On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane, £20)
Conversion is at the core of this book. Not in its familiar, religious form — although there is a passionately quasi-religious conviction at the heart of Naomi Klein’s pleas to save the planet, and your reviewer has fallen for them hook, line and sinker.
I began it with a sigh of mild irritation. Didn’t I already know about global warming? Wasn’t I onside with re-cycling and aware that cars and planes pollute the planet? Did I really need to plough through this gloomy-sounding tome? Then I started to read and Klein’s logical, rational vision drew me into her panoramic view of the state we’re in.
Naomi Klein is a brilliant prose writer. Her language is clear, simple and direct, so that this book is no chore. Nor is it mere partisan lecturing or hectoring. Most readers will be able to forge a path through Klein’s intellectual logic towards her conclusion.
The way is strewn with real-life encounters, personal stories, and she meets her critics head on. In a US talk, she takes a question from Richard Rothschild, a councillor in Maryland County who perceived “an attack on middle-class American capitalism” in policies to halt climate change. And, in a sense, Klein agrees with him: “Climate change is a message telling us that many of Western culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.”
She is referring to the pursuit of growth, the entrenchment of inequality at home and worldwide , the despoliation of the earth’s natural habitats , the extraction of fossil fuels to maintain a greedy and ultimately disastrous lifestyle for a minority while leaving most of the world’s people to founder on the debris left behind by mining, intense fishing and farming.
“And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right,” she adds. No wonder that, in the middle of the book, we find Klein’s feminist credentials burnished, at the heart of Pope Francis’ Vatican as she helps advise him on how to raise consciousness of the immorality of what we are doing to the planet.
She explains that the slave-owners and traders, factory bosses and colonial cowboys of previous centuries developed a rationale to deal with critics of their brutal behaviour — now paralleled by our callous disregarding of victims of climate change who flee their chaotic homes, and indifference to the catastrophic climatic calamities of stricken, third-world nations.
She scorns the savage immigration policies of Australia and, increasingly, the United States as much as she reviles Justin Trudeau and the smug Canadians who preside over the toxic Alberta tar sands pipeline as it devastates the landscape and promises more environmental ravages when it reaches the atmosphere.
Yet Klein’s is essentially a message of optimism. “We were born for this moment,” she proclaims as she spells out an eight-point plan she claims will save us. This is a new, green revolution to create jobs in renewable fuel industries; spread a fairer society with an FDR style New Deal; a kind of Marshall plan to halt the destruction of our world and, with a raft of community-based changes, challenge rapacious capitalist markets with a simpler and fairer system.
On Fire is a book for our era, a timely reminder of how the world economy has developed and what this will mean for our children
Anne Garvey is a freelance writer
