Chapo Trap House - 358 - World on a Wire feat. Naomi Klein (10/14/19)

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

We're joined by author Naomi Klein to discuss climate change, a green new deal and what it must include, and new developments in responses to ecological crisis from both the right and the left. Check out Naomi's new book "On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal" here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-Fire/Naomi-Klein/9781982129910 And if you're in NYC, consider stopping by our launch party for the paperback edition of The Chapo Guide to Revolution, this Wednesday at Powerhouse Arena https://www.powerhousearena.com/events/book-launch-the-chapo-guide-to-revolution-by-chapo-trap-house/

All right. Hello, everybody. It's your Chapo for the week. It's me, Matt, and Virgil here, and we're very excited to be joined now by a now-making-our-second appearance on the show, getting that two-time Chapo challenge coin. It is Naomi Klein to talk about her new book On Fire, The Burning Case for the Green New Deal. Naomi, how are you doing? Very well. Good to be with you guys again. Writing the book or putting it together, you sort of do an admiral job of going against pure doomism despite the content of it. Was that difficult? I mean, there's a lot of doom. I mean, it's interesting what passes for being hopeful

these days is just sort of seeing any possibility that we might rally and do what is required to prevent absolutely catastrophic unraveling, because we've already locked in a level of warming that is extremely dangerous. I mean, this is why I sort of hesitate over the word doom. I think no matter what we do, we're going to be living with greater levels of climate disruption than we're seeing already, and we're already seeing some really, really scary events with having warmed the planet by one degree Celsius. I think it's really about how we decide to take care of each other in the context of love, serial climate shocks, whether we're going to tip into full kind of climate barbarism.

The reason I don't just feel sort of raw terror about it is that there's a greater appetite for that kind of systemic change than there has been at any point in my adult life. There's definitely a generational shift going on, as you guys know, where there's activists in their 20s are not terrified of connecting with other movements. They're not terrified of talking about capitalism. They actually know that the climate crisis is one of many systemic crisis crises produced under the system, so that's progress, I guess. You talked in the beginning about how this sort of shift in this debate away from this idea that global warming is a problem, but we can manage it within the confines of a free market capitalist

system to one that supposes that there's basically nothing we can do. The scale of the problem is too large, and we just have to sort of withstand it. Given that turn, how does that thinking lead to what you describe as climate barbarism, and what might that look like? Well, I think we're in it. I don't think it's a coincidence that as climate disruption becomes a lived reality, whether or not people claim to deny it or not. I think most of the people who claim to deny that the climate has changed here are just lying. Donald Trump had to change the designs of his golf courses to deal with sea level rise. They all know it's happening. They just think they're going to be all right. They think they're going to be able to make short-term profits. They think

they're going to be able to fortress themselves and their families. The climate barbarism is no longer denying that it is happening or really just kind of doing a lackluster effort around the denial, like the occasional tweet saying it's a Chinese hoax, but adapting in the sense of moving money from responses to the crisis over to building concentration camps and fortressing the borders. We're seeing this in the US. We're seeing the money move from FEMA disaster response to ICE and migration detention. We're seeing in Europe a similar process underway with the offshoring of the patrolling of the seas for migrants to the Libyan coast guard, as they call themselves, but they're really a bunch of warlords and they're

bringing migrants to concentration camps in Libya. All of this is modeled after Australia, which has been doing this for many years where they intercept the boats. They make sure that they never make it to Australian soil and they bring people to these offshore camps on remote islands like Manus and Nauru, which are themselves really vulnerable to climate change. They market this as deterrence, but it isn't really deterring because we have more people on the move at any point in history. It's really a strategy to fortress majority white continents from the impacts of climate disruption and the wars that we fund. Essentially, despite the odd and lackluster protests to the side, all the people who really matter all know that climate change is happening

and are already seeing the effects of it, but this barbarism is leading not to the creation of infrastructure or social order that would maintain a decent quality of life for people in light of these facts, but to essentially manage large human populations in ways that keep them out and in camps, basically. Yeah, and further criminalize people for seeking refuge. With the Trump administration, we've seen the new quota for how many refugees they're willing to accept is 18,000. That is nothing. I think in the final year of the Obama administration, it was 130,000. They're massively contracting the number of refugees they're willing to accept, even as the number of refugees increase. The other thing that they've been doing really

systematically is attacking temporary protected status, TPS. The significance of this is that there's actually no such thing under international refugee law as a climate refugee, because when the convention was written, it wasn't understood that there would be climate refugees. You can have a refugee for war, you can have a refugee from all kinds of civil conflict, genocide, but not climate disruption. One way that people who are displaced by natural disasters have been able to get temporary status in the United States is under TPS. TPS is a program that gives people temporary status if something extreme happens in their home countries. One of those things can be a natural disaster. That's one of the ways that you can get TPS. If you look at what the

Trump administration has done from the beginning, they have tried to close this loophole. They went after Salvadorans protected under TPS, and after Haitians protected under TPS. Now they've said that people from the Bahamas who were hit by Hurricane Dorian can't come under TPS. This is like the one way that people hit by natural disasters have been able to get status in the US, and they're shutting that down even as they massively restrict the number of refugees allowed. And of course, your listeners know all about what is happening on the borders with family separation and the building of these camps. But I guess what I'm stressing is this is not just about Trump. This has been happening in these settler colonial countries like Australia as well

at New Zealand. I don't think it's by happenstance that an Australian guy in New Zealand goes to a mosque in March and opens fire and kills more than 50 Muslim people at prayer, and in his manifesto he describes himself as an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist. And he sees immigration to Australia and New Zealand, North America and Europe as part of this war, as part of the great replacement. I mean, he said it in his manifesto, and then this in turn inspires the El Paso shooter to go to a Walmart, open fire, and more mass murder. And in this guy's manifesto, he actually says climate change is happening. Americans aren't going to change. So we have to keep Mexicans from adopting our way of life. And that's why he chose the Walmart. He was literally saying, only we get

