Itâs easy to get the impression that all Naomi Klein really wanted On Fire to be is its 53-page introduction, which reads like an update to her fairly optimistic 2014 book about climate change, This Changes Everything. Since you canât sell a 53-page book (something I think discourages reading, frankly), the rest of On Fire is a collection of climate crisis-adjacent essays Klein wrote for various publications of record, beginning with âA Hole in the Worldâ for The Guardian in 2010âabout the impact of BPâs Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexicoâto âThe Battle Lines Have Been Drawnâ for The Intercept as recently as 2019.
On Fire: the Burning Case for a Green New Deal is Kleinâs least readable work yet. Kleinâs gift for using a few relatable persons to carry readers through dense writing, which we saw in Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, never finds a hold in On Fire. This is doubtlessly due to the book being a collection and not something Klein was able to seamlessly weave together. She also notes that she tried not to interfere with her nearly 10-year-old pieces, merely adding footnotes or short postscripts to update us on the outcomes. Being broken up into essays does make the book easier to digest in segments, but the fact that these essays were likely constrained by word count may explain why Klein rarely spreads out from dense reporting into the non-fiction characterization weâve come to love from her work.
Another thing we expect from Klein, is her strength for drawing together related instances whose connectedness is not immediately obvious. And we do see this popping up reliably in On Fire. Klein draws a line between the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand which happened on the same day (March 15, 2019) as a worldwide student walkout, where schoolchildrenâincluding thousands of Portland studentsâtried to demand we save the planet they will inherit. How differently might we remember that day had we not pored over some murdererâs manifesto? Would we have noticed the kids?
On Fire is decidedly less optimistic than This Changes Everything, probably because the situation is a whole lot worse than it was in 2014.
On Fire is decidedly less optimistic than This Changes Everything, probably because the situation is a whole lot worse than it was in 2014. Weâre running down the clock on precious months and years when we can adjust the climateâs hottening to survivable levels for future generations.
During CNNâs seven-hour September 4 climate crisis town hall, Highlander-esque Democratic presidential candidates answered questions about whether they would take certain measuresâsuch as: ban offshore drilling (many would!), impose a carbon tax (such pivots!), attempt to reduce US red meat consumption (feels like a trap question, but I guess France is doing it). I wondered how many had read On Fire, because one of Kleinâs most salient points came out of the mouths of nearly every presidential hopeful. Even if we donât have the 100-percent perfect idea of how to fix the worldâs climate crisis, we canât wait any longer. We have to start. âWe are fighting for our lives.â Klein writes. âAnd we donât have 12 years anymore; now we only have 11. And soon it will be just 10.â