 You can either invest in the infrastructure of care, try to help make people feel secure enough that they can be generous, that they can act on what I think is most people's first impulse when they see human suffering, which is to help, or you can intensify the pre-existing hierarchies of humanity that long predate climate disruption, right, on which this country is founded that ranks human beings and declares some more human than others. I am so, so pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with Naomi Klein, discussing her indispensable new book, On Fire, The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. The book is completely arresting in two capacities. It's about the gravity of its facts and its captivating voice. Many, many passages stopped me in my tracks, but this one frankly derailed me to excuse my metaphor. Naomi writes, Humanity's one and only home is now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale. We are so honored to host this event here in Harvard Square tonight. Before the conversation begins, Naomi will give some introductory remarks, but now please help me give a warm welcome to both of tonight's speakers, Juliet Shor and Naomi Klein. I want to thank everybody at the Harvard bookstore for putting on this wonderful event. Thank you so much. This church has so much history in it. It's such a meaningful anchor of the progressive community here. I'll never forget being here for the memorial of my hero and friend, Howard Zinn. And I feel Howard's presence with us tonight. Thank you for being here. I want to shout out my friends at Sunrise Boston and 350 Massachusetts. You both have tables, so make sure to check out their tables on your way out. And I'm so delighted to be here with Juliet Shor, who has taught me so much over the years. I have read all of her books and draw on many of her ideas and forward-looking framings for the argument that I make in On Fire. So I'm just so delighted to be able to talk with Juliet tonight. And so I'm not going to take too much time with my opening remarks, because I'm looking forward to that and to tackling your questions. But I do want to just begin with a few framing ideas about where we are right now in this moment. I had the pleasure of going on one of your excellent public radio shows today. And one of the hosts described me as a cauldron of hope. And I thought, hmm, that's an interesting phrase, a cauldron. What is in that cauldron? Yeah, so I'm not going to get too witchy on you, but I will say that it isn't only hope that is in my cauldron. There's fear, there's terror, there's rage, pain. But I have some hope in there, too, because I see a pathway. There is a pathway to preventing unimaginable loss of life, of the beauty of creation, this world around us. And so long as there is any path, no matter how narrow it is, that's where I want to focus my attention, my labor, my work. And I think that that's where we all need to be focusing, so that that path can get a little bit wider. And that is the work at hand, that's the work that I see it. But I certainly feel more than anything else, the historical weight of what it means to be alive and breathing in 2019, when we have this extraordinarily narrow window, when we can prevent those horrific outcomes and maybe even build something beautiful. We do not have a lot of time, and we know this. A year ago, exactly, a report came out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body that advises governments about the state of climate science so that it can guide their emission reduction plans, so-called. And this report advised strongly that we keep temperatures, keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. They said it is technically possible for us to do this, but if we are to have a good chance of doing it, then we would need to slash global emissions in half in a mere 12 years. Now, of course, that report came out a year ago, which means that we now have just 11 years. And in the summary of that report, the scientists said that though it is possible with existing technology, it would require, and this is a quote, unprecedented transformation in every aspect of society because scientists have learned to speak more directly to us because they've noticed we don't listen very well. So, we have this very, very short window to achieve these unprecedented changes and they explain what they mean in every sector of society. That's energy, how we power our lives, transportation, how we move ourselves around, building construction, where and how we live, agriculture, the food that we eat, how we grow our food, all of it requires unprecedented transformation. Now, this would be very, very, very hard to pull off if all of our energy was focused just on that task. But that is not what is happening. At the same moment that we face this enormous challenge, the men who are rising to the most powerful positions in country after country are not dousing the flames. They are, in fact, planetary arsonists. They are torching the planet with glee, seemingly convinced that their wealth will protect them and their families from the results of their destruction. So, we have, obviously, Trump, rolling back every possible environmental law, cracking open public lands to unrestricted drilling, all going green land, trolling Greta, you know. In Brazil, there's Jair Bolsonaro, who ran on a campaign promising to attack indigenous land rights, to crack open the Amazon, to cattle farming and soy farming and all manner of extractive activities, and now went before the UN a couple of weeks ago and said, actually, the Amazon is not on fire. It's all our imagination. In Australia, there's Scott Morrison, a man who is best known for having walked into the Australian Parliament holding a giant hunk of coal and declaring that coal is good for humanity, and that was why his government intended to greenlight the world's largest coal mine in the world. We have strong men emerging in country after country, people like Modi, Duterte, on openly supremacist platforms. In this country, it's white supremacy. For Modi, it's Hindu supremacy. There is a formula for a lot of these figures. They have their sharply defined in-group, the sort of the real citizens who are worthy of their protection, and then there are the out-groups inside their borders and particularly on the borders, right? The exile, the illegitimate, the illegal, the frightening other, the terrorists, the diseased, the drug dealer, most of all the invaders. And because of this, it becomes supposedly acceptable to wage all kinds of wars on these out-groups, and they manage to divide all of their respective populations against each other. So we have these two fires. We have the fires of climate disruption that are very, very real as we gather hundreds of thousands of homes in California are in the dark right now. That's millions of people, around 2 million people in California are in darkness and will be for several days because the conditions right now in California are so similar to the conditions one year ago that produced the campfire, the largest and most lethal fire in the state's history that killed now 86 people and destroyed the community of Paradise, California. And so because we know that these fires have been started by stray electrical lines and electrical sparks, PG&E's answer is just to turn off the lights and hope that it doesn't happen again. If that's an ad for why we should get rooftop solar, I don't know what is. So... So we have these very real fires of climate disruption, not just those literal fires, but also the droughts and the storms and on and on. But we also have these political fires, the fires of hate, that are also beginning to rage out of control, that are also jumping the flames from country to country. And I don't believe it is a coincidence that these two