Walmart. You can't shop like us, and we're going to keep shopping. So I mean, it doesn't get more literal than that. He apparently doesn't know there are Walmart's in Mexico. But again, all part of this is this idea that no longer is the rising tides, the threat, or the idea that we can do anything about putting stop the amount of carbon we're putting into the atmosphere at a level that would make a difference. But it's all about how people now are the real threat of climate change, and that everything we're doing to intervene in that is about how to surveil, stop, and ultimately kill and contain human beings themselves, which are sort of like an environmental disaster in these people's minds. So for some of these people, it's text,

like these mass murderers in El Paso and in Christchurch. But for other people, it's subtext. But it's been a big part of the subtext of the climate change denial movement for a long time. I wrote about it in the piece in the book about the Heartland Institute. I went there in 2011, and they were basically saying, you know, laughing about climate disruption and drought and, you know, I quote one of their speakers saying, you know, oh, well, if it's hot, if it's hot, they should get air conditioning, you know, I mean, they damn well know that people in in very poor parts of the world don't have the option to go to a Walmart and buy air conditioning. They're just saying, I don't give a shit, right? Okay. So if I'm reading you correctly, so what you're

saying is the camps on the border, Trump's, what is white supremacist policy, that's not an aberration. That's not just his particular populist dementia. That is the the next step at the next step adaptation to the externalities of climate change. And you see that all throughout the developed world. Right. I mean, you see it. And you know, I'm not saying that everybody who is moving is moving because of climate change. It's one of the drivers of migration. It's certainly a big driver of migration from Central America because Honduras and El Salvador and that's 50 year of a drought that is pushing farmers from from their lands. They can't feed their families. That's why they're moving. But we also know that basic like climate disruption just makes

everything worse, right? So if you have gang violence, and you add a drought on top of it, it makes things worse. If you have a crisis of domestic violence, it makes things worse. So you can't really pry these things apart. We know that in Syria, the fact that there was a historic drought in the in the year before the outbreak of civil war was one of the exacerbating factors. But I am saying that whether people deny it or not, we know that we are in an era of mass migration that is not going to change. And the reality is that the parts of our planet that are compatible with human civilization are contracting. We are going to have to share less and less space. And there's a couple of ways to deal with that. One way is to say, screw you,

you're not coming in, we're protecting our own. And to rationalize that with brutal theories that rank human life, theories that have always been alive in the American psyche and in the and in the settler colonial psyche, because they were required to rationalize the best of indigenous land and to rationalize slavery. And now they are required to rationalize the fortressing of borders. You have to tell yourself a story that makes it okay that families are being ripped apart, that people are being locked out, who are clearly desperate. And I think we're and so that's one way of dealing with this reality. And another way of dealing with it would require a kind of revolution in values where we would have to decide that actually we really

do believe inequality and we believe that rights are attached to the person and not to their nationality. And we would have to figure out how to live together on this contracting space for humanity in a way where we don't turn on each other, which means that we need to invest in a in a huge way in health care. And we need to invest in mental health as well, because communities are under incredible stress. And we have to build in these kinds of shock absorbers. And of course, we have to do everything possible to keep it from getting a hell of a lot worse, which means that we have to do everything possible to get to 100% renewable energy and a zero emission economy. Well, let's talk about the baseline for a minute. Let's talk about the do nothing and just see what

happens reality. We're talking when we're talking about climate refugees, we're talking about adaptations that take place at the border at the point of entry. What would internal adaptations look like 10 20 years from now? Right. So if we if we literally do nothing, like if we stay on the road, we're on. So that means we blow the completely inadequate emission reduction targets, that were introduced under Obama. And that's that's the road we're on under Trump. That would lead us to about four to six degrees Celsius of warming. And like I said, we've worn the planet by one degree, and we're seeing the unraveling under that. So how do you adapt to four to six degrees of warming? I don't know what to say about that, what that looks like.

It's it's really damn ugly. I don't like Kevin Anderson, who's in my opinion, the world's leading expert on on emission reduction. He says that four degrees warming isn't compatible with anything you would describe as organized civilization. I mean, with four to six degrees warming, New York doesn't exist. So I don't I don't know. I mean, choose your choose your fly of choice. We've imagined this future many times. What about the modest emissions reductions, the non revolutionary future? So like the Obama era kind of right, right? We'll still we'll still have the same capitalist world system. But you know, we'll we'll have some decoupling. Well, you know, I'm hesitating because, you know, even those emission reduction targets, like the the sort of,

you know, everybody is grieving because Trump left the Paris Accord. But if you look at what the Paris Accord actually was, it was it was the governments of the world coming together and saying we need to keep temperatures below 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius warming. And we're willing to do exactly half that. Because the Paris Accord was because it was still sort of under neoliberal logic, there wasn't any it didn't include a regulatory approach that was justice based that would have said, OK, well, this is how much each country has to cut emissions by if we are serious about meeting those targets. It just said every country just bring us your best efforts. And and and and so, you know, Obama brought his best efforts and Justin Trudeau brought his best efforts when you

