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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein

4.18 · Rating details · 15,032 ratings · 1,667 reviews

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon – it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, exposes the myths tha ...more

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Hardcover, 576 pages

Published September 16th 2014 by Simon Schuster

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Aug 28, 2014 Chris rated it it was amazing

Naomi’s Klein’s This Changes Everything is absolutely essential for understanding, confronting, and meeting the challenges of the 21st century. I recommend it to everyone.

Naomi Klein is known for her activism and her reporting on corporate malfeasance – the misused power of corporations, and the deleterious effects of unfettered global free-market western-style capitalism unchained from any conceivable governance that might restrict profitability. Profits first, above all else. Protect shareho ...more

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Aug 16, 2014 Nicole D. rated it it was amazing

Climate change is not liberal propaganda

There is only one truth you need to know - from this book, from this review: Denying climate change is profitable, and as long as it remains profitable, the environment degrades. It will get to a point of no return. Do you want to do something now voluntarily or be forced to do something later, when it’s probably too late? “In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collaps Climate change is not liberal propaganda

There is only one truth you need to know - from this book, from this review: Denying climate change is profitable, and as long as it remains profitable, the environment degrades. It will get to a point of no return. Do you want to do something now voluntarily or be forced to do something later, when it’s probably too late? “In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”

Fossil fuel companies are among the most profitable and they are destroying the planet on the fast track enabled by lobbyists and politicians, because it’s more economical (and profitable) for them to do so than to change what they are doing. Do you want to give BP a dollar so you can drive a Suburban, or do you want to deny BP that dollar (or cut it back to .20 cents) and drive a hybrid? These choices are ours to make and the only way the fossil fuel companies will hear us is economically, because they don’t care about us ecologically.

Corporations whose primary objective are profits cannot be allowed to influence decisions about the PLANET. Poor nations suffer because rich nations pollute. When things get bad, the poor nations will be the first to go. “Media commentators speak of ‘compassion fatigue’, as if empathy, and not fossil fuels was the finite resource.”

We are living beyond our environmental budget, and the bill is coming due.

It’s hard to write a review of this book without discussion how you feel about the topic. How you process the information. This book is, to some degree, preaching to the choir. Klein is radical, and this book is no holds barred. Right-wing Americans aren’t going to read this and suddenly say “Oh, wow, I get it now. My bad.”

If we go down party lines, only 50%(ish) of Americans believe climate change is something which needs to be addressed. Unfortunately, the “other” 50%(ish) control corporations and lobbyists. Better planet, one way or another, results in lower profits. Or a complete breakdown of certain industries.

Cheap goods from China? Bad for the environment, good for Wal-Mart. You could see why Wal-Mart (as an example) would want to deny climate change.

You know why the sky in China is brown? So we can have cheap goods. And guess what? It’s not entirely China’s fault. Every time we buy some tchotchke, pan, coffee mug, electronic device “made in China” we are contributing to climate change.

We need to consume less, and we need to consume more thoughtfully - Buy local (do we really need asparagus which traveled 7,500 miles?) Think about the corporations you support and where your goods are coming from.

Corporations are making deliberate decisions for profit which hasten climate change. This is a book for people who want to understand the economics of climate change. Who want to make educated buying decisions. Saving the planet isn’t just about biking to work one day a week, it’s thinking about where and how you spend your money. ...more

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May 17, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, 2019

My full review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, can be found on my blog.

Expansive and visionary, This Changes Everything urges that bold, structural changes to the global economy must be made if greenhouse gas emissions are to be lowered and cataclysmic climate change avoided. In lucid prose Klein details how neoliberal policies have wrecked havoc on the public sphere and environment over the past four decades, intensifying already-rampant inequality and industrial pollution. As she surveys t ...more

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Nov 11, 2014 Joseph Spuckler rated it really liked it

Shelves: oil-coal-nuclear, political-science

I have read to of Klein's other books and will admit none of them read as well as Shock Doctrine. This Changes Everything reads more like a thesis than a marketed book. Nearly half of the book is documentation and source material. If Klein says it, she backs it up.