fires are raging at the same time, that at this moment when the climate crisis ceases to be this issue that is discussed as something off in the distance, a problem to concern yourself with grandchildren, but becomes a banging down the door crisis, that at this very moment, in the midst of so much fear, because as Greta says, our house is on fire and that is really scary. It's especially scary when the so-called leaders are denying it. And in this moment of terror, when we feel that we are in danger, even if we're not able to articulate that fear, it is everywhere. And in that moment, these figures step up and they say, I have the solution. It's attack that guy over there and attack her and attack the weakest and most vulnerable people in every country. They're tapping into that feeling of profound unease, building walls, waging war on their political opponents in the press. And this leaves them free to get on with the real business at hand, which is plundering the last remaining wildernesses on this planet from the Amazon to the Arctic. Which of course fuels those planetary fires, the droughts and the super storms and the floods, the fires that force millions to flee their arid lands, which intensifies armed conflicts, which also fuels migration, which in turn is used to fuel the fires of hate. These fires are feeding each other. And I'll just read you a short extract from the introduction of On Fire. The rapidly escalating cruelty of our present moment cannot be overstated, nor can the long-term damage to the collective psyche should this go unchallenged. Beneath the theater of some governments denying climate change and others claiming to be doing something about it while they fortress their borders from its effects, there is one overarching question facing us. In the rough and rocky future that has already begun, what kind of people are we going to be? Will we share what's left and try to look after one another? Or are we instead going to hoard what's left, look after our own, and lock everyone else out? In this time of rising seas and rising fascism, these are the stark choices before us. There are options besides full-blown climate barbarism, but given how far down that road we are, there is no point pretending that they are easy. It's going to take a lot more than a carbon tax or cap and trade. It's going to take an all-out war on pollution and poverty and racism and colonialism and despair all at the same time. So here is why I do have a little bit of hope in my cauldron. And please listen to me here because it's important. I don't believe that we are living in a time of just two fires. I believe that we're living in a time of three fires, that there is a third fire and it is our fire. It is the fire of our movements converging, coming together at last. Ours are the movements of the youth climate strikers who mobilized 7 million people into the streets over an eight-day period. Yeah. And ours are the fires of the Indigenous rights movements putting their bodies on the line as they have always done to stop new oil and gas and coal infrastructure projects across Turtle Island. Ours are the fires of the fossil fuel divestment movement, which just managed to convince the University of California system representing $80 billion of portfolio to divest from fossil fuels. So Harvard, we will get you yet. Ours are the fires of the climate justice movement that have worked for so many years in frontline communities of color in Indigenous communities, black and brown communities to create the opening that is now called the Green New Deal. And ours are also the fires of the Sunrise movement, this movement which takes its name from that ball of life-giving fire in the sky and managed to put the Green New Deal on the political map when they occupied Nancy Pelosi's office a year ago. And then they were visited by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who got the ball rolling and then along with Senator Ed Markey came up with a bold resolution for a Green New Deal which redrew the political map and now we have the vast majority of the contenders to lead the presidential party swearing their allegiance to the Green New Deal. We need to send Ed Markey back to the Senate, okay? I call this book on fire because that is what we need to be in this moment. These are huge changes and we are up against powerful, powerful enemies. We are not going to win if we're sort of in favor of it. We have to be on fire for it. And we cannot be afraid of fire because our fires are not the fires of destruction and annihilation. Ours are the fires of creation. Ours are the fires that clear away the debris and make room for new growth. And that is what we need to do. We need to clear away the debris. We need to clear away whatever is standing in our way of rising up to this historical moment. And maybe the debris is inside. Maybe the debris is something inside of us that is keeping us from standing up and doing what is necessary. Really doing it, right? Maybe we're afraid that we're going to lose some status. Maybe we're afraid that we've always considered ourselves very, very serious, very, very rational, right? And we don't want to get too excited about anything and we don't want to get too worked up and we need to clear away that debris. And maybe there's some trauma that we're holding that is keeping us from rising to this moment and being in it with everything we have and then we need to do the work. We need to do the work to be able to rise to this moment because it's too important and needs all of us. And it needs all of ourselves. We have to clear away the debris in our path. We have to clear away the debris of the deniers, the fossil fuel-soaked deniers who continue to lie and spread misinformation on our airwaves and on our political system. We need to clear away the debris of the distractors who are constantly telling us to look at something else that is more important than the fate of our planet, than the fate of humanity. We need to clear away the debris of those distractors. And we also need to clear away the debris of the doomers. You know those doomers, those doomer dudes who write, you know, for places like The New Yorker who tell us it's all too late anyway and why not just, you know, go upstate and just chill out with your friends and you know, we need to clear away the debris of the doomers because it comes from such a place of privilege that imagines that you will be safe. We need to clear all of that away and most of all, we need to clear away the debris of the dividers. We have to come together. We have to come together across movements. We can't turn on each other. We need to be more united and more powerful than we have ever been before. And I just want to leave you with a quote from the UK climate strikers. The young people who have been going on climate strike every Friday, they say, Greta is the spark, but we are the wildfire. And that's what we need to be. We need to be the wildfire. Thank you. I was mentioning to Naomi on the way over that I remember meeting her just about exactly 20 years ago when she published No Logo and we had a dinner across the yard and how much I've admired her and learned from her work over all these years. And I want to start by saying how fantastic this book is. I loved it. For those of you in the audience who haven't read it yet, you're in for a profound experience. I think you got a little taste of that in her remarks. It's indispensable writing, and I want to thank you for writing it. I wanted to start with some of the darker material in the book. You heard a little bit of it. It's really important what she's talking about here in hopes that as the conversation goes on, we can get to some of the other material that will leave us all feeling engaged and ready to be that wildfire. So, I think there's no avoiding the