brought their best efforts. And you add if you add up all those all those best effort pledges, it doesn't lead to to emissions that are compatible with 1.5 to 2 degrees warming, it leads to 3 to 4 degrees warming, which, like I said, is compatible. And and and then if you look at what governments are actually doing, there's they're blowing those terrible targets. So Justin Trudeau, you know, who this sort of liberal heartthrob of a five minutes ago, you know, he bought an oil pipeline for, I think, $3 billion or $4 billion from Kinder Morgan, and he's blowing the ridiculously inadequate initial reductions he brought to Paris. So there really isn't a plan on the table that that our existing model has been able to

to produce that doesn't lead to truly catastrophic outcomes. It would help if you stated the overall thesis of your book and generally and how that relates to not just the right or the status quo, but the the other ideas of what should be done. Right. So I mean, the reason why why I published this book now and the subtitle of the book is the burning case for a Green New Deal is is arguing that the kind of transformational approach that the Green New Deal a truly radical Green New Deal and not people are kind of taking that slogan and making it what they want. But I'll talk about what I mean by Green New Deal and what I think we should accept as a definition for a Green New Deal, that this

is actually the only way of meeting anything like emission reduction targets that could in any way be compatible with a good life, with a decent life. And I say that acknowledging that that anything we do, we're going to be living with massive loss and massive disruption where there's going to be more disasters than we have now. And there's going to be a lot more migration because it's too late to prevent warming of anything like 1.5 is the best we can we can achieve. And even achieving that would require, you know, I mean, it's a moonshot as AOC has said. And so the book is an argument for a Green New Deal, which is a way of reducing emissions in line with what scientists have told us we need to do to hit those targets, but doing it in a way

that is very deliberate about creating not just any old green jobs, but unionized, well-paying, good jobs, protecting the salaries and benefit levels of people who are moving from high carbon sectors to green sectors. And also making sure that jobs that are already low carbon, like caring for kids and the elderly and the most devalued work in our economy, devalued because it's overwhelmingly women's work, it's overwhelmingly immigrant women's work, actually pays a good salary, also has those protections, and so that we can expand those parts of our economy. So the Green New Deal is about centering justice within our countries and between our countries as we try to meet these very tough emission reduction targets.

What we're seeing is that if we forget, if we say, you know, we don't have time for justice, we have to do this as quickly as possible. And we've heard that argument from Thomas Friedman, we've even heard it from climate scientists like Michael Mann, who have said, you know, we just don't have time to throw in the healthcare and, you know, we don't have time to make this about racial justice and economic justice. And, you know, people are saying this very explicitly now. You know, we just need to get ourselves a good carbon tax or a good carbon pricing scheme. Look at what happened in France. Look at what happened with the yellow vest movement. You know, when you introduce carbon pricing schemes within a neoliberal framework, right,

which is already attacking people's standard of living on multiple fronts, and that caused a great, you know, stand in for this because he attacked labor rights, he imposed austerity, he handed out tax breaks to millionaires and corporations. And he said, and I really care about the planet. Let's make the planet great again. He sent out a very popular meme and said, in the way we're going to do this is we're going to make the price of gas more expensive. And lo and behold, you have a popular uprising and cars burning on the streets of Paris and Lyon because it has rightly seen as yet another stress on overstressed people who can't take it anymore. And the slogan is you care about the end of the world. We care about the end of the month.

So, you know, the argument I'm making is this pathway that that that pretends to be serious and pragmatic, right, is intensely un-pragmatic and intensely unserious because not only does it have nothing to do with the climate science because it won't lower emissions as, you know, in any way near as quickly as we need to do it. It also is going to generate a huge popular backlash and you'll have to undo it, which is what my call did and which has happened, you know, in different places, you know, I'm in the U.S. now. I used to live in Ontario. I hope to return to Canada in a couple of years, but nice and warm for you. I'm here till 2020 and I'm leaving. But, you know, in Ontario, we had a liberal government

that introduced various carbon pricing schemes that were seen as reasons why people's energy prices were going up. And that was part of what has given us, you know, our very own version of Donald Trump, which is our right-wing populist government in Ontario is the brother of the crack-smoking mayor, you probably remember him, friend of the show. Doug Ford, you know, he ran on a platform of repealing the carbon price, repealing the carbon pricing, giving people buck a beer and rolling back sex education to 1992 levels and he won. So, you know, this thing that poses as pragmatic, which is let's divorce carbon from all of these other failing structures in economic inequality, you know, is a recipe for getting less than nothing done.

Right, right. And so the Thomas Friedman idea of decoupling is that, you know, we can have our cake and eat it too. We will maintain the economic growth. We will just, you know, tinker with some of the underlying structure there, swap out some fossil fuel generators of electricity with clean energy. Right. So, but decoupling, right, is the, you know, it's an economic term that says that actually we are moving to a less material economy. And so while it was true in a more industrial age, that economic, that increases in economic growth were, you know, happened in parallel to increases in carbon emissions. Now, because we are in sort of the information age and sort of in often the cloud, we can have economic growth and we can have a reduction in emissions.