My thoughts: The problem is not so much capitalism, but what capitalism has become. Capitalism has had its problems from sweatshops to slavery. America prides itself on being a capitalist nation, but that in itself is a misnomer. Roads, police, air spac I have read to of Klein's other books and will admit none of them read as well as Shock Doctrine. This Changes Everything reads more like a thesis than a marketed book. Nearly half of the book is documentation and source material. If Klein says it, she backs it up.

My thoughts: The problem is not so much capitalism, but what capitalism has become. Capitalism has had its problems from sweatshops to slavery. America prides itself on being a capitalist nation, but that in itself is a misnomer. Roads, police, air space, food, education, snow removal, water and sewage are all controlled by one of the several layers of government and paid for by public funds. Many people hate socialism, unless it is their water, their children's education, their roads with potholes.

Klein's view of capitalism is the current system we are experiencing. Not to sound archaic but the system was much more local in the past. Local areas provided are fairly closed loop. You bought something and you expected it to last. You visited bakers, butchers, and farmers markets. This system worked well until people found that bigger was better. Bigger stores meant cheaper prices. Chains grew Walmart came into play. Things still went ok because things were still made at home. The next step was imports, which were cheaper, but not produced at home -- this cost jobs. America started to think free trade might not be in its interest. Protective tariffs tried to save industry, but industry moved overseas. WTO and NAFTA came about to insure free (or fair) trade. The move was to globalization. This was the system of efficiency. Let each nation build what it builds best and trade. Win-win for everyone.

The problem with increased efficiency is there are much more finished goods being produced everyone bought what they needed. What to do after everyone has what they need? How many televisions, cars, or pairs of shoes does one person need? Advertise, make cosmetic changes, create a want and when that doesn't work planned obsolesce. More manufacturing, more power consumption, more cars, and a new cell phone every two years. More waste, more coal power plants. It's ok to be poor, you have an Iphone.

The system puts a strain on the planet. Ninety-seven percent of the scientist agree that man made climate change is real. The dissent does not present much of a case, except for things like if you live in Montana global warming will give better crop yields and longer growing seasons. It is mostly the poor that will need to adapt because the poor live in hot climates. (This Texas resident really questions that logic).

A big part of the problem is the politicization of the problem. In the 1990s, both parties recognized the problem. Newt Gingrich spoke on needing to change our ways. That has all changed and the issue has become partisan, much like school vouchers or tax cuts. Climate change, however, cannot be legislated away. If science is right, there will be a tipping point where no matter what we do, we won't be able to fix, stop, or slow climate change.

When countries move to become green they are attacked. In 2010 United States challenged China wind power program because it was protectionist. Likewise, the Indian Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission was challenged because it encouraged local industry. Even more outrageous was the US challenge against Quebec legislation banning fracking. It was challenged on the grounds that it cut off gas resources to potential industries. These actions may sound a bit odd, but it is little different from colonization. National sovereignty is becoming a thing of the past.

Mass transportation systems are another topic mentioned in cutting greenhouse gasses. America calls investing in public transportation subsidies, but using tax money to build new roads is called an investment.

Change can come, but it needs to be a movement. Slavery was not crisis for the American elites, until abolition became a movement. Civil rights was not an issue for many until Northerners saw the dogs and fire hoses turned on American citizens. The First Nation peoples of Canada are making progress in stopping pipelines, tar fields, and mining on their lands. It seems to be making a difference.

Klein uses environmental issues to attack the "capitalism" we have today. This book is filled with documented information. The reading can be a bit dry and even burdensome at times but well worth the read. Klein tackles both the environment (and she does not hesitate to call out the failures of environmental organizations) and the economy. This Changes Everything is a call to remember when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging. ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 Adam Yoshida rated it did not like it · review of another edition

In reading Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything - a friendly-looking tome with a sky-blue cover - I couldn’t help but recall what Whittaker Chambers’ remark, in reviewing Ayn Rand’s classic that, “(f)rom almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “to the gas chambers — go!”” This is a book that will seduce many people with its tales of various indigenous people standing up against further development and its surface-level commitment to In reading Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything - a friendly-looking tome with a sky-blue cover - I couldn’t help but recall what Whittaker Chambers’ remark, in reviewing Ayn Rand’s classic that, “(f)rom almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “to the gas chambers — go!”” This is a book that will seduce many people with its tales of various indigenous people standing up against further development and its surface-level commitment to humanitarian aims, but it is also the work of profound evil. This is a totalitarian book that aims to advance totalitarian aims in the guise of combating a supposed emergency. As Klein herself admits, she herself truly began to engage with these issues only when she realized that the aims of environmental radicalism provided a rationale for the adoption of ultra-left positions more generally. In writing this book, Klein has done the world a profound service in a surely-unintended fashion: she has set out in crystal-clear fashion the slightly-hidden agenda that lies behind most so-called “environmental” initiatives: the destruction of capitalism and Western Civilization.