dark material, what's happening in the world. And I want to start with climate barbarism, which you just raised. You also wrote about it in This Change Is Everything. And in the book, you talk about some of the worst kinds of barbaric things that are happening around the world. Probably my favorite essay in the book is your Edward Said lecture, which is called Let Them Drown. And the subtitle is The Violence of Othering in a Warming World. And I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about that violence and the othering that you are seeing and why it's happening. Yeah, absolutely. So, I talked a little bit about, you know, that I think that these political actors, who are hardening the borders of particularly, well, European, you know, European borders and also settler colonial borders, like majority white countries like the United States, Canada, Australia. New Zealand is an exception here because they've actually, in the midst of all of this, they are going to be welcoming more migrants from the Middle East and Africa and really going against that tide. But, so what I think is happening on the border is a kind of climate change adaptation. And I'm not concerned with whether or not these governments say they deny climate change or don't. Some of them do, some of them don't. They all know what's happening. I mean, Trump has had to modify his golf courses because of climate change. He may find it politically expedient to call it a Chinese hope, but they know what is happening. And I believe, as I said, I think on some level, their base knows it's happening as well, that we are in a moment of mass human migration. And the truth is that what we are experiencing now is one degree Celsius of warming. If we do absolutely everything right and we are incredibly lucky, we could keep temperatures below 1.5. But it's more likely that we would hit two. And so things are going to get a lot rockier. And the space in which humans can live on this planet is contracting, and I think that we know that. And so there's a couple of ways to deal with that. Like I said, you can either invest in the infrastructure of care, try to help make people feel secure enough that they can be generous, that they can act on what I think is most people's first impulse when they see human suffering, which is to help. Or you can intensify the pre-existing hierarchies of humanity that long predate climate disruption, right, on which this country is founded, that ranks human beings and declares some more human than others and more worthy of protection than others. And those systems of white supremacy emerged for a reason. They emerged to justify the transatlantic slave trade and colonial land theft. And they are surging back to the surface because I believe they are needed to justify allowing people to die in the Mediterranean by the thousands, to allow people to be, you know, who are clearly suffering and in need to be locked up in concentration camps in Libya, on Manus and Nowru, if they're headed for Australia, and now we have Trump, who is adopting this same model, which is all about preventing migrants from ever reaching these borders, right? So Australia really pioneered this with this model of intercepting the boats and sending migrants to detention camps on Pacific islands that are very poor, are themselves vulnerable to climate change, and basically saying, this is your one and only revenue stream. You can be the jailers for migrants. And saying this to, like in the case of Nowru, an island that itself is intensely vulnerable to climate change. So, like, tomorrow's migrants are today's jailers. And so now that is called the Australian model, and that's what the European Union has adopted over the past four years, where this is why, you know, you've all heard about how humanitarian rescue boats are being made illegal. They're jailing people who fish people out of the sea. It's because they want Libya to be the one to intercept the boats, and then they're taken to camps in Libya that have been described by many reputable humanitarian organizations and UN agencies as concentration camps. So this is what is happening now with Trump, where he is, after having cut hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Central America, in the grips of a multi-year drought, and much of that money was going to help farmers deal with the drought, now he's going to those same countries and saying, here's your new model for economic development. You can hold the migrants and keep them from ever reaching the United States. So that's what I mean by climate barbarism. I'm not saying that everybody who is migrating is a climate migrant, but many are, and climate disruption is an accelerant to conflict. We're seeing this again and again. We saw it in Syria. So I think we have to frontally look at the systems that are ranking human life, because that is really our enemy here. And one thing I would just quickly say is I saw this very recently when I visited Paradise, California, which became famous when it burned to the ground a year ago, and I visited Chico, which is where everybody from Paradise went, because as you were fleeing the fire, everybody ended up in Chico. It's 10 miles away. And the people of Chico who suddenly found themselves with, I think it was 20,000 new people living in their community at one point, they responded with incredible generosity. They wanted to help, just like people so often want to help, right? And people not only made food and gave clothes and money, they opened their homes to total strangers, their guest bedrooms, you know? But what has happened in the years since is that rent's gone up, there's real estate speculation, utilities are going up, the infrastructure's overloaded, there's no mental health support. And so what you see is that if you don't invest in that infrastructure of care and you don't deal with a disaster profiteering and what I've called disaster capitalism, then people will turn on each other, even if they've tried so hard not to do that, right? And that's what I think the promise of the Green New Deal is, is that it brings together that sort of social infrastructure, also the need to invest in housing and all of this that's going to make people less stressed when we face these climate stresses, because that was what was most vivid to me when I was in Chico, was like, it's just really, really stressful to be, and they're not the ones who lost their community, they're just dealing with the impact of their neighbors coming for help, it's stressful. And we're going to all be more stressed in the future. So we need to think of like, what are the de-stressers that we can invest in so we can hold on to our humanity as this unfolds. Yeah. So my next question was going to be about white supremacy and settler colonialism, which have played an increasing role in your analysis over time. You've already talked about that. So let me just be a little provocative here and ask the question sort of your call for a reorientation to this history, to the importance of indigenous leadership and kind of really, you know, a sort of different world view than the, you talk a lot in the book about the dominant narratives and the dominant stories. So to rewrite that story of our history, how do you make that story compelling to a mainstream middle class suburbanite who we so desperately need in our movement? That's a good question. So I think it is important to kind of look at where the ideas come from that we can, like why it is so threatening to be told you can't keep expanding, right? Like that shouldn't be such a threatening idea. This idea that you have a right to expand, you have a right to live better and better and better and more and more and more and more. Where does this idea come from? And is it really what everybody wants? Like we're programmed to be