That's the idea behind decoupling and all of these guys love it. But it isn't serious, because the only, the only thing that they can point to is the most marginal decoupling. So like growth of 1 to 2% paired with emission reduction of like 1 to 2%. But if you're serious about meeting the 1.5 to 2 degree target, you actually need emission reductions of 15%. So that is a massive gap. Okay. So to quote Kevin Anderson again, you know, it is possible to have marginal emission reductions with marginal levels of economic growth, but it is absolutely impossible. And there's not any economists on the planet who can tell you how you can have deep emission reduction with economic growth, which is why you have this clash between our economic model and

what our planet needs. It's not actually a serious position. Like they're not engaging with the science, I guess is what I'm saying. Well, this brings me to something that a lot of people who resist the Green New Deal point out, if they don't, if they're not totally nihilists and they do believe it's real, they might point out, I'd like for us to change stuff, but the reality is, is that it's not just up to the United States. That China is a huge emitter now surpassing us as an emitter, and will only do more so as its economy becomes more developed and becomes more of a consumer society and a consumer economy that's also true of India, Africa. How do we integrate this Green New Deal in the United States into a international framework that would actually lead to reduction

of emissions in other countries as well without basically insisting, no, you have to maintain your status as like peonists, like agriculture societies without the advanced lifestyle that the West has. Right. So we have the framework in a way, which is the UN Convention on Climate Change, which says that countries have common but differentiated responsibility, and what that means is that every government on the planet has a responsibility to rise to this challenge, but there is a differentiated responsibility, and the differentiated responsibility has to do with the fact that some countries have been emitting carbon on an industrial scale for several hundred years, and the countries that you mentioned have been doing so for a few decades. Right.

And so what it means is that the countries that have been doing so for a few centuries and building up the benefits from that have to kind of do more faster, right, which is why in Alexandria Acacia Cortez and Ed Markey's resolution about the Green New Deal, it talks about decarbonization in the United States for electricity in a decade. And everyone said, why are you doing it so fast? Right. And the IPCC said that we had we had 12 years to cut emissions in half globally. And the reason why you need to do it faster in the United States and faster in Europe and faster, you know, in other highly industrialized countries is because of that historical emissions, the historical emissions. But the other thing that you need to do is you need to pay your climate

debts. So you need to help countries that have emitted less carbon and whose people are still living in dire poverty to leapfrog over fossil fuels and create lots of good jobs and leave their forests intact and not dig up the carbon that they have, that they could dig up and sell and make money and redistribute and pull people out of poverty. You need to provide real climate financing. And this has been the biggest weakness of the Green New Deal, to be honest with you, is that there was not enough language about the need for the U.S. to provide to live up to the commitment that it made when it signed the UN Climate Convention and provide climate financing. There's this idea that the U.S. is going to lead just by doing like, you know, just this idea that

when the U.S. does things, people just naturally want to follow. And the fact is the U.S. has just been enough of an arson on the international stage when it comes to climate change, that nobody's going to be inspired by the U.S. doing some green things. Like, what is going to move the needle on this is the U.S. actually living up to its international commitments. And the only one who's talking about this is Bernie. I know this is going to be a huge disappointment to all of you, but Bernie's Green New Deal, everybody else's Green New Deal honestly stops at the border of the U.S. And that's not climate justice. You can't call your plan, you know, a justice-based transition if you're only talking about it in a national context or

even a nationalist context, which is what Elizabeth Warren is doing. She talks about economic patriotism and how there's going to be, you know, this huge manufacturing boom in solar panels and the way the U.S. is going to be a climate leader on the world stage is essentially by dumping cheap solar panels on the developing world, which is actually economic imperialism. It's not, you know, it's not leadership and it will be understood as such. So Bernie, you know, is talking about mobilizing $200 billion, which is not a number he pulled out of the area. He has worked with the leading thinkers on this who have been blocking out what the U.S.'s actual historical responsibility is. And this is what would actually move the needle. This is what would

empower people in India and China who want their governments to also lead on this because they're the ones choking on impossibly polluted air in Delhi, you know, and in Shenzhen. And, you know, it may have their own reasons for wanting this to move, but when the U.S. does not live up to its historical responsibilities, it really emboldens this sort of fake anti-imperialism that you get from a lot of governments in the global cells who say, you know, they're trying to keep us from having the benefits that they had, right? And, you know, really what they're trying to do is just protect corrupt coal contracts. So I know that's my spiel about it. It's not, I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I think it's really, really important for people to understand that this idea

that the U.S. is just going to lead within its own borders and renege on its responsibilities to help finance the global transition is a complete fantasy. We have to do a couple of things. We've got to put real money on the table. Bernie is the only one talking about it. And we also have to open our borders to many, many more migrants and refugees because they have a right to asylum. At least as it pertains to the Green New Deal as a movement or a series of policies being proposed in America that has caught on and become sort of a stand-in for this idea that we need to do something serious. We can't just, you know, nibble around the edges of this problem. But as you've mentioned, there are a lot of people talking about the Green New Deal and it's always not, it's not

always so clear what they're actually referring to. It's sort of like Medicare for all. It's become a popular slogan, but not all of the people that are using it are using it to describe the things that you or I or serious advocates for these things would have in mind. What are some of the things that individuals, citizens, voters, whatever you want to call them, should be on the lookout for when they hear a politician or an organization talking about the Green New Deal to, you know, discern whether what they're talking about is the real McCoy or something that is more of one of these yet nibbling efforts. Well, look, this framework doesn't come from nowhere. Like this phrase, the Green New Deal has been around for a while and it's been used and misused and Thomas Friedman

used it for a while. So, you know, like I don't think it's possible to say, you know, what is a real Green New Deal? I think it's possible to say, what is real climate justice? Because the framework comes from the climate justice movement. It comes from the, it comes from countries like Ecuador and Bolivia, who have been calling for a Marshall plan for planet Earth for more than a decade. And it comes from frontline communities that have had the dirtiest industries in their backyards, overwhelmingly communities of color, and have borne the toxic burden of our addiction to fossil fuels. So the core principles of a just transition away from fossil fuels are that the people who got the worst deal under the old extractive economy need to benefit and help

