April 23, 2020 55
groans and breathes his last....
They will forget you and remem-
ber me.Hirut knows, of course, that the
opposite will be true: she will be for-
gotten. In this regard, her emotional
intelligence is matched by Mengiste.
Even as she bears witness to the ravag-
ing and destruction of bodies, Mengiste
remains respectful and protective of
her subjects’ integrity. There will be
life beyond the horror. When Hirut
eventually retrieves the pornographic,propagandistic photos taken of her,
she recognizes that they are twin
images:One begging for assistance while
the other pleads silently for for-
giveness. One alone within thefolds of barbed wire, and the other
catapulted into history, doomed to
roam through borders and homes,
never more than the object impris-
oned by the eye.(^) Q
On Fire :
The (Burning) Case for a
Green New Deal
by Naomi Klein.
Simon and Schuster,
309 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper)
This Land Is Our Land:
The Struggle for a New
Commonwealth
by Jedediah Purdy.
Princeton University Press,
164 pp., $19.95
A Planet to Win:
Why We Need a Green New Deal
by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni,
Daniel Aldana Cohen,
and Thea Riofrancos, with a foreword
by Naomi Klein.
Verso, 194 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Roughly six million people across the
planet participated in the Global Cli-
mate Strike last September, inspired
by the sixteen-year-old Swedish activ-
ist Greta Thunberg and organized by a
rising social movement of young people
who ask why they should go to school
every day when adults seem hell-bent
on destroying their future. The demon-
stration, which spanned 163 countries
and all seven continents, was the larg-
est climate protest in history.
The surge of youth leadership is
not the only reason the climate move-
ment has gained momentum. Eco-
logical crises made worse by global
warming—devastating wildfires in
Australia, ferocious hurricanes in the
Caribbean—are unfolding faster and
more violently than all but the most
alarmed scientists and activists antici-
pated, even as recently as a decade ago.
Back then, Barack Obama was in the
White House, and while with one hand
he patiently steered the nation toward
the historic, if faltering, Paris Agree-
ment of 2015, with the other he proudly
helped the fossil fuel industry turn the
US into the world’s leading oil pro-
ducer. Most leaders of affluent coun-
tries acted in kind. They went to Davos
and the United Nations and preached
the gospel of resiliency and sustain-
ability. They called for a transition to
renewable energy and pledged to help
developing nations adapt to the treach-
erous conditions produced by emis-
sions from the developed world. Then
they went about business as usual,
while the people and corporations they
represented continued to burn through
the carbon budget and threaten species
of all varieties, across the planet.
Since the Paris Agreement a torrent
of frightening scientific reports and
catastrophic climate events has worn
away the appeal of any gradual, polite
approach to reform.^1 Climate advo-
cates have found it difficult to mobilize
effectively. Their demands can come
across as appeals for reducing personal
consumption. Cut down on air condi-
tioning. Don’t eat meat. Fly less. Drive
less. Move into a smaller home. Thus
far, appeals like this have failed to in-
spire the global movement that we need
to combat climate change.
More and more activists, including
many of the Global Climate Strike
participants, see the Green New Deal
(GND) as our best chance for doing so.
The GND was conceived in 2007 by the
New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman, but today it is most asso-
ciated with New York representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who intro-
duced it as a congressional resolution
with Massachusetts senator Edward
J. Markey in February 2019. Their
resolution enumerates the core con-
cerns of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), identifies
the United States as “responsible for
a disproportionate amount of green-
house gas emissions,” states that global
warming has “exacerbated systemic
racial, regional, social, environmental,
and economic injustices,” and warns
that “climate change constitutes a di-
rect threat to the national security of
the United States”—all shocking sen-
tences to read in a government doc-
ument. More controversially, it calls
for a vast set of policy objectives for
American legislators, including rapid
decarbonization of the economy, which
would require a full federal commit-
ment to renewable energy systems and
steep taxes on fossil fuels; an enormous
public works project, with new infra-
structure for housing, transit, and cli-
mate security creating millions of good
jobs; economic reparations for historic
discrimination against indigenous com-
munities and people of color; the right
to unionize; and a guarantee of better
working conditions, including family
and medical leave, paid vacations, and
retirement security for all.
When the Green New Deal was in-
troduced in Congress, the backlash was
immediate, with criticisms that it was
overambitious, implausible, and not
worthwhile. Yet within months, every
leading Democratic presidential candi-
date had embraced some version of the
proposal. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobu-
char, and Kamala Harris cosponsored
the GND in the Senate.^2 In the US,
Canada, and much of Europe, the GND
is the rare utopian idea that feels sud-
denly, surprisingly, plausible: struc-
tural change that, like its predecessor,
FDR’s New Deal, could actually hap-
pen. Like that remarkable legislative
package, the Green New Deal aims
to make infrastructure the engine of
transformation. It’s predicated on the
idea that protecting the earth and re-
storing economic opportunity require
rebuilding the systems that make mod-
ern life possible.
Three new books, Naomi Klein’s On
Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green
New Deal, Jedediah Purdy’s This Land
Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New
Commonwealth, and Kate Aronoff,
Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana
Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos’s A Planet
to Win, argue that nothing less than
a Green New Deal will allow future
generations to live well on this planet.
Purdy’s is a soulful work of political
theory based on a lecture he delivered
at the New York Institute for the Hu-
manities in 2018. Klein’s is a collection
of incendiary essays, speeches, and dis-
patches from her visits to Puerto Rico,
the Vatican, and the Great Barrier
Reef—some of the front lines of the cli-
mate movement—that were originally
published in progressive outlets like
The Guardian and The Intercept over
the past ten years. A Planet to Win,
which includes a foreword by Klein,
The Great Green Hope
Eric Klinenberg
(^1) See Bill McKibben’s recent article in
these pages, “A Very Hot Year,” March
12, 2020.
(^2) Nancy Pelosi has since introduced,
and the House has passed, the Climate
Action Now Act, sponsored by rep-
resentative Kathy Castor of Florida,
which would ensure that the US honors
its Paris Agreement commitment to re-
duce greenhouse gas emissions, even if
it pulls out. For now, the bill is mainly
symbolic, because of opposition from
both the Senate and President Trump.
Illustration by Molly Crabapple