On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal is comprised of various essays published by Naomi Klein between 2010 and 2019. Among the publications in which her writing on the broad subject of climate change appeared are The Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. In other words, for any unfortunate souls who may somehow not be familiar with name Naomi Klein, she is what is known in the industry as a pretty big deal. And when it comes to the issue of spreading the word about just how incredibly serious the short-term effect of climate is—not to mention, of course, the long-term effects—for some bizarre reason America needs such pretty big deals to weigh in where the largest possible audience or readership can perhaps land upon the information they provide.
The information provided within this collection spans the gamut of possible perspectives upon, as she identifies it, “science so basic that these kids could grasp it easily age eight.” The book begins at the bottom of a deep hole in the ocean floor and ends with a nine-point manifesto listing the advantages of the proposed “Green New Deal.” The opening essay is a comprehensive review of the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster that a decade later was still causing problems along the Gulf Coast. Despite the utter incompetence and willful lack of vision on the part of BP which stimulated this unnatural natural disaster, it does not appear to be the case that the company actually planned to create the misery the accident caused for the purpose of long-term profit. Such is the not the case with actual natural disasters such as Hurricane Maria which destroyed much of Puerto Rico.
The chapter covering that particular hurricane response becomes in Klein’s capable hands a textbook lesson in the ways that the governing principle of the official disaster response in devastating cases like these is “Do everything possible to make that it will happen again and again.” What does gaming the system of natural disaster response have to do with massive changes in the earth’s climate as a result of a lack of any significant or serious regulation controlling the amount of polluted molecules unleashed into the atmosphere every second of every minute of every hour of every day? Perhaps not what one might expect. The point of the Hurricane Maria response isn’t really about weather, much less the climate that products that weather. The devastation left in the wake of a hurricane is portrayed as being, in reality, only very partially about the strength of natural forces.
A long, unbroken history of colonial exploitation of the island which grifted the population of its own access and potential for exploiting its resources for the benefit of its population inevitably and inexorably has led to a condition of living well below the poverty range for the majority of inhabitants. Hurricane Maria is not merely a textbook study in the ways and means of disaster response, it is a microcosmic prediction of what will inevitably and inexorably occur to similar low-lying coastal regions around the world not just within the next century, but perhaps within the new two or three decades.
This very short chapter is in some ways the central argument supporting the need for passage of something like a Green New Deal not just sooner rather than later, but immediately. The rest of the essays in the volume also further more evidence (which, amazingly, is still necessary for a surprisingly large percentage of the population) that capitalist greed is the number one contributing factor to epochal climate change that are without a doubt going to make the world of 2020 in some ways (topographically first and foremost) unrecognizable to those living 2120. And the longer the delay in taking radical action to address the causes of climate change, the less recognizable the world of today will be to those alive in 2050, much less in a hundred years.