design this transition. So that's a core principle. Another core principle of a just transition is that no worker should be left behind. So we need to have trade unions involved in this process, democratically designing the transitions. We need to have workers' salaries protected. And this is a big mistake that the environmental movement has made over the years is treating all jobs as kind of interchangeable. So they say, like, oh, don't worry, you're losing your, you know, your, your, your, your family supporting job in the fossil fuel sector, but you can have a $13 an hour job putting up wind turbines and not understanding why people aren't excited about that, right? So there have to be real, real union protections, real labor protections. And there also has to

be a polluter pays principle in it, right, which means that the people most responsible for this have to bear the economic costs of the transition. And justice has to be baked in on all of these fronts. And justice can't stop at the border. That's another really key element to it. You know, I mentioned earlier that the reasons why, you know, healthcare has to be recognized in this is that this, we are going to be dealing with shocks and stresses. And one of the, you know, stupidest responses to the Green New Deal has been this idea that healthcare is somehow an add-on, right? That it's kind of making it harder. And why are you like making it everything in the kitchen sink? If you look at what actually happens in the aftermath of disasters, I'll use Hurricane Maria

as an example, because it is the most lethal disaster in recent years. More than 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. But what killed people was not falling debris. What killed people was decades of austerity that had starved the electricity grid, prepared it for privatization, decades of attacks on the healthcare system, privatization of the healthcare system, so that when you had the storm, the infrastructure was so brittle, the public infrastructure was so brittle that it was just completely wiped out. And so thousands of people weren't able to plug in their oxygen machines or dialysis machines. And all the research shows this, that it was actually a healthcare crisis in the aftermath of Maria that took those thousands of lives. So that is why

Medicare for all has to be part of this. And I could go on and on. There's lots of parts of it that I think are, my criticisms of the Green New Deal are, I actually think that it's not broad enough. We don't have enough discussion of migrant rights within a Green New Deal. We need more about the connection to the military. This is why we can have this sort of, I mean, not to be too hard on Warren, because I do think that there are parts of her Green New Deal plan that are very good. But this idea that we can kind of green the military as part of the Green New Deal is real profound absurdity and really dangerous, because we actually need to get that money and move it over, because we aren't going to do this all with MMT, sorry. This is trillions

and trillions of dollars. I want to go back to that discussion about decoupling and one of the more provocative ideas. This isn't something you hear very often. Let's move back to this really obscure. Okay, let's go back there. Everyone turned off the last time. One of the more provocative ideas in your book, it's under the header, Ending the Cult of Shopping. And I'll just quote here, the bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies, but also by reducing the amount of material stuff that the wealthiest 20% of the people on the planet consume. So in terms of electoral politics, politicians have to promise

growth, but that is that growth always correlates with increased consumption, which will necessarily correlate with increased emissions, yes? Right. So that is a problem that politicians feel that they have to always promise growth, but there is going to be growth in parts of our economy if we do this. And if we're not careful in how we design a Green New Deal, you could actually end up having a pretty serious emission increase, right? Because if we are talking about transforming housing, transportation, electricity, agriculture, and this is what a serious Green New Deal is, is talking about a huge building boom. And it is necessary to do. But when you have an economy that right now is intensely reliant on fossil fuels, as you roll out this huge infrastructure

project, you're actually going to burn a lot of fossil fuels. You may eventually get to a 100% renewable economy at the end of it. But in the short term, you're going to burn a lot of carbon. That's the trap that we have to be aware of. The other piece of it is that if we are going to pay workers a living wage, and we should, and if we're going to provide a jobs guarantee, and I think that we should, then we also have to be aware that within our current economic model, a lot of that is going to be turned into carbon. A lot of that is just going to end up being spent shopping on disposable products that burn a lot of carbon. So what we need is to figure out which parts of our economy we can afford to grow and which parts of our economy we have to contract. So if you turn

on Fox, you hear that this is all about taking things away, right? It's all about taking away your hamburgers and grounding you and telling you you can't do anything. And this is now part of Trump's stump speech, right? Because it's a very effective fear tactic that equating climate action with suffering. And this is why I think that you know the concept of sort of private restraint and public luxury is a really important one because there are all kinds of ways that we can invest in the things that actually increase quality of life. We can invest in public infrastructure like parks and we can fund the arts and you know not in an elite way but actually give people the right to nature, the right to participate in the arts as they did during the original New Deal

where you had a renaissance and public funding for the arts and it was intensely democratic whether it was theater or mural projects. You know to me it was one of the most exciting parts of the original New Deal was this idea of sort of democratic revolution and who has the right to make art and access art. That's low carbon, that's more low carbon work. We can invest in schools, we can invest in the infrastructure of care which is also what saves lives during disasters. So you know I'm not in the degrowth crowd where I think that the most important thing is that we understand that we can't grow. I think that's like not a helpful framing. I think we need to be much more deliberate about the areas where we can afford to have abundance and the areas where we can't

afford to have abundance and it does require a much more designed economy than we have right now and you know some of this is not particularly compatible with the sort of sort of communication that happens during election campaigns but I think one of the really important things we need to do if we're serious about a Green New Deal is I think we need to build in a kind of a regular carbon audit to keep ourselves honest right. So if we end up in a situation where Trump loses, we have you know a president and administration that ran on introducing a Green New Deal and they actually start introducing it. I think one of the really important thing we need to do is have some sort of independent carbon audit making sure that we don't end up in this

really really bizarre situation of mobilizing huge resources to introduce a Green New Deal and ending up with a carbon emission spike. Growth that isn't predicated on consumption essentially. Yeah I look when you have an infrastructure project like this you're going to have it is true that you will have economic growth and the question is how do you keep that from turning into carbon like how do you keep that from just turning into more shopping and that's very tricky. It's very very tricky to do. Speaking to the issue of consumption particularly among you know our listeners beneficiaries of a you know developed western nations and a you know highly consumptive lifestyle like even you know people who know

