Briahna Joy Gray: I’m so glad to be joined today by environmental activist, writer, Naomi Klein. Thank you so much for joining me and let’s hop right into it. So, Bernie has put forward a 16-point, $3 trillion plan, and there are some folks that are saying that’s just too much money and it’s unrealistic. Do you agree or do you think that that amount of money is commensurate with the threat that we’re facing right now?
Naomi Klein: So, if we believe what we say about the need for a green New Deal, we are not talking about a narrow climate policy. We are talking about transforming the bones of our economy, right? We’re talking about transforming where we get our energy from, how we live [particularly in cities, the kind of buildings we live in], how we move ourselves around [the extent to which we are in private cars versus public transit]… We’re really talking about changing everything, so yeah, it costs a lot of money. It is also going to save us huge amounts of money because we are already seeing the enormous costs of superstorms, of droughts, of sea level rise.
But I think the truth is we have to spend what it takes [laughs]. We have to spend what it takes because there’s something morally bankrupt about even doing a cost-benefit analysis because what we’re really talking about is whether or not we are gonna save hundreds of millions of lives, and you can’t put a price tag on that.
So what we have to do is honestly cost it out and we have to design the transformation in a way that is just, that puts justice at the center, that says that no worker can be left behind in this transition, that workers need to be guaranteed the same wages and benefits as they had in their previous jobs. They need to be democratic participants in the transition, and the front-line communities, which are overwhelmingly black and brown communities who have borne the toxic burden of our addiction to fossil fuels, need to be first in line to benefit from this transformation. And that is what matters.
Briahna Joy Gray: So, you mentioned front-line communities and often kind of racial justice issues and environmental justice issues get siloed so they’re separate and apart from one another. Can you talk to me a little bit about why it’s important to actually think of these things intersectionally?
Naomi Klein: So, look. We are all inside the climate. It is the ultimate big tent, the earth’s atmosphere, and it is in crisis. Our house is in crisis, and when your house is in crisis, everything inside your house gets worse, goes into deeper crisis. So, this is a fundamentally intersectional crisis. Whatever is in crisis without climate change spirals into even worse crisis with climate change, and we see this in the aftermath of devastating storms like Hurricane Maria. What cost thousands of lives in Puerto Rico was not falling debris after Hurricane Maria. It was the impact of decades of brutal economic austerity that systematically underfunded and privatized the healthcare system, that was… had stripped the public utility trying to get it ready for privatization, then the storm hits and the whole system breaks down and people are unable to plug in their oxygen machines, their dialysis machines. It becomes a public health emergency.
Anybody who understands how the climate crisis actually plays out on the ground understands that you can’t pry apart healthcare and the right for every single person to have free, great healthcare. The idea that this is somehow an add-on [laughs] is absurd because this is actually what costs lives.
Briahna Joy Gray: So, you’ve written a book called Capitalism vs. the Climate. Can you talk about why those things are in conflict with each other?
Naomi Klein: There are a bunch of reasons why the economic system that we currently have is in a fundamental conflict with the things we need to do if we’re gonna take the climate crisis seriously. We have an economic system that tells us we need to leave everything to the market. So, if we’re gonna do something about climate change, we should put in a sort of a gentle market mechanism and then get out of the way of the market.
First of all, we don’t have enough time for that. We have procrastinated for so many decades that, now, the transformation that we need is so deep and it is so rapid that these kinds of market mechanisms, while they may play a role, absolutely can’t get the job done. What we need is to break the rules of the free market fundamentalist project, which told us we can’t invest in the public sphere. We should privatize the public sphere. We should cut taxes for the wealthy. We should pay for them by attacking the public sphere. We have to break all of those rules. And we need to invest massively in the public sphere. We actually need to reverse many privatizations, particularly of energy, because we need the levers in our hands to transform our energy system.