told. Everybody has to live better. Each generation has to live better than the generation before. There always has to be more. But, you know, I think people want to live well. People want to have security. People want to know that their families are okay. People want to not live with stress. And so we do, I think we need new stories of what a good life is. I think we're capable of it. I think we need all of our best storytellers in on this. Where I do think this is settler colonial history is important is like it was a big moment for me when I sort of realized I'm Canadian, I am living here, but I think there are some similarities and some differences. But one thing that is shared in being a settler colonial nation is like this idea that our countries, states, provinces, were founded in a moment when Europe was hitting its own ecological limits, right? Where it had fell this great forest. You know, there was an extinction crisis. They hunted up their great game. There was a fishery crisis. They were just kind of running out of nature, right? And they arrive here and they're just like, wow, right? We found like, we'll call it New England. It's like a whole other England, you know? But it's like bigger. And then they've got so much, they've got so much nature. Like we'll never run out, you know? And I mean, we, you know, I have from Montreal, they was called New France, you know? I mean, it's just unbelievable when you think about it, like New South Wales. I mean, there's excruciatingly unimaginative people, you know? But you know, when you're reading the sort of literature of the early explorers, I mean, there's just this sort of dizzying excitement at the scale of it. Like it's beyond the realm of the imagining. And so I think it's sort of understandable that we live in a culture that is so frightened of the idea of limits, right? But look, I mean, like, Julia, I think you've done like the best work about like how we, you know, the areas where we can have abundance, right? It isn't all about contraction. And we need to paint a picture. I mean, we tried to do this with a little video that you were all sent, the AOC video that we made at the Intercept, where we tried to show a picture of the future that was different than the present, that was not perfect. But I think it's all part of a process where we just need to tell other versions of what it means to be happy. Because one thing I do think is resonant right now is that people get that they're not that happy. Like, people get that something is wrong, that there is a mental health crisis, that there's a youth's mental health crisis, that there's an epidemic of addiction, that all is not well, right? And I find that there's less defensiveness about this idea of just like maybe there's something wrong that maybe we would benefit from change. Whereas a few years ago, I think that I would encounter much more defensiveness, like everything's fine, my life's great, things are fantastic, you know? I love the Internet all the time. You know, like nobody likes it anymore, you know what I mean? I think that there's a sort of, I don't know if that's good news, but what have you found in terms of, because I feel like you've been trying to communicate this idea for longer than anyone, right? That maybe it's, maybe things will be okay if we have a little less. Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea that there's a better way to live is extremely resonant in the culture now. No question about it. And I think it has been in some ways for a long time for certain groups, you know, on certain issues or certain dimensions of what's sort of wrong with the culture. I do think that sort of taking responsibility for the connection between the way we live and the history is difficult. And, you know, I can speak for the U.S. I think we are having a really difficult time coming to terms with our history, whether we're talking about the settler colonialism dimension of it, the slavery, you know. So that's, I do think it's hard. I think we have to do it. I don't think we have a choice. But it just strikes me as more difficult than sort of saying to people, yeah, you'll be happier with a different lifestyle because I do think that people get that, you know. They understand that. But I mean, one thing that I think is worth underlining is that while it is true that there has to be a story that is not frightening to that sort of middle-class, you know, suburban family or whatever it is, I really do think that part of the problem of the environmental movement, a big part of the problem of the environmental movement is that it's been too middle-class and suburban and white. It's, I mean, because the truth is that the main message has been like act, we need to act or terrible things will happen, right? And I think that is true, but there are a lot of people for whom terrible things are happening right now, right? And for whom a Green New Deal wouldn't just be better than climate breakdown, it would be better than Tuesday, you know. So I think that, and this is why I get tremendously frustrated when I hear people say, why are you weighing down the climate fight with all this justice stuff and all this anti-racism stuff? Like, can't we just fix climate change as hard enough? And to me, I mean, not only is it morally bankrupt because if you're going to remake your entire infrastructure, why wouldn't you try to make it fair? It's insanely unfair, you know. But in addition to it being a morally bankrupt position, I also think it's a strategically poor decision because I don't think a, like, just a predominantly privileged movement will fight as hard as we need to fight against the forces that we're up against. I think that the people who fight hardest are fighting for their lives, you know. And if we think about the way folks fought in Standing Rock to protect their water, you know, I think when people really believe that they're fighting for health care and free public transit and affordable housing and air that's not going to give their kids asthma and cancer, you know, that this is going to be a different kind of movement and it's going to fight harder. And we do need to fight harder than we've been fighting. Like, it can't just be a movement that, you know, has an action a few times a year. Like, it needs to be in motion all the time, which is, I think, the lesson of the original New Deal is that that came from, like, just a mobilized society that is unlike anything that we've had yet. Yeah. I absolutely agree with you. And I think you can see in what's happened over the last year that, you know, what's right about the argument that you just made because it's the power of an equitable alternative, you know, has really galvanized people in a way that decades of talk about environment versus economy or sacrifice or carbon taxes and all of those things completely failed to move the needle. Yeah. And when people stood up and say, here's the better world we can fight with, the fire. Yes. Your third fire started. So, yeah, absolutely. So let's move on to the Green New Deal. So just before we talk specifically about it, I do want to just raise, you know, one of your really interesting arguments, and it's one you've made for a while, also present in this book, which is the accident of bad timing of the climate crisis and the rise of market fundamentalism. And so I'm curious about where you see, how you see market fundamentalism at the moment. Do you think that it's really, you know, defeated is too strong a word, but is it receding? Do you feel like we've actually made some progress there or kind of how are you seeing its power? Interesting. Yeah, so, you know, I make the argument, some of you have heard me make it before, that if we want to understand why we failed to act when the scientific consensus became sort of undeniable in