that this is all a problem but feel like their individual actions and like the attempts made to uh hector them in terms of their you know uh individual consumer choices not really mattering like how do you how do you approach that problem in terms of like the need for collective action when people feel perhaps you know not irrationally that whether they use a paper or plastic straw isn't going to tip the balance one way or another but at the same time probably should just use the paper straw. You see what I'm saying? Like I wasn't looking at you virtual. Are you having a debate about paper straw? I mean like it's just the idea that like the uh the you know not totally irrational despair people feel about the fact that yeah

their beneficiaries of this very easy nice consumer lifestyle but like you know thinking that my individual consumer choices are not really going to make a difference here and I'm you know I have to use the paper straw like maybe it pisses me off maybe it doesn't but like I feel trapped in like the only thing I have power over is are these consumer choices versus a broader state project of collective action like what like what is the right tone to set there in terms of how we individually can be consuming less or being less wasteful with what we really really we need to in dire need of is a grand state project to to confront this problem. Yeah I mean I think I think we really need to emphasize the collective over the individual

um because I think the main reason why people immediately turn to their shopping habits and try to sort of you know when you talk about these huge global scale crises and the immediate question is what should I buy what should I eat um what can I as an individual do it's it's just because people have been trained to think that that is their only sphere of influence that they that that that activism is for other people um and you know you often often like when I get that question it's sort of predicated on this idea like well I'm too busy to do any of this kind of organizing stuff you're talking about so what is the one thing I can do as a consumer to help you know and I'm just really honest about it I'm like nothing like you can't do anything as a

consumer that's going to stop climate change and the idea that you as a consumer alone are going to do this or that we're going to voluntarily get enough people to stop eating meat altogether to to get emissions down by 15 percent a year I mean that's just ridiculous I think there are reasons for us to change our lifestyle that more have to do with debunking this idea that we've been fed that if we do do the things that are necessary to lower emissions our lives will be terrible um when the truth is that a lot of the things will make us you know healthier you know it's well I know there's been a new study but generally it is agreed that that eating less meat makes you healthier um and and riding your bike instead of driving and a lot of the things

that are equated with the good life actually are making people miserable and unhealthy um you know in this country and so if you do those things and realize oh my life didn't end and in some ways it's better then you know you'll be in a better position to to win an argument with somebody who tells you that it's all apocalyptic but you know if you make your lifestyle into a fetish then you're going to have less time to spend doing the political organizing that we need to do to stand up to really really powerful forces that really want us to lose um so you know I guess that's how I try to thread it like sure do those things don't mistake them for what it's going to take to um to to avert catastrophic warming um understand that this idea that that our primary

sphere of power is is through our shopping is part of a 50-year campaign to wage war on the other aspects of life from which we used to draw collective identity and now we try to build our identities whereas shopping um and that's too bad um you know generally one of the benefits of joining a movement is is that you actually get other ways of building identity through that and you also have less time for shopping so that helps um I mean honestly I think it's it's a pretty huge distraction and I and I'm getting less of it to be honest so I used to get a lot more of it you know ever since I wrote no logo people have been asking me how they can change the world through shopping um and now I find that um this you know that sort of that this sunrise generation

of activists really get that um you know a lot of them are vegans and a lot of them you know ride bikes and use transit but they don't mistake that for what it's actually going to take to to win a habitable future um just to change her for a little bit like in thinking about all this I remember when I was a kid uh you know in the 90s he'll shout out all the 90s kids out there like the biggest the biggest you know public health uh thing in imagination was uh cigarettes and the biggest villain like the biggest corporate villain in american public uh the imagination was the tobacco companies and they were so villainous because they knew as you know early is like the 1970s or even before that the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer and

a very various other uh you know illness and death caused by their product and they covered it up and they let a generation of people uh smoke cigarettes be unaware of the consequences of it and you know there's a big effort to uh you know stop smoking and vilify and rightly so these tobacco companies but think about it now we know for certain that like Exxon knew for sure what putting fossil fuels into the atmosphere was doing to our climate in the 70s they saw all the graphs that everybody knows now and everyone's familiar with and they did the same thing as the tobacco companies and if you think about the scale of the evil involved in that as compared to cigarettes it vastly outstrips it in terms of like the loss of life and damage that it has done

and is going to do is there any way like thing beyond the parameters of the green new deal is there any way we're going to make a difference without basically euthanizing the fossil fuel industry as it currently exists through nationalization or whatever else means that is at our disposal no um they have a business model that requires that they have as much in production in much as much in reserve as they have in production so fossil fuels that they have in their back pocket but they haven't yet begun digging up um they have to constantly be able to tell their investors that they have a 100 percent what's called a reserve replacement ratio as much in reserve as they have in in production now what we know is that if we want to keep

temperatures below two degrees warming below two degrees celsius let alone 1.5 we need to start winding down the fossil fuel extraction projects that are currently in production that means the fossil fuel frontier is closed now as soon as Exxon admits that their stock price collapses right because what they're saying is we have no future and what they have to constantly say is no no no even though all these governments are claiming they care about climate change and you know fewer of them are right because we have more trumps and false analysis and so on but what they have to say is even the governments that claim they're going to do something about it don't really mean it because they're non binding and they look at what they're doing they're buying

