30 | New Scientist | 14 September 2019
Book
On Fire: The burning
case for a green new deal
Naomi Klein
Allen LaneGrowth: From
microorganisms
to megacities
Vaclav Smil
MIT PressWHEN it comes to digging
ourselves out of the climate mess
we are in, there are a number of
big questions. Near the top of the
list is: can capitalism help? Then,
if so, how? If not, what can? And
what do we do about growth?
Two new books provide us
with some answers. Radical green
polemicist Naomi Klein starts her
new book, On Fire, with a shocker:
she agrees with the climate
deniers. Only about one thing, but
it is a big thing. Both sides believe
that climate change is, at root,
as much a cultural war as a battle
for the environment, and that
climate policies are a battleground
for how our civilisation evolves,
either in an individualistic
and capitalist way or in a
collectivistic and socialist way.
The book, a compilation of
some of Klein’s most trenchant
journalism coupled with fresh
material about the proposed US
Green New Deal, underlines that
view as she recounts key episodes.
For example, fresh from a meeting
of the conservative, free-market
Heartland Institute in Washington
DC, Klein writes that its CEO said
that those on the political left big
up climate change because it “is
the perfect thing... the reason why
we should do everything [the left]
wanted to do anyway”.
Klein follows on by responding
that: “They [the right] aren’tGreen in tooth and claw
Transforming our turbo-charged capitalism into a force that nurtures green
industry and reins in growth will take a real revolution, finds Fred Pearcewrong.” She believes that too
many climate scientists and
activists baulk at this political
truth, clinging to the idea that
somehow “we can avert
catastrophe by buying ‘green’
products and creating clever
markets in pollution”.
She says global capitalism
has become a geological as well
as a geopolitical force, eating
Earth’s resources and spewing out
planet-heating gases. “Political
revolution is our only hope,” she
writes, and those on the political
right who say that climate change
is a threat to capitalism aren’t
being paranoid, “they are paying
attention”. Leftists, she says, have
yet to capitalise on the fact “that
climate science has handed them
the most powerful argument
against capitalism since William
Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’”.
Her articles show how she has
moved from a preoccupation with
the social fallout of globalisation in
the sweatshops of Bangladesh and
land-grabbed plains of Africa to a
belief that the climate emergency
and growing inequality are
two sides of the same coin.
Some climate scientists see her
as an activist who appropriated
climate as a vehicle for her anti-
capitalist prescriptions. Maybe so,Views Culture
pessimistic. Once, he dismissed
people like Klein as members
of a “catastrophist cult”, but now
he seems to have joined them.
Growth, whether biological, social
or economic, may be normal, he
says, but the exponential growth
in economies and lifestyles we
have seen in recent decades isn’t,
and can’t continue without
disastrous consequences.
The sizes of the average US
house and the average European
car have doubled in the past half
century. Typical TV screens have
grown 15-fold. The wealth of the
richest has grown even more, with
the richest 1 per cent owning close
to half of the world’s wealth.
There is, says Smil, no way of
reconciling the preservation of
a well-functioning biosphere
with the standard economic
mantra that “does not conceive
any problems of sustainability in
relation to resources or excessive
stress on the environment”.
Unlike Klein, he doesn’t call forbut that doesn’t make her wrong.
Environmental scientist and
policy analyst Vaclav Smil comes
at this from a lifetime of Olympian
overviews of human society, and a
determinedly non-political stance.
In his new book, Growth, however,
he reaches remarkably similar
conclusions to Klein. Smil, whose
books have been famously lauded
by Bill Gates, grows ever moreENRI CANAJ/MAGNUM PHOTOS