If you think my last sentence was hyperbolic, you should read the book yourself. In it Klein advocates a program that would see a radical redistribution of wealth, not only from the “1% to the 99% within the advanced industrial nations, but on a global basis. She approvingly quotes one academic as, “envision(ing) that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries of today.””

When I read that sentence, I was temporarily floored. It is clear enough to myself that the aim of a notable portion of the present-day left is to take what you, I, and our families have and give it away in the name of “social justice”, but it’s rare to see it admittedly so openly. How many in the West would ever willingly accept having our standard of living “coverage” with that of Liberia?

She tries to put as kind a spin on this as possible, writing that, “(w)e will need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s” in order to attempt to pull back the shock a little bit. But, I ask you, how many among us would sincerely and willingly see our standard of living rolled back by four or five decades? She does her best to disguise the sort of pain that she’s proposing to inflict upon the majority of Canadians, Americans, and other citizens in advanced nations, as well as the fact that it is more or less it is impossible that such measures would ever be adopted on a voluntary basis. Here and there, however, the mask slips, which was when she writes that, “if these sorts of demand-side emissions reductions are to take place on anything like the scale required, they cannot be left to the lifestyle decisions of earnest urbanites.”

Ah, there it is! These decisions, Klein and her ilk believe, as so important that they cannot be left to the people. Nowhere in her book, beyond in laying out a vapid and shiny vision of a mass-movement of various native peoples and local townspeople resisting oil development, does she ever get too explicit about how the practical politics of this change should be managed, but it doesn’t take too much of a leap to infer that it would be impossible for her anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to operate in accord with basic constitutional liberties and the rule of law. What she proposes, in essence, is for a revolutionary mob to come along and take by force the property of others in the name of the Earth. What she proposes is for a massive increase in the powers of the state over the affairs of the people - one that could not be possibly gained by democratic consent in the timeframe that she suggests (before the end of his decade). When Klein invokes the increase in transit usage and home production of food that occurred during the Second World War as an example, she shows a little more of her hand: those measures were only possible within a context of near-absolute government control of society during a total war.

It is a cliche to invoke Martin Niemöller in a political debate, yet it is irresistible here. Her first targets - the oil companies and select billionaires - may have some aspects about them that are unappealing, but this is really about everyone. This is a vision for a Khemr Rouge-like Year Zero society that will harm practically everyone if even a small fraction of it is allowed to come to pass.

“It is a matter of the well-off 20 percent in a population taking the largest cuts,” Klein writes, but soon enough she adds that, “(t)his does not mean the middle class is off the hook. To fund the kind of social programs that will make a just transition possible, taxes will have to raise for everyone but the poor.” Later she add that this, “is precisely why, when climate change diners claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.”

Yet, strangely, Klein fails to ever truly engage with the sort of tenacious resistance that such measures would face not only among the oil barons and the other villains of her work, but among ordinary people who do not wish to see the work of generations and their own lives destroyed or stolen and “redistributed” to others. If you would like to see your lifestyle “converge” with that of Nepal, you are more than free to make such a thing happen immediately. If you wish to require that my standard of living be reduced until it is roughly the same as the global average, than you are going to not only need votes but also guns and armies. This is the single greatest flaw of this book: Klein unveils a totalitarian and world-transforming vision and acknowledges that there are ideologues whose ideas differ from hers that she is willing to accord at least intellectual respect to, but she never engages with the reality that there are millions of people - ordinary citizens - in the Western world who would die on the battlefield before they would ever consent to live in her nightmarish version of the future.