pipelines they don't really mean it so our demand for our product is going to is going to continue well into the future so no that that that is not compatible with anything that we need to do in the face of the climate crisis and I believe we you know we what we really need to do is we need to get the remaining profits of a left in this you know murderous sector and we need to use them to pay for the transition to pay for the damage that they've done which is you know why we need somebody you know as president who has a track record of standing up to very very powerful players because there isn't a way to bring them along and you know I think that that's been a really really dangerous fantasy for a long time but I mean the tobacco analogy is really it's really important

for a couple of reasons you know from what one thing it points to is the fact that people start changing their behavior on a large scale when you have laws that tell them to as opposed to just you know voluntary changes in lifestyle of the kind that you know people who are just saying no everybody just go vegan as if people are just going to voluntarily do that right I mean I used to smoke I knew smoking would kill me you know I well past the point that tobacco companies were suppressing the science we all knew and I you know I did eventually quit smoking but only when you know there was nowhere left for me to smoke you know I it was banned in restaurants and then bars and I you know I come from a cold climate I was shivering you know in the in the Canadian

tundra and I just started feeling really foolish having a cigarette and then eventually quit you know yeah they're trying to try to they're trying to do that with vaping now too but I think we'll win this fight I think you're the wrong audience for this anecdote but you know I I do think we have to start being honest because regulation has gotten such a bad name that sometimes you know we do things that we know are bad until people make it really really really hard for us to keep doing them some of us need that we just you know some of us sure so one thing that is often brought up by speaking of the fossil fuel industry those sort of industry leaders and politicians who are scared of the new deal is the idea that we should be investing in carbon capture technology and the

way out of this is we don't need to really stop producing carbon in the atmosphere we can create technology that will take it out immediately so that the effect doesn't exist and I know that that is scorned that obviously is an opinion that's scorned by most people among climate activists for the very simple reason that's pretty clearly a attempt to muddy the waters and and create a distraction and an easy out that lets people out of the real dilemma of dealing with this but when we talk about how much climate change has already locked into the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere how much is coming right on the horizon one should we be talking in some way about carbon capture if it is viable or is it just too dangerous because it can too easily be taken by

the existing corporate polluters and used to their advantage to fend off the new green a new green new deal right so they're kind of there's two kinds of of carbon capture technology that get talked about there's a kind that are sort of like attached to a coal-fired power plant that they're yeah lets them continue to increase pollution but the idea that they're going to capture it and bury it deep underground in a rock formation and then there's this and then and then there's the carbon drawdown technologies right which are saying no this is not about this is not about the coal-fired power plant this is about the fact that we already have too much carbon in the atmosphere at safe levels or you know around 350 350 parts per million

or lower and we're well over 450 now um so we have to pull carbon out of out of the atmosphere out of the air right so even so so this would be assuming that we get our energy to 100% renewable that we get our economies running on on zero emission technologies and we still have this problem of the fact that we need to draw carbon out of out of the atmosphere I think the the idea that that that we stay with fossil fuel technologies and and and use these really untested dodgy and expensive technologies tacked on to them to bury the carbon underground I think that should be a non-starter you've been talking about this for decades the the the projects that they have gotten off the ground have been boondoggles um we have the technology to get to 100% renewable

energy there are so many health benefits to doing it it means you don't have sacrifice zones communities that have to have these industries in their backyards and have to have their air poisoned by them and the benefits of of renewables is that it creates this great opportunity also for a more democratic economy because you can you can shift to other ownership models because the inputs are ubiquitous right wherever the air wherever the wind blows wherever the sun shines you can have renewable energy um they're they're much cheaper technologies than these very very cumbersome fossil fuel technologies especially when you add on carbon capture to them so you can have more distributed ownership you can have energy co-ops you can have mean remunization

you can use the profits from renewables to pay for services and so on um so that's why I think I mean we also know that it just doesn't work now let's talk about the ones that are just about drawing the carbon down from the air I you know these are really um un largely untested technologies not to say that it's not theoretically possible but we haven't seen any anything like it they're kind of metal trees is what's being proposed um and there's another technology that draws carbon out of the atmosphere as well and that's trees they are tested we've seen this happen we also have a crisis of wood it wouldn't trees not metal we have an you know climate change is the only ecological crisis we face girl so we also have a had an extinction crisis um and so assuming we

don't want to be the only species left on earth um one of the best things we can do is have um um uh you know reforestation and revegetation um projects that that draw carbon out of the atmosphere and also restore habitat for wildlife um that are facing extinction and I think marrying those two projects um those two imperatives is one of the most exciting ways that we can respond to the climate crisis so um you know one of you know when we think about what FDR did under the original New Deal one of one of the most popular programs was the Civilian Conservation Corps which was a response to a deforestation crisis in the 1930s and also to the Dust Bowl so you had under the Civilian Conservation Corps you had more than two million young men from cities

coming from families that were getting relief so they were poor families and these young men were sent um to forests across the country and to farms to plant trees they planted 2.3 billion trees which is more than half the trees that have ever been planted in the United States um and so you know it would be interesting to think about what a modern day uh a Civilian Conservation Corps could look like um how how we could learn from the mistakes that were made how it could center indigenous knowledge and indigenous land rights um how it could be designed to um to protect wildlife habitat at the same time you know that's the kind of carbon capture that I'm more interested in I mean when you think I mean we do have to be honest that when you when you talk about rolling out

renewable energy on a huge scale we are talking about having having to mine a lot of metal right for the wind turbines for the solar panels so to add on top of that all of these metal trees right um which would be sucking carbon out of the air and burying it underground I mean one of the problems is it's a whole whole hell of a lot more mining that we we would be doing I want to spend the balance of our time talking about the right and the generational change that's happening you mentioned and wrote about in your book uh going to the Heartland Institute a couple years ago and it seems that the the climate denialist message has changed rapidly in the past couple years and gone from it's not happening to it's happening but it's not man-made to it's