the late 1980s and when you had the IPCC formed and you had all the momentum leading up to the Rio Earth Summit, it was incredibly bad timing because although there were a lot of good speeches that were made about how we need to deal with climate change in this period, and although planet Earth made time as man of the year in 1988, this was the sort of high point for the neoliberal project and it was a really tough time to make the argument that we need to invest in the public sphere and we need to regulate corporations and we need to get the money from somewhere. So let's tax corporations and rich people. It's like exactly the opposite of what the historical trends were. So I would certainly say we're in a very, very different moment. You know, and I think these Democratic primaries speak to that, that we have candidates competing over who can be more progressive, who has the most universalist policies, who's going to invest more trillions of dollars in the Green New Deal. So something has definitely shifted and I think there's a huge generational shift. You know, I had an event a couple of weeks ago in New York with Varshini Prakash, the executive director of Sunrise, who we love by the way, Varshini is awesome. And, you know, she was saying that for her generation and younger, that they came of age in the rubble of the post-2008 breakdown. And there's definitely a sense that this system just isn't working on multiple fronts. Like it's failing them, it's all failing, the guns in schools, the trolls online, the job precarity, and plus the world on fire, you know. And so I think that that is a huge shift and it has breathed a lot of political oxygen into the room. I do think neoliberalism isn't dead yet, or it's morphing into something scarier, which is this sort of climate barbarism. I think that, you know, I think that the stranglehold that this economic project has had on our imagination has been the most powerful part, as it turns out, that there is no alternative side of neoliberalism, that don't you dare imagine anything other than, you know, its bleak version of reality. And that I do see shifting, but not quite fast enough, which is why I think, and I think there's a big generational change. Like I think many of the young people who I meet can't imagine a different future, can't imagine things changing. But I think we've got a problem, we really do have a generational problem where the people who grew up seeped in it, seeped in like homo-economicists, and that's why we have the doomers who are just like, no, we're too selfish, because they absorb this idea that humans are just these sort of base self-interested, you know, short-term thinking beasts that are the product of, you know, the neoliberal project. And so they're equating humanity with, you know, late capitalism. But I can see why it feels convincing. So I guess that's where I think we're at. I think we've made progress, not enough, I don't know. They need to read more. I mean, if you look at what's happened in the intellectual terrain, you know, the rise of really powerful accounts of cooperative sustainability from Ostrom to, you know, all of the new work on biology and evolutionary economics and so forth, which shows how integral cooperation and altruistic behavior has been to humans forever. Well, it's also sad that so much of this comes from fiction writers. I mean, surely their imaginations should be a little bit better than that. So I just thought maybe a little check-in on where we're at with the Green New Deal, sort of just about a year into it to start off that part of the conversation. So how do you see things going? Where's the momentum? Where are the obstacles? I mean, what do we need to do to make it happen? Yes. So I think that we need to just... I think wherever the debris is clear, relatively clear, we need to start doing it. So I think one thing we need to not do is just sort of wait for some, you know, perfect 2020 outcome. You know, I think that we need new deals at the city level and there are some cities that are working on that. We need it at the state level, and I think that there's some talk of a Green New Deal for Massachusetts and I think you should do that because it's all going to help. I mean, the more people there are who have an actual lived experience that challenges the lies they're being told about this because this is a problem that we have one year out. One thing that is very clear is that the right talks about the Green New Deal more than the liberals. So Trump talks about it in every stump speech. He lies his head off about it in every stump speech. Fox is obsessed with it. They talk about it all the time. But if you turn on MSNBC, they barely talk about it. Most of the candidates only talk about it when asked, which is sort of odd. Like if you're talking about transforming the entire economy, it should come up more often than, you know, it should be in your stump speech, you know. Because the whole point is that this is a vision for the next economy. So you shouldn't need like a specific question about climate change in order to start talking about it. It's your economic program. It's, you know, it's your jobs program. It should have something to do with your foreign policy. I think it should. Anyway, the candidates need to do more. And I wish Sunrise had won the battle to get a climate debate, but we can't let candidates off the hook because just because there's no dedicated climate debate doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to be weaving climate in to their answers regardless if they say they support a Green New Deal, right? Because a Green New Deal is a vision for the next economy. So you should bring it up all the time, you know. And I think that would help. I think that would help with the problem we have with, you know, MSNBC and CNN not covering the Green New Deal because if the candidates talk about it, then they have to cover it. But this is just, this is a story we've experienced a lot of times where we let the right frame things for us. So basically they decided we're going to make this idea toxic. We're just going to lie and lie and lie and lie. And then most, you know, most Democrats just got scared and we're like, I'm not going to talk about it. Green New Deal is like, it's a scary thing. And yeah, I support it, but don't, you know, please don't make me talk about it, right? So that's a problem and we need to keep pushing on that. The good news is that the polling shows that it's still popular, right? And the individual policies in it are still very, very popular. So there's no reason to run away from it. There's no reason to tell yourselves, oh, they've made it toxic. We need a new name for it, whatever. Whatever it is, they will make it toxic. What you need is to have the courage to tell your own story, to tell it over and over and over again, make it a better story, get out there and sell it, not wait for them to not attack it, you know, whatever it is, they're going to attack it. So I'm going to go to our first question from someone in the audience, and that's Justin from Boston who asked, is Justin here? Hi, Justin. Citizens and officials in Boston have started conversations about what a Green New Deal would look like at the city level. What do you see as the essential steps to take to make sure that the principle of climate justice is kept at the center? Right, okay, so I would say that the essential element is that frontline communities are at the table designing it, and then you'll make sure. And this is, Seattle is having an interesting conversation about a Green New Deal, and, you know, the first fights, the Seattle City Council has passed a resolution saying that they want to bring in a Green New Deal, and, you know, the first stage was an argument over who sits at the table, and I think they have 11 seats