Going through this book I thought of a moment in another work that I’d be willing to bet that Klein is familiar with (since it came out of the febrile imagination of the far-left of the British Labour Party during the 1980s). The late 1980s mini-series A Very British Coup is horribly dated now (it was based upon an even-older novel). It imagines the election of a crypto-communist British Prime Minister (who, among other things, funds his wild spending by taking out a large loan from the Soviet Union) and the resistance to him by the United States and the British establishment. In the climactic showdown between the Prime Minister and the sinister head of MI5, the intelligence chief tells the Prime Minister that his ideals represent a threat to everything that he and his fathers have fought for over the centuries, yea onto the Middle Ages. The Prime Minister closes his reply by telling the head of MI5, “don’t forget: I have ancestors too.”

Klein’s mistake here is assuming that she and her allies have a monopoly on virtue. She assumes that they are the “good guys” in this scenario, much as the old-line Marxists of earlier days held a position that took the virtue of “the workers” as an established fact rather than the debatable and mixed proposition that it was. She forgets, in other words, that I have ancestors too and that those of us who believe in individual liberty and the heritage of the English-speaking peoples have things that we believe in every bit as passionately and that we are certain are just as right as the things that she and her followers believe in. By failing to account for this, her extremism ensures that, at best, those who share her beliefs will remain eternally consigned to the fringes of society and, at worst, if they are ever to gain a mass following and the opportunity to implement her ideals that she will not be ushering in paradise, but instead bring on bloody and brutal civil wars that will resemble, more than anything else, the terrible strife that nearly destroyed the Balkans two decades ago. ...more

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Dec 07, 2014 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: foreign-affairs, journalism, america, business, science, politics, nonfiction

Klein has every reason to be depressed about the way governments the world over are relinquishing their responsibilities when it comes to air, water, and land pollution. Though she admits to faltering in looking forward to the future we have left for our children, in the end she does not quail: she comes to see that there is a glimmer of hope that humans might actually slow or stop other humans from destroying our habitat, and the habitat of other species on the planet. In fact, our salvation ma ...more

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May 11, 2015 Pink rated it really liked it

This changes everything. I wish it did. I suppose you have to be quite anti-capitalist to even pick this up. The title certainly makes clear Naomi Klein's view, by pitting capitalism against the climate. I completely agree.

There is a LOT of ground covered in this book and an extensive amount of research. At times it became a bit too much and I was unclear what it's intentions were. I wanted a simpler solution, when of course there isn't one. Yet there were many great ideas and examples of how g This changes everything. I wish it did. I suppose you have to be quite anti-capitalist to even pick this up. The title certainly makes clear Naomi Klein's view, by pitting capitalism against the climate. I completely agree.

There is a LOT of ground covered in this book and an extensive amount of research. At times it became a bit too much and I was unclear what it's intentions were. I wanted a simpler solution, when of course there isn't one. Yet there were many great ideas and examples of how grassroots communities ARE working for the good of the climate. Which is usually in opposition to the global energy companies whose incentive is to make money. Then make some more. And more.

Did I learn anything new? Yes, I learnt a lot. Not only about climate change, why it's A REAL PROBLEM and how this will affect everyone (no not hotter summers, yippee). I discovered more about why we're being pushed into extreme energy sources, what governments are(n't) doing about it and the roles ecological and green organisations play to help. Or not. I read about problems encountered by people who really do WANT TO HELP and how easy it is for their good intentions to be turned in another direction. I read a lot of things that made me angry. I expected multinational companies to be making big profits for themselves. I less expected them to be ignoring laws and legislature, simply because they have money and time on their side, to strip the earth of resources before communities can make LEGITIMATE claims through the courts. By which time it's too late to put the resources back in the ground. Is it such a novel idea just to keep them there?

I think more people are beginning to think this way. Most populations don't want to live next to a nuclear plant, they don't want oil drilling in their back yard, or fracking on their doorstep. Demonstrations at ground level have stopped some of these things from happening and they're slowly pushing back the tide of these last wave extractions. More needs to happen of course. Saving one area at a time with protests is not enough and that's where some of the bigger ideas of this book come into play. Living in a more co-operative society, where that literally does what it says. Changing the global dominance of the way the world runs, when it's to the detriment of local jobs, resources, people, animals and land. Yet, I don't see that things will change.

For things to be implemented as Naomi Klein suggests there would need to be a huge rethink on everyday life and a return to a simpler time. For a start, more growing, making and buying of local goods, rather than buying products that have flown halfway across the world because someone else can produce them cheaper. Free trade sounds like a positive thing, but it can also work against us. We're running out of resources to ship these goods back and forth across the world and if we continue down this path of mass consumption things will eventually come to a head.

