Deal or No Deal?

At this year’s World Economic Summit, in Davos, the teenage activist Greta Thunberg told the assembled, “I don’t want your hope. . . . I want you to panic. . . . I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.” Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, takes up this challenge. Made up of long-form reports, think pieces, and public talks written between 2010 and 2019, it is Klein’s attempt to decode the obstacles and “topple” the ideologies that hinder progressive and much-needed environmental policy. She presents a “burning case” for the Green New Deal, or GND, a modern rendition of Franklin Roosevelt’s radical progressive vision in the 1930s. It aims to reduce the world’s carbon footprint and, in doing so, fix its economic inequalities too.

In her introduction, “We Are the Wildfire,” Klein mentions a landmark UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 2018. We must restrict the rise...