There are other reasons as well that this economic system is fundamentally in conflict with what we need to do in the face of the climate crisis because, ultimately, we have a system that defines progress as economic growth in any form, profit-making in any form. And the truth is we need to move away from a disposable culture, we need to move away from a culture that treats people and things as disposable, and we need to expand those parts of our economy that actually bring us quality of life, stronger communities, and are already low-carbon, like teaching kids, caring for the elderly, making art… These are all actually low-carbon sectors. Yes, it is somebody putting up a solar panel in a hard hat. Um, yes, it is somebody building energy-efficient, affordable housing. We need all that, but we also need to value the low-carbon work that is overwhelmingly done by women, overwhelmingly done by women of color, and that is so systematically undervalued and underappreciated in our economy.
Briahna Joy Gray: So, you mention moving away from a profit-driven model, which reminds me of how Bernie Sanders often talks about New Deal programs like the TVA and how those are models for how we could go forward right now. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?
Naomi Klein: So, a fundamental tenet of the climate justice movement has been energy democracy, which is the idea that if we are gonna transform where we get our energy from, moving from fossil fuels to renewables, why wouldn’t we build a fairer and more democratic economy in the process? The thing about fossil fuels is that they lend themselves to highly centralized, monopolistic control, actually whether in the hands of the state or, now, in the hands of private corporations. The reasons for that is that fossil fuels are concentrated in particular locations, it costs a lot of money to dig them up. It costs a lot of money to transport them, and it costs a lot of money to refine them.
The beautiful thing about renewable energy is that it is distributed. It is wherever the sun shines. It is wherever the wind blows. It is wherever you can create water from waves. So, you have this amazing opportunity to have a distributed economic model as well because we know we have a crisis not only of climate disruption, but also of extreme economic inequality. So, as we transform our energy grid, our energy system, to this more distributed model, we can also create policies that encourage the ownership, the distributed ownership, of the generation of that electricity. It can be owned and controlled by communities. We can design it to make sure that front-line communities who have been poisoned by fossil fuels are first in line to benefit from the profit generation, the skills training, the job creation, and then we can only do that if there is community control.
So, you know, some people say, “Well, you know, why are we making it harder?” Actually, this makes it easier because what we found in countries like Denmark and Germany when they have taken an energy transition seriously is that, if they want to move fast, they need to create mechanisms for communities to own and control their own renewable energy. In Germany, there have been hundreds of cities and towns that have remunicipalized, taken back control over their energy grids because the private energy producers were standing in the way of the transition. Why? Because when you have distributed renewable energy and people have solar panels on their rooftops and they’re able to feed their energy back into the grid, they are no longer just customers. They are producers. They become the competitors of the private utilities.
So, of course, the private utilities don’t like it, and they have systematically blocked it in the United States. So, this isn’t about ideology. This is about how do we do this quickly? How do we get the barriers out of the way because we don’t have time for those barriers? The other thing we’ve seen is that there has been a lot of local resistance to big wind farms when all of the profits for those wind farms go to individual private players. You know, one land owner just puts up a wind farm and it changes the landscape for everybody, whereas when there is community ownership over the renewable energy and everybody benefits because everybody shares in the profits, everybody is helping design it, making sure that the jobs remain locally, then you have community buy-in and so that resistance to it breaks down and we’re able to move really, really quickly.
So, this isn’t about ideology. It’s about practicality and how we’re actually gonna get the job done.
Briahna Joy Gray: So, some folks say, “Gosh, I don’t want to trust the government with our energy needs.” What would you say to those folks about why we should trust the government as opposed to private industry in this realm?
Naomi Klein: When we talk about energy democracy, we’re not talking about a centralized government that’s- that’s controlling all the renewable energy. We’re talking about designing policies at the federal level that systematically encourage decentralized, local ownership, cooperative ownership, municipal ownership… all different ownership models that put the priority on doing everything possible to get to 100% renewable energy in a decade as opposed to doing everything possible to make profits for shareholders, which is what private companies are designed to do.
Briahna Joy Gray: So, in some ways, it feels like the U.S. has hit the jackpot with respect to climate resources. We have glaciers and a lot of water and big lakes and Alaska and we’re in the Northern hemisphere. What do you say to people who might think, “Okay, we can hunker down and weather this out.”? Is that naïve?
