Green New Deal Quotes

“The stories we tell about who we are as a nation, and the values that define us, are not fixed. They change as facts change. They change as the balance of power in society changes. Which is why regular people, not just governments, need to be active participants in this process of retelling and reimagining our collective stories, symbols, and histories.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“What we need are transitions that recognize the hard limits on extraction and that simultaneously create new opportunities for people to improve quality of life and derive pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle, whether through publicly funded art and urban recreation or access to nature through new protections for wilderness. Crucially, that means making sure that shorter work weeks allow people the time for this kind of enjoyment, and that they are not trapped in the grind of overwork requiring the quick fixes of fast food and mind-numbing distractions.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatization, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often, resistance to them is highly compartmentalized. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change; the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too many of us fail to make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. Overcoming these disconnections, strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements, is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“There are many [...] sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It's a lot like how this culture treats people. It's certainly how we have been trained to treat our stuff - use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more. It's similar to what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period: they are used up and then abandoned to addiction and despair. It's what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically valuable as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Put another way, this is how we are going to address the crisis of empathy in a warming world.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that's not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“The critical infrastructure of Indigenous worlds is, fundamentally, about responsibility and being a good relative. But our responsibilities do not happen only in the realm of political transformation. Caretaking, which we address in the introduction and in Part III, is the basis, too, for vibrant economies that must work fluidly with political structures to reinforce the world we seek to build beyond capitalism. We must thus have faith in our own forms of Indigenous political economy, the critical infrastructures that Huson speaks of so eloquently. We must rigorously study, theorize, enact, and experiment with these forms. While it covers ambitious terrain, The Red Deal at its base provides a program for study, theorization, action, and experimentation. But we must do the work. And the cold, hard truth is that we must not only be willing to do the work on a small scale whenever it suits us—in our own lives, in our families, or even in The Red Nation.

We must be willing, as our fearless Wet’suwet’en relatives have done, to enforce these orders on a large scale. In conversation, our The Red Nation comrade Nick Estes stated, “I don’t want to just honor the treaties. I want to enforce them.” We can and should implement these programs in our own communities to alleviate suffering and protect what lands we are still able to caretake under colonial rule. To survive extinction, however, we must enforce Indigenous orders in and amongst those who have made it clear they will not stop their plunder until we are all dead. Settler and imperial nations, military superpowers, multinational corporations, and members of the ruling class are enemies of the Earth and the greatest danger to our future. How will we enforce Indigenous political, scientific, and economic orders to successfully prevent our mass ruin? This is the challenge we confront and pose in The Red Deal, and it is the challenge that all who take up The Red Deal must also confront.”
― The Red Nation, The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth

“We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools - of ranking the relative value of humans - are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged there.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“The US will pay for climate change whether or not a Green New Deal is in place.

The question is, will we invest in a bold plan to boost the economy, or will we pay for damage from intense hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, rising sea levels, & ecological devastation?”
― Ro Khanna

“Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organizations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of green human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the 'why' behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.

Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground.

What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“The better news is that as we transform how we generate energy, how we move ourselves around, how we grow our food and how we live in cities, we have a historic opportunity to build a society that is fairer on every front, and where everyone is valued. Here's how we do it. We make sure that, wherever possible, our renewable energy comes from community-controlled providers and cooperatives, so that decisions about land use are made democratically and profits from energy production are used to pay for much-needed services.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“The Extinction of the Human Race now underway. Watch it live as it happens - Is it too late to stop it? Search "Extinction Live Mathiesen" on Amazon”
― Michael Mathiesen

“The climate crisis has been long framed as an issue of either techno-utopian tinkering, entrusting a few billionaires to save the day, or of collective self-sacrifices - us versus us. Have fewer children. Buy organic. Drive less. Amid all the carbon shaming, it's worth recalling Occupy Wall Street's most enduring slogan: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. If we didn't write ourselves subprime mortgages and we didn't on a whim decide to saddle ourselves with six figures worth of student debt, we certainly didn't wreck the planet. They did.”
― Kate Aronoff, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

“I would of believe it if the clement chance is real when I see all rich people walking way from their ocean front property!”
― Beta Metani'Marashi

“I would of believe it if the climate change is real when I see all rich people walking way from their ocean front property!”
― Beta Metani'Marashi

“Earth has plenty resources to suffice our need, but no planet has enough resources to suffice our greed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“Without the green of heart, what green apes, what oil apes - all energy leads to but one color - the color of blood - red!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Energy used to sustain the same old paradigm of greed, control and disparity, is anything but clean - no matter what it says on the label.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Treat greed first, you fools - treat greed first! Then you won't need to make a ton of empty promises and winded policies for a sustainable future - because where there is no greed, sustainability flows like spring water. Treat greed first, then I shall call you humankind - until then, you are nothing but apekind. Without the green of heart, what green apes, what oil apes - all energy leads to but one color - the color of blood - red! Energy used to sustain the same old paradigm of greed, control and disparity, is anything but clean - no matter what it says on the label.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“As a society, we cannot afford to overlook the nexus between environmental health and reproductive well-being. The future health and vitality of our communities depend on our collective commitment to creating a cleaner, safer environment for everyone, especially those who are most vulnerable.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal