Is the Green New Deal Realistic? Two Sympathetic Authors Weigh In

Among the burgeoning global movement of young environmental activists the book chronicles is the Swedish 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, who has galvanized audiences from Davos to the United Nations with her blunt shaming of inaction by politicians and corporate executives in the face of looming catastrophe. Thunberg is the book’s hero, the brave warrior who speaks truth to power: “The clarity of Greta’s voice gave validation to the raw terror so many of us have been suppressing and compartmentalizing about what it means to be alive amid the sixth great extinction.”

Klein knows the Fox News crowd will be quick to label her and other Green New Deal advocates as commies. In fact, she goes out of her way to argue that we shouldn’t toss out capitalism, but that it needs to “shift to a dramatically more humane economic model.” She is especially sharp about the failures of trickle-down economics, which was supposed to help everyone on the planet: “What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet.”

But the author is also attuned to the risks of revolution, to the links between recent mass shootings and a doomsday brand of eco-fascism that sees migrants (many of whom are driven out of their homeland by climate change) as dangerous invaders. “Let there be no mistake: This is the dawn of climate barbarism,” she writes. “And unless there is radical change not only in politics but in the underlying values that govern our politics, this is how the wealthy world is going to ‘adapt’ to more climate disruption: by fully unleashing toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity.”

Klein is a skilled writer, even if at times she tries a little too hard to be a voice of reason. Unfortunately, the structure she employs is hodgepodge and repetitive, built on speeches and previously published essays written over the last decade. Although she updates each chapter with new footnotes, some still feel dated or perfunctory. A section on geoengineering — large-scale manipulation of the earth’s climate — is downright dogmatic in its dismissal of the idea. Yes, techno-fixes like fertilizing the ocean with iron or injecting sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere are risky. But there is a big difference between reckless strategies and intelligently designed ones. Klein can also sound like a detached elitist when she suggests consumers stop buying junk and spend more time in nature, or looking at art.

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In “The Green New Deal,” Jeremy Rifkin is too busy geeking out on technology and economic theory to mess around with social justice or moral outrage. The futurist and prolific author is the kind of thinker popular among chief executives and the TED Talk crowd. So it’s not surprising that “The Green New Deal” takes a stance quite different from that of typical Green New Deal supporters. Rifkin’s not much interested in building a popular movement; he’s interested in building factories, farms and vehicles in a fossil-fuel-free world, asserting that “the Green New Deal is all about infrastructure.”

Rifkin predicts the fossil fuel bubble will burst in nine short years (why he chooses 2028 rather than, say, 2025 or 2035 is unclear), ushering in a “zero-carbon Third Industrial Revolution.” But his writing is so clotted with numbers and stats and technological jargon that it’s not easy to figure out exactly what he thinks this revolution would look like, beyond the usual futuristic shout-outs to renewable power, smart buildings and Big Data. “The digitalized Communication Internet is converging with a digitized Renewable Energy Internet,” he explains, while at the same time “a digitized Mobility and Logistics Internet” sits “atop an Internet of Things (IoT) platform,” etc. That’s a lot of internets. Rifkin argues that all this convergence will lead to a new era of “social capitalism” in which “the market is a guardian angel looking over humanity.” But he says little about the dark sides of technological progress — alienation, siloed information, privacy abuses, destruction of the natural world.