Naomi Klein: The U.S. is already being rocked by climate disruption, and the same kind of unequal impacts that we see between relatively wealthy countries in the North and poorer countries in the global South are playing out within the borders of the United States, so you have incredibly unequal impacts in a city like… I- I started writing about climate change after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And you saw what is now being called “climate apartheid” where if you had money and resources and, in New Orleans, that overwhelmingly meant if you were white, you got the warnings, got into your car, drove out of the city, checked into a hotel, called your insurance company… Nobody wants to be hit by a hurricane, but the resources were there to deal with it. If you needed there to be a functioning government, if you needed there to be a real evacuation plan, if you needed to be rescued and, in New Orleans, that overwhelmingly meant if you were poor and black, you were literally abandoned on rooftops, in the Superdome, and then you were vilified on Fox News, you know, accused of looting. There were vigilantes, white vigilantes in the streets of New Orleans just looking for people to shoot.
I mean, this is what it looks like to have these incredible unequal impacts. We are seeing it again and again and again, in Houston after Harvey, in Puerto Rico after Maria. So the idea that the U.S. is somehow safe, I think, is, you know, it comes from, I think, an idea that very wealthy people feel that they can buy their way out of this disaster, that they’re gonna be able to build their sort of gilded fortresses, that they’re gonna be able to move to higher ground, and that they may be able to profit from it. I mean, it’s not for nothing that Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland. He wants to buy Greenland because the ice in the Arctic is melting and it is opening up possibilities to drill for new oil and gas reserves and to have new trading routes. There are definitely profits to be made in a warming world, but it’s not like the U.S. as a whole is gonna be okay. The vast majority of people in the United States are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and it is a very, very small minority, the same people who benefit from Trump’s deep corporate tax cuts, who would benefit in the short term from a warming world.
Briahna Joy Gray: Can you explain what the impact of global warming is going to be on climate refugees?
Naomi Klein: There are so many reasons why we need to do everything possible to get to 100% renewable energy because the impacts of climate change are so severe and really so unthinkable. But there’s evidence all around of the immediate costs of our addiction to fossil fuels, including the fact that so many of the endless wars that the United States military’s engaged in around the world have to do with protecting fossil fuels. We’re seeing it play out right now with S- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen. What is this all about? It is all about oil. It is so often all about oil. And, you know, this idea that- that we can solve the climate crisis by kind of greening the military, you know, is one of the things that I have the most trouble with because the fact is so many of the wars that we are fighting is over continued access to fossil fuels. War itself is an ecological disaster. And now we are seeing the intersection of the fallout from oil wars intersecting with drought because so many of the countries that have the most oil also have the least water. And so, as drought intensifies, it leads to… or it’s one of the drivers of civil war in places like Syria. And then that leads to mass migration, and then we have the Trumps of the world using that mass migration to fuel their politics of hate.
We need a completely different approach. Climate disruption is a reminder that our fates are profoundly interconnected. This is a crisis that is global in nature, it plays out in profoundly unequal ways, and there will be no response to it that is not fundamentally internationalist and based on s- solidarity and based on valuing every single human being and their right to safety. We’re not gonna solve this through a nationalist framework. We’re gonna solve this through an internationalist framework, and we have to demand that all the candidates understand that and don’t try to sell us nationalist solutions to a fundamentally international crisis.
Briahna Joy Gray: Some of our listeners might be familiar with the concept of “pinkwashing,” which is when you take something like fighter jets, per se, paint it plain pink, and say, “This is now feminist” or “This is pro-women” while ignoring that the underlying thing is still very bad for women all over the world. You know, it doesn’t matter when you get droned, if you get droned by a pink plane or not. And now we have this new concept of “greenwashing,” where there’s a way that some folks are talking about making the military green as part in parcel of this climate project.
Can you talk about why you think that that is an- an ill-founded approach?
Naomi Klein: The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels, and wars are ecological disasters as well as humanitarian disasters. There is no such thing as a green war. And this transition is gonna be really expensive. I think finally we’re starting to be honest that we’re talking about trillions of dollars. So we have to move some money from places that are destructive and move them to places that are constructive, and the hugely outsized spending in the United States on the military is one of the areas where we need to transition resources away from an economy that is destroying lives and destroying ecologies around the world, and move it to this transformation where we are rehabilitating land, where we are creating productive, dignified, unionized jobs, and bringing the communities along in this transition. But I think more broadly, uh, when we think about how we’re gonna finance this huge transition, there’s some money that can just be spent in the same way that we spend bailing out the banks, but there is also… there are also resources that we need to move, that we need to move from polluting sectors, polluting industries, into this transition.