Coal, oil and gas aren't finite resources, they will run out. By which time it will be too late to start mass investment of real green alternatives. That needs to be happening right now. If we wait another 50 or 100 years too much damage will have been done, which can't be magically fixed. More people will live in land stripped communities, or be displaced from rising sea levels, or suffer from repeated famines due to crop failures. The west won't be exempt either, with increased natural disasters in the way of heat waves and forest fires, or extreme hurricanes. Perhaps in the future there will be an even more two tier society, with the rich living in air conditioned, flood defended, earthquake resistant structures. While the poor languish outside of these areas. Think hurricane Katrina style disaster on a global scale, year on year. Or your favourite dystopian novels come true.

So what if all of this is wrong? What if the 97 percent of scientists who tell us global warming is happening, are actually mistaken? What if it isn't all our fault, it's actually a fluctuation of earth's natural temperatures and there isn't really a problem. Well, in this case, as Naomi Klein says, we'll just have made the world a fairer, better place for everyone, for no reason at all. What a shame that would be. ...more

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Jun 04, 2017 Thomas rated it really liked it

Shelves: own-physical, nonfiction

I wish someone had taught me to question capitalism before college. This past year at university has made me so weary of capitalism and its greed-based consequences, and Naomi Klein's brilliant This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate has persuaded me even more. While I do not claim expertise on the topics of environmentalism or economics, I still must say: it is my responsibility, and our responsibility, to protect this earth we live on. Klein does a thorough and effective job of explaining I wish someone had taught me to question capitalism before college. This past year at university has made me so weary of capitalism and its greed-based consequences, and Naomi Klein's brilliant This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate has persuaded me even more. While I do not claim expertise on the topics of environmentalism or economics, I still must say: it is my responsibility, and our responsibility, to protect this earth we live on. Klein does a thorough and effective job of explaining how capitalism contributes to climate change, and while this review does a better job than I could on breaking down how she does it, I want to include a relevant:

"By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we don't already know. The battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as an excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisold bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity of extraction, poisoning or poverty."

Amidst several striking points, I most appreciate Klein's emphasis on valuing nurturing and regeneration over domination and extractivism. As someone who researches and thinks a lot about gender, I see this struggle play out between the "masculine" urge to destroy and to practice aggression the "feminine" urge to heal and to protect. I wish we as a society cared more about caring instead of profit, because that would help the environment ~~and it may have prevented the incompetent Donald Trump from becoming President.~~ With the awful Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, we need to act fast. A quote that reflects my sentiments in this paragraph, about how we should question what we prioritize in society:

"Now, I realize that this can all sound apocalyptic - as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all - a decent standard of living, a measure of feature security, and our relationships with one another. So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules."

Overall, a dense and important book about an urgent topic in contemporary society. I am genuinely so afraid of the suffering future generations will have to experience because of our negligence, and at the same time I am hopeful that we can lessen their burden if we mobilize now. Please join the fight for climate justice, with me and so many others. ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 Blair rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: economics, zzz-own-e-book, best-reviews, politics, science-climate, pseudoscience

Believing is Not Enough

Naomi Klein believes that the inequality of wealth and power in the world is unjust and that it should be redistributed more fairly. The problem with this book is not that she wants redistribution; it is that she believes in it too much. She filters all her information about the world through this moral lens, which results in simplistic and misleading conclusions.

She describes this clearly when talking about other believers. She explains the tendency of some cons ...more

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Feb 05, 2015 Emma Sea rated it it was ok

One giant eye-roll

You make me facepalm, Naomi Klein.

"As our boat rocked [in the Louisiana Gulf Coast delta] I had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water, but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage."

If you want to change people's minds - right-wing, die-hard meritocracy-spouting capitalist human minds - you can't talk like this and expect them to listen.

I am left with the firm belief that Klein's purpose in writing this book was to simply sell a l/>"As ...more

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Sep 22, 2014 Zanna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: environment

At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are unleashing – a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt us

This book is a brick, a great heavy block with which you can shatter screens of lies and greenwash. Nine months after reading it, I still remember parts of it so well that I'm reviewing without properly rereading, so please accept my