happening and there's nothing we can do about it or it's happening and look at this awful child from Europe what is what is right now the what is the denialist goal what was that last one it's happening but look at this awful child who wants to take away your hamburgers and your plastic lawn chairs right and what is what's the denialist end game right now because maybe that's the messaging for the dum-dums but you know shortly policymakers even at elite levels have to you know they they can see the writing on the ball so what's the I mean I like I said I think what will end up being nostalgic about the age of climate change denial because I think the only thing scarier you know than somebody with an intensely hierarchical worldview and what all

the social science shows is that is that climate change denial correlates very closely with people who have a high what's called a hierarchical worldview which is just a way of saying that they're racist that they think that people who you know who are poor are poor because they deserve it because they're somehow lesser and people who are rich are are rich because they're just better people and you know if they if they overwhelmingly happen to be white men that's just because they happen to just be better right this is the hierarchical worldview and and and so overwhelmingly it is the people who have the most hardened hierarchical worldviews who have denied the reality of climate change and now we're seeing a generational shift on the right where young

right-wingers are not denying climate change it nearly it's nearly the same levels as their parents did but it's not because they no longer have an intensely hierarchical worldview it's because they've found a way to reconcile that intensely hierarchical worldview with the reality of climate change and that's even scarier right because what what because what that looks like is let them die in the desert let them let them drown in the Mediterranean because we have ranked human life and you know we and we are okay with that so you know that's the end game and this is why like this idea of we have to convince the climate change deniers with like the right science based argument has to me always been you know a little bit of a fantasy because i'm actually

scared of what happens when they stop denying climate change well that seems to me what you talk about eco fascism in your book that seems to me what is about to be the explicit mass electoral message that yes it's happening but we have the resources and we have the military will be fine and you won't have to change your life or anything like that yeah yeah i mean i don't know if Trump will ever make it explicit but you know when he talks about the invaders right um he's invoking it he doesn't have to explicitly say why they are invading it's all subtext right um i think that some of the european uh you know fascist parties are explicit about it and and and and they don't deny the reality of climate change and they do use the fact that that they know that more people will

be on the move in the context of ecological disruption to harden their their white supremacist projects and i think this is true of reigning the pen what should the mass left response be because it it seems like what you're calling for overall in the balance of your book is a essentially it's it's it's the left revolutionary project and it is undoing 30 years 30 plus years of austerity of neoliberalism and something that's cooked into people's minds what's going to disrupt that equilibrium before you know before the seawalls burst you know i think that i'll just give it just tell you a short story i hope it's short because i feel like i've been rambling but um i was recently in chico um california and um and went to paradise california which

now it it's just a really really really spooky place because um you know 14 000 buildings were buildings burned um and it was part of the largest um wildfire in california's history almost exactly a year ago now um and but they've they've cleared away the debris most of the debris in paradise has been cleared away and so it sort of looks kind of tidy and you have all these empty plots and it looks almost they almost look like campsites you know what i mean um because you see the individual plots but there's nothing there and down the road from paradise is chico and and when the those when the fire um started spreading so quickly right i mean it it happened so fast i mean this is what everybody's still kind of just in shock about it's just how quickly it

happened that it started you know in the morning and by noon the whole thing was over right um people got in their cars and they drove and they drove to to paradise and sorry they drove to chico and a lot of people ended up in the parking lot of walmart and in that parking lot it turned into this kind of amazing um mutual aid center where people came together and they um they brought each other home cooked food and they brought each other clothes and they you know made databases who had an extra room and who would welcome a family that had just been displaced um and you know you really saw and i've seen this again and again in disaster zones like this incredible you know just deep desire for people to help each other and help total strangers and you know and

really be their best selves and and now a year has passed and and the the stresses the structural stresses of living with the increased um the increased burdens of of a of a climate disrupted community where they have you know i think they have more than 10 000 new people in their community at one point it was 20 000 additional people were living in chico which is not a big place right and they have all the traffic accidents that go with that and everybody is stressed out and they don't have the mental health supports that they need and there's a spike in domestic violence and then everyone's rents are going up because there's nowhere to rent and that's what capitalism does it hikes the rent and it hikes the utilities and people are under all of this stress and on

these families who open their homes to strangers in need they start getting on each other's nerves right because everybody's so stressed out and and and it just is like everyone's on edge and it's just me and you really think that we you know these investments that we make in universal programs right if we say everybody has the right to health care and it has to be free we need free public transit to just take the pressure off off of our infrastructure with to guarantee people housing it has to be green housing all of this is going to be the difference between whether or not we respond to the shocks that are coming with as much grace as we humans are able to muster and i have to say that people of chico did as well as we can do they've really really tried but everything is working

against them right they don't have any of the structural supports that they need so you know that those market forces bear down and they bring out those other parts of ourselves right which you know that that short termism that that that you know that that tendency to to turn on each other in times of scarcity so you know those investments in in in non-market universal programs that people say are you know and add on to the green new deal why are you talking about it this is going to be the difference between whether or not we are monsters in the future or whether or not we're able to hold on to some kind of humanity so i you know i feel like that's the most important message we need to absorb right now Naomi Klein i think that is a perfect place to leave this

conversation but i want to thank you so much for joining us again once again Naomi Klein the book is on fire the burning case for a green new deal uh in stores now do not order on amazon don't order the brand amazon just want to make that clear i know previous comments on the show might have led you to believe otherwise but no yet do not buy the book on amazon uh once again Naomi Klein thank you so much for talking to us this is one consumer choice that will change the world thank you bye thank you take care guys thank you