for environmental justice organizers at that table, and also labor at the table. So you need to make sure that the people who are going to be most impacted are part of designing it. One of the things we know from previous fights in Boston is that affordable public transit, maybe even free, is a central part of the justice response. Housing, affordable housing, right? And the two are together, because you can have a beautiful green city, right? You can have the public transit, and you can have the bike lanes, and you can have the solar, and you can have everything. But if you price low-income people out of the market, then what's going to happen is they're going to have to drive more, and the rich people aren't even going to use the public transit, they're just going to drive and fly, and so you're going to end up having higher carbon anyway. So what you need is you need affordable housing, you need to prioritize green affordable housing and transit along those lines. I think those are really, really key, and obviously representation in who's designing it. Yeah. Well, and the good news is that that is sort of the way things are moving here in Massachusetts, so that's great. Let me ask you a question about... Where's Cole? This is from Emerson in Boston, and do you think enough is being done to highlight the voices of indigenous people and people of color in the climate movement, specifically in regards to Greta Thunberg being the spokesperson of the youth in the climate movement? So a little bit of a connection to the last question. Yeah, so I mean, I think that with Greta, it is really complicated. I think that Greta is just an absolutely extraordinary prophetic voice. I think she should be listened to. I think that she has inspired and managed to motivate a huge number of people. She did start the student strike movement. She did not start the youth climate movement. The youth climate movement is a lot older than Greta, and she'd be the first to say that. And I've seen her say it. It's also true that there are and have been many other prophetic voices who should have been listened to before, and were not because they came from the global south, came from frontline communities here in the United States. I think about people like Kathy Jettner-Kugener, who is from the Marshall Islands and gave a speech at the United Nations in 2014, read an exquisite poem to her nine-month-old baby. I mean, she should be listened to as much as Greta. And it barely made the news. There was a horrific UN summit that happened at the exact same time that Typhoon Haiyan was pummeling the Philippines. And there was this moment where the Philippine negotiator, a man named Yeb Sinal, had to address the UN on behalf of the Philippines, but he didn't know if his family was safe, and he gave the most harrowing speech. And, you know, everybody said it was going to change everything, and, you know, they aired it on Democracy Now. So I think we have to, like, hold two truths, which is that Greta is a prophetic voice. We should be listening to her. I think she deserves to win the Nobel Prize tomorrow. I think that would be amazing. And it probably does have something to do with being a white European that is why she's listened to when other people were not. I don't believe that our movement is overrun with the voices of young women on the autism spectrum. I mean, I don't, like, I think that this, I think she represents a very important diversification of our movement, and I value her and appreciate her for that. I also believe that what has happened in this opening, and I think there's always many factors that contribute to an opening, but what has happened with this opening that Greta has been a huge part of, has absolutely created more room for more voices. And Greta has been really deliberate about that. She spent the last couple of days, she was at Standing Rock and Pine Ridge with Dakota Iron Eyes, who's an amazing Indigenous teenager who I met at Standing Rock. And some of you may have seen a video I did with her because I was with her when Obama denied the permit for them to build, and she, at that point, was just 13, and I had just turned my phone on her and I said, how do you feel as one of the people who started this movement? And she said, I feel like I got my future back. And, you know, she is an amazing woman. It was so beautiful to see the two of them together, side by side. All of us have more room because of what Greta's doing. And I think I understand this feeling of scarcity and I understand the injustice that she is getting this and other people aren't, but I still believe that we are in a moment where, like I said, we can't turn on each other. I think we need to value and cherish Greta while simultaneously recognizing that this is a leaderful movement. There are many young people who are part of this. Many of them are Indigenous. And we need to hear more from them. We did an event with the Intercept where Greta was the only non-Indigenous speaker at the event. So I do think that the voices in designing the Green New Deal, I'm particularly, when it comes to Indigenous leadership, I think it's really, really central that when we talk about the need to plant billions of trees, we need a modern-day Civilian Conservation Corps. Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge should be leading that process or it will lead to more Green Colonialism. It will lead to more Indigenous people being locked out of their own land because that's the history of national parks and state parks in this country where you conserve land and then Indigenous people lose access to it. So, I mean, like if the question is, do I think these frontline voices are being heard enough? Never. I don't think they're being heard enough. And I think we have to do a lot more. But I also think that Greta's leadership should really be cherished. So I love that answer. I think she is going to win the prize tomorrow, but I'm hoping, like they do in many of the sciences, that they give it to her with a number of other young leaders, which would be fantastic. Well, yeah, and no matter what they do, she will make sure that it is shared with this movement. Yeah. So, another Green New Deal question. This one's a little, maybe a little wonkier. So in the book, you talk about something that I've worried a lot about, and that is that a Green New Deal ends up being kind of a climate Keynesianism, which sort of supercharges the economy and leads to a lot of emissions, not because we want that, but even with a shift to renewables it ends up using a lot of carbon to build them and the cement and so forth, and then also just the increase in economic activity, which we know is very highly correlated with emissions. So, the Green New Deal I think is brilliant in not saying anything about what the rate of growth is going to be. So that in itself is a huge step forward that it didn't say the Green New Deal is going to increase GDP or the rate of growth or GDP. It's silent about that, but there is this, you know, it's a really hard problem to do all the things that it wants to do and reduce emissions. So, how are you thinking about that? It is really tricky. I think that there are going to have to be changes and I think that so far a lot of the discussion has dodged the thornier questions about overconsumption and we know that 70% of global emissions come from the 20% richest people on the planet. So it isn't everybody who's going to have to consume less, but it is going to be the wealthy who are going to have to consume less. And differently, right? And this is where I think your work is so relevant, right? Because you link it with working less, right? So if people have shorter work weeks, then they're not in a state of kind of harried stress which fuels the disposable way of life and you have more time to do things