Trump’s election, summer vacations marred by apocalyptic smoke - occasionally punctuated by glimmers of hope: the Vatican’s encyclical that argued for better planetary stewardship, the radical “Leap Manifesto” building a case for climate justice, and scientific pronouncements declaring the need for revolutionary economic changes. The most exciting part of reading this collection is the clear sense of a marked political shift over the last few years. If we’re going to start winning, the next ten years must look very different. As long as emissions keep rising, we are still losing. Emissions hit a record high in 2018, and it appears 2019 will be even higher.

If we’re honest, those ten years have largely been wasted. Ten years is a really long time in the climate fight.

The main value of reading Naomi Klein’s collected essays written between 20 in On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal is that it allows us to see how Klein and much of the climate left’s thinking has evolved over the past decade, from the debacle in Copenhagen in 2009 to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution in 2019. Review of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

On Fire by Naomi Klein