And I think, as we design the financing, justice has to be at the center because we often hear that Americans are not willing to make changes or not willing to sacrifice. The truth is that Americans have a very keen sense of justice, and this is true around the world where we’ve seen that when there are climate policies that put the burden of transition onto working people who are already facing huge economic stresses in an economy that keeps piling on more stresses onto families, more precariousness, uh, more insecurity, and then you say, “And you know what? You need to pay more at the pump.” Or “You need to pay more for your electricity to deal with climate change.” And then folks look around and they see that millionaires and billionaires are getting tax breaks, that the polluters are not being asked for anything. They’re not being asked to pay for the clean… to clean up their messes. They’re not being asked to pay more in royalties. And people rightly, I think, say, “This is a really raw deal.”
If we look at what happened during World War II in a period of tremendous transition, and Senator Sanders has talked about how quickly the U.S. economy changed during World War II to fight fascism, it was absolutely central that that transition was not just rapid, but fair, which meant that corporations had to make sacrifices, which meant that very wealthy people had to make sacrifices. The slogan was “Share and share alike.” And so, you know, what we see from history is that, if a transition is seen as fair and that fundamentally means that it is not just working people who are asked to change and asked to make some sacrifices, but also the very rich, then that is key to people accepting it. If it is not fair, if it is an unjust transition and people see the injustice, then they will reject it and we will not do what we need to do in the very short time that we have left to safeguard a habitable planet.
Briahna Joy Gray: So as voters are trying to choose between this big field of candidates and voters are prioritizing climate change, are there any particular features you think that folks should focus on in order to make an informed decision?
Naomi Klein: When I’m assessing a climate justice plan, here are a- a few of the planks that I look for. Front-line communities. Are front-line communities helping to design the plan? Are they first in line to benefit? Workers. Workers in high-carbon sectors. Is no worker being left behind because no worker can be left behind?
Another thing I look for: Are we celebrating investing in low-carbon work that is overwhelmingly the work of care and repair, work that is done by women, and work that is gonna make us more resilient and more caring as we face the climate shocks to come? And that means are we investing in education? Are we investing in healthcare?
And the final thing that I look for is are the polluters paying because justice is not just about making sure that the people who got the worst deal are benefiting from the transition. It is also about making sure that the people who profited from the destruction are also paying to clean up the mess.
Briahna Joy Gray: Some folks, when they talk about climate change, there is this capitalistic approach that they maintain, right, where they say, “Well, we can just make corporations pay enough for what they extract from the earth and they can burn it all down and if we… we can disincentivize them through capping trade and things like that kind of purely.” But you’ve written this book that says that capitalism isn’t the way out. What would you say to folks who still think that you can accommodate this problem with kind of conscientious capitalism?
Naomi Klein: The intergovernmental panel on climate change told us a year ago that we have to cut global emissions in half in 12 years. So that was last year, so now it’s 11 years. By the time there’s a new administration, it will be just one decade. There is not an economist on this planet who can tell you how it is possible to cut emissions in half globally in one decade with a carbon tax or with capping trade. We’re talking about an industrial transformation. We’re talking about building a new economy. So yeah, you can have a carbon tax, a progressive carbon tax, that is one part of this transformation, but the much more important part of it is how you are gonna build new infrastructure. And the protagonists of this really have to be the workers who are gonna benefit from it, the people living in cities who are gonna benefit from low-carbon, energy-efficient, affordable housing, who are gonna have affordable public transit that actually gets them to where they need to go on time.
This is not a story of just putting in a few mechanisms and getting out of the way. It is not serious, even though the people who talk about this are very good at pretending to be very serious in splitting the difference. They have not engaged with the science. They are dressed up like serious people, but they are fundamentally unserious.
Briahna Joy Gray: Thank you so much, Naomi. This has been a real pleasure.