like cook and garden and then we need to make sure that it isn't just women who do all of that. So I think that we... I think it's okay to dodge some of those questions. What I don't think is okay to dodge is that we need a mechanism for how we're going to keep ourselves honest. And I think about this all the time. When I was researching this change is everything, I made an early research trip to interview Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson at the Land Institute and I was making my sort of excited case about, like, we can respond to climate change and build this great new economy and Wes just said, how are you going to keep from turning it into carbon? And I didn't really understand what he meant. It took a while. And then I'm like, oh, I get it, right? People will have better jobs and then they'll make more money and then they'll go to Walmart and spend the money and then we'll turn it into carbon. So I get it. And I think what we need is, like, we need a carbon audit mechanism. So that maybe it's like every three months we submit whatever is happening to a carbon audit. And, I mean, the first thing that the AOC Markey Resolution says is that we are guided by the IPCC carbon budget and that we're going to lower our emissions. I mean, very boldly, right? They're talking about decarbonization in 10 years in most sectors. So if that's the goal, we have to have a mechanism that holds us to it, right? So we don't all need to agree on whether it's compatible with GDP growth or whatever. All we need to agree is that we are going to be guided by those targets and we're going to start rolling it out and then we're going to see did we increase emissions by mistake? And if we did, then we have to rejig this, right? But this is also why I think that it's really important to identify the centrality of already low carbon sectors that can be easily made, lower carbon, you know, access to nature, access to the arts, you know, the caring professions, none of that is high carbon. So we can have more abundance in those areas. They do increase quality of life. All the research shows it. And then that's going to make it a little easier if we are having to contract the parts of our lives that are based on endless consumption. Yeah. I totally agree with all that. The one footnote I would put on it is the investment, I mean, the Green New Deal is also about a big investment program. So I think it's not just the consumption where you get the high carbon activities. Yes, you have to start with the targets and whatever you do has to be compatible with the targets. But if we're talking about all that infrastructural investment and the renewables and so forth, it's challenging. We're going to burn a lot of carbon in order to get off carbon. Yeah. It's going to be really tricky. Yeah. So there's a question here about the U.S. This is from Cole. Is it Cole Harrison, by the way? Yes. Hi, Cole. How does the U.S. role as military enforcer of the world economic system, including protector of the oil supply, affect our strategy for winning a Green New Deal? Yeah. It's a good question. And it's a question we don't ask enough. And for that reason, because we don't make that connection enough, I think we can think that we can green the military, which I don't think is really possible. We have a Ph.D. student who just in the military did her dissertation on that topic, by the way. Solar panels on the tanks. I'd rather just get rid of the tanks and use the money to pay for the Green New Deal. There should be a contraction in military spending to help pay for this. And this is one of the things that sets Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal apart, because we need to be pushing all of the candidates on this question because it is expensive and the money needs to come from somewhere. And the fact is the U.S. military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet as a single buyer. And much of the massive expansion of the U.S. military machine has been about protecting fossil fuel infrastructure. So why does it need to exist if we're moving away from fossil fuels? So we need a just transition for the military. That's part of the just transition that we need. But we need to be honest about it. So as the inaugural holder of the Gloria Steinem chair, I can't let this conversation go by without asking a question about gender. And I thought it would be interesting to hear what you have to say about the surging of misogyny in the discourse about climate this year, particularly with attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Ortiz, Ilhan Omar, Greta and others. How are you thinking about kind of what's happening with gender and misogyny in the climate conversation? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So, I mean, in some ways, I think this brings us back to those sort of old ideas, those old narratives that are really underlying the crisis that we have. I think that the crisis of climate change is born not just of the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, but a worldview that is a dominance-based worldview that is about the supposed sort of divine right of certain men to having unlocked the secrets of the world to dominate the natural world. And it was intensely tied with the scientific revolution and so on. And I think that there's always been a sort of a hatred of women that's been part of this. I mean, you read Francis Bacon and it's sort of the right to tie nature down in her wanderings and, you know, hold her... I mean, it's just a rape fantasy, the whole thing. And so I think that there's been... you know, fossil fuels supercharged this project because it gave us an illusion that we really were in charge for a couple of hundred years, that we were able to have this one-way non-reciprocal relationship with the natural world that you could... and this was how the steam engine was marketed. You can sail your ships, you know, whenever you want. You don't have to wait for the wind to blow. You can build your factories wherever you want. You don't have to, you know, sight them where there's a waterwheel. You are in charge and you've finally dominated the natural world and that was the ultimate power. You will be as gods. And so I think that that project has always... it's been about dominating nature and the people seen as closest to it. And so I think that women have always been seen as closer to nature and that's part of the hatred. I have other... I think that a culture that venerates the individual wealth creator, self-made, share-no-credit kind of male always has to resent women because women serve as like a reminder of interdependence that, you know, we all came from someone with a uterus and we all were intensely dependent at one point in our lives and that's... that dependence and interdependence, you know, you can... I think it's a beautiful thing, you know, but I think it's... I think that there's... that if you decide to venerate this hyper-individualism, in some ways you have to hate reminders of interconnection and I think that that's the role that women play in this story and so, yes, like the misogyny against Greta and the misogyny against AOC is, you know, you see it unmasked. You also see it with Jair Bolsonaro talking about the Amazon as our virgin and these perverts want her about cheese hours to, you know, do with what we will and then, you know, he attacks Emmanuel Macron's wife, you know, for telling him he's not doing enough about the fires and insults her, you know, her looks. I mean, the misogyny is rampant in it and, of course, it is with Trump. I mean, it's all about, yeah, just the right to grab, you know, women in the natural world and the sense of total entitlement. So I think it's always been a big, big part of the project. I think... But I mean, that said, I think it's great that