Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, tackles questions of power head on. Written in the lucid, urgent prose that characterizes much of Klein’s work, the book collects essays published over the last 10 years, a period Klein calls the 'lost decade,' when lawmakers missed a crucial opportunity to start decarbonizing the global economy. Klein’s thinking, admirably consistent, develops over this period in subtle but telling ways ... Klein’s sense of strategy sharpens ... There’s no question that Klein is a utopian thinker. But she’s also a realist. Among On Fire’s most valuable contributions is Klein’s effort to reclaim the language of 'realism' from the do-nothings — the political and business elites who, for years, have dismissed decarbonization proposals as childish fantasies ... For Klein, a global economic overhaul is very much in the cards. But students cutting class is not enough to make it happen ... make no mistake: Klein is perhaps the most important ecosocialist writer today. She doesn’t write for people with power, but for the people who are poised to take it. She not only openly advocates for ecosocialism...but also articulates her position with a clarity and moral force designed to win people to the cause. Such work is not just indispensable. It is the whole point.

If I were a rich man, I’d buy 245 million copies of Naomi Klein’s On Fire and hand-deliver them to every eligible voter in America. I say this not because Klein’s book is flawless — far from it — but because it makes a strong case for tackling the climate crisis as not just an urgent undertaking, but an inspiring one ... Klein is not interested in fleshing out policy details — or, for that matter, in working out the numbers on how to pay for it. She’s interested in making a moral argument for why it is necessary. To Klein, climate change isn’t simply another important issue; it’s 'a message, one that is telling us that many of Western culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable' ... 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 ... 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.

At first glance, On Fire is nowhere near as ambitious as Klein’s other books. After its rousing introduction, the book is a mishmash of short, uneven pieces on subjects ranging from suffocating wildfires on the West Coast to the 2015 papal encyclical on climate. It does not propose a master narrative to explain the current situation. It lacks the deep reporting that distinguishes her most influential work. It’s repetitive and unfairly dismissive of some genuinely difficult scientific and political questions that deserve more open debate ... Yet Klein is a talented polemicist, and On Fire is a powerful manifesto. Readers with a more scholarly disposition may be put off by her admonitions and instructions, but Klein isn’t trying to win over the seminar room or the swing voter. She wants to catalyze a movement ... What it will not do is persuade skeptics, including people who care about global warming but don’t share Klein’s politics, that a GND is politically feasible, given the vehement right-wing opposition to it as well as the enormous costs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic response and recovery. It offers no coherent strategy for overcoming partisan opposition to progressive environmental and economic policies, no likely pathways to the more just, sustainable world Klein wants to build.

...despite its subtitle, the new collection ends up being less a coherent argument for or against any particular slate of green policies, and more of a historical overview of the last decade, one that charts how far the environmental left has come ... even as the broader left has caught up to Klein, reaching consensus on the basic outlines of a Green New Deal, the 'how' remains fuzzy ... Klein, in this collection, still leaves us short on the details of exactly what shape this will take: How can federal agencies empower communities to retool their energy infrastructure? ... How do we forge international coalitions to ensure decarbonization takes place on a global scale? These are central, burning questions in the formulation of a Green New Deal, to which Klein proposes no robust answer. Instead, Klein frequently gets bogged down in the culture wars around the climate crisis. Even as she repeatedly acknowledges the deeply material roots of this crisis, her writing is preoccupied by a nearly spiritualistic anti-consumerism, geared toward convincing her reader that a cultural shift will help solve climate change ... despite the padding, there’s much here that’s worthwhile ... It’s...where the personal and the political intersect, that Klein’s writing is most moving. Her strident calls to action, written in ardent, rousing prose, make her a joy to read. Taken together, what the pieces collected in On Fire reveal most clearly is that we’re in uncharted territory.

Reading Naomi Klein’s book...is similar to watching a mega-disaster movie in a theater. But you can leave your fears behind when credits roll and you exit the theater. Klein’s message is much more dire: our human-induced climate change is devastating our livable earth, we are stuck here, it is not safe, the house is on fire ... Unfortunately, she does not provide any country that rejects economic growth as a working model ... Klein provides the data and the vision. Her hope is to see a coordinated global movement to successfully reverse carbon consumption within each country—a challenge that will require something more than a book.

Klein’s 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 ... 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 we’ve 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 ... On Fire is decidedly less optimistic than This Changes Everything, probably because the situation is a whole lot worse than it was in 2014.

Paradoxically, now that the left-wing climate movement she called for in This Changes Everything has become increasingly manifest, Klein seems intent on downplaying its radicalism ... If global warming changes everything, then in On Fire Klein hesitates to elucidate exactly what 'everything' means ... contains some new material, including Klein’s thoughts on the recent students’ strikes, but much of it is given over to her writings on global warming over the past ten years ... To avoid the inevitability of geo-engineering, more than the one percent must change their ways: There must also be profound social changes of a magnitude that is only hinted at in On Fire. Undermining the current fossil-fueled hegemony and building a coalition for an austere, highly regulated economy will be much harder than [Klein] seems willing to consider ... Klein champions the Green New Deal’s target of net-zero emissions by 2030, but she refuses to wade into baroque scientific debates on decarbonization. This is an important omission, as many of the proposals floating around rely heavily on the unproven technology of carbon capture and storage ... Klein refrains from spelling out these implications, reluctant as she is to switch from broad-brush arguments to policy pointillism ... It is admirable that Klein is supporting a cause as worthy as the Green New Deal. Yet fighting climate change requires an accurate reckoning of the balance of forces and the necessary measures in an age of environmental collapse.

Klein’s On Fire is a cri de coeur and an exposition on what she calls the burning case for a Green New Deal. In rhetoric that is ablaze with passion—her metaphors run like, well, wildfire—she sets out a blistering critique of capitalism, democratic institutions, and contemporary politics ... Some of the facts she presents are—and here the language fails us—chilling ... The question is whether other minds are changeable ... Klein makes a good effort on both fronts. But that effort is marred by the architecture of this volume, which isn’t so much a book as a collection of speeches and articles, some of which seem dated ... The most effective and persuasive part of this book is in its first 53 pages, written as an introduction to what follows. In those pages she sets out her argument with a precision that matches her passion. Even so, there are important elements in the latter sections of the book ... This is a scorching volume for a heated time. The fire next time, it turns out, is now.

Climate justice expert Klein...combines ten years' worth of her public talks and essays to clearly explain the urgent need for the creation of the Green New Deal ... A necessary read for both proponents and opponents of the Green New Deal, complete with eye-opening facts that make clear the need for drastic change.

Klein...brings her informed perspective to a series of probing essays and rousing speeches that trace the movement from climate concerns to an environmental emergency ... Her zeal and eloquence will inspire, engage, and motivate those who are concerned about the planet’s future to become even more involved in taking any and all possible steps to curb or reverse further disruption and destruction.

What separates Klein from many other advocates for a Green New Deal is her balanced combination of idealism and politics-based realism ... Throughout her urgent essays, Klein lucidly expresses her incredulity that huge swaths of humanity fail to recognize the critical nature of our current climate crisis ... Klein wisely ranges beyond the U.S. and her native Canada when presenting evidence and explaining obstacles. Another important addition to the literature on the most essential issue of our day.