The main value of reading Naomi Klein’s collected essays written between 2010 and 2019 in On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal is that it allows us to see how Klein and much of the climate left’s thinking has evolved over the past decade, from the debacle in Copenhagen in 2009 to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution in 2019.

Ten years is a really long time in the climate fight. If we’re honest, those ten years have largely been wasted. Emissions hit a record high in 2018, and it appears 2019 will be even higher. As long as emissions keep rising, we are still losing. If we’re going to start winning, the next ten years must look very different.

The most exciting part of reading this collection is the clear sense of a marked political shift over the last few years. The bulk of the chapters read as an onslaught of disasters — the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Trump’s election, summer vacations marred by apocalyptic smoke — occasionally punctuated by glimmers of hope: the Vatican’s encyclical that argued for better planetary stewardship, the radical “Leap Manifesto” building a case for climate justice, and scientific pronouncements declaring the need for revolutionary economic changes.