there are so many prominent women who are leading despite the hate because women have always been leading this movement but for a long time you didn't see women leading with the movement and I think that we are now and I think it's really great. So I had written a question about sort of your emotions and feelings doing this work and especially there's a really powerful essay in the book called Season of Smoke which is about going to the Sunshine Coast and during the wildfire season last year. Laura from Arlington wrote on a similar theme so I'm going to read hers but you might want to talk about Season of Smoke too. Is Laura here? Hi. So how do you stay grounded while doing this work and what do you recommend for activists who are having a hard time dealing emotionally with the gravity of the climate crisis rising fascism and other interlocking emergencies of our time? I mean, I would say the main thing is just don't try to deal with it on your own and I think we need to build movements and it's one of the things that I love about Sunrise and I see that you're part of Sunrise is I feel like it is part of a shift in movement culture where we are allowing people to be like whole human beings instead of just kind of activism machines who are just acting all the time. These are very, very difficult issues that we are all navigating and there will be days when we are laser focused and know exactly what we should do and there will be days when we just can't imagine that we will make it and there will be days when we just feel the grief of what we have already lost and what we know we will soon lose and I think we just have to have spaces where people are allowed to feel those things and where we just forgive ourselves and each other and where we build community I think is the word I'm looking for we don't just need organizations we need to build communities with one another and communities take care of each other and we need to have relationships with one another and care for each other I mean I feel really lucky to have friends in the struggle who it would surprise you because some of us seem to be very outwardly focused all the time but we call each other and they're just like oh my god it's so bad and places where I go with friends where we take care of each other and put each other back together again so that we can go back out again and I think that we need to it's another reason why I think that our movements need to be need to have leadership from the most ravaged communities the communities that have gotten the worst deal that have been the sacrifice zones and those are overwhelmingly black and indigenous communities and immigrant communities because if you go to those communities folks are living with grief all the time they're living with family separation they're living with police violence and mass incarceration and actually have the skills it may be a new thing for middle class white people to have to figure out how to organize with grief but it isn't new for a whole hell of a lot of people in this country and in other countries too so I think it's part of the reason why we also have to learn to follow and not think we have to invent this it is possible to continue to do this work even as we grieve and we're going to have to figure out how to do that with each other we certainly can't do it alone that's the one thing I would say we mustn't do is try to hold all of this on our own shoulders that's what we have friends and loved ones for is to help us shoulder that burden so in the spirit of that wonderful answer I know many of the people in this room are probably already connected with others who are working on these issues but if you are not Sunrise and 350 mass both of whom are very involved in Green New Deal and Massachusetts Green New Deal and so forth have tables on the other side of those doors so please connect with us so we've come to our last question which is a really nice one from Andrew from Worcester and is Andrew here? Hi Andrew as a young person I'm concerned that most media attention around the climate crisis has been on youth and that such attention is used as a placating and condescending device for adults and institutions to not make the changes needed please speak on this That's a great question and so before I wrap up with that question I just want to say how lovely it's been to share this space with you and Julie thank you so much I've learned so much from you over the years I also want to shout out my friend when Stevenson is here who's such a brilliant writer and organizer and activist and he's walking I take a lot of inspiration from him and I think he models a lot of what I'm talking about and that allowing ourselves to feel the things so yeah I love that there is this youth climate surge but I think it's really dangerous when we frame this as an intergenerational struggle because like I said I think there are generational differences but I think that the enemy is not previous generations the enemy is this economic system that is built to pursue profit at all costs and the strongest movements are intergenerational ones and we've talked about indigenous leadership this book is dedicated to Arthur Manuel who was a sequemuk leader in Canada he died a couple of years ago he was my mentor and incredible writer and taught me a lot about what it looks like to build a truly intergenerational movement I did so much work with him and he always organized things with elders and they would always be the first to speak and I don't necessarily think that all elders deserve that but I do think that movements that wage war on previous generations tend to age out pretty quickly and be pretty vulnerable I think the 60s taught us that so we need an intergenerational movement and the youth climate strikers have been pretty clear that they don't want us to just pat them on the heads and say thank you for giving us hope as Greta said I don't want your hope I want you to panic and she also said that they want us to join them and I was really struck this isn't necessarily a high note to end on but I'll just be real with you here because I see some it's not that young a crowd I don't I mean one of the reasons why I think it's a really dangerous framing is that like young people are leading this movement because young people are going to be most affected it is true that young people are going to be most affected over the longest period of time but if we look at how quickly this is accelerating and how quickly it will continue to accelerate I would speak to the middle aged people in this audience and just say at least they'll be able to run we will be in all the research shows where the vulnerability is my friends and this is going to be in my lifetime you know it's going to be we're in it and it's getting worse fast this idea that somehow this is just an issue for youth it's simply not true and I've spoken to many young organizers who have said what Greta said at the UN which is you stole my childhood and so I spoke earlier about the need to find our fire and to find our fight and I mean that and so if these young people are giving up their childhoods and they are this isn't actually what they want to be doing believe it or not and they're giving up their recesses their evenings their weekends to do this organizing what are the rest of us going to give up that's a real question you know are we going to give up some evenings and weekends are we going to organize our co-workers the way they are organizing their friends if we are retired are we going to give up some you know I don't know some nation cruises I mean I don't know my audience here oh no Katrina I didn't mean that but we are going to have to you know we need to be we should see what this generation is doing as a challenge to step up and so I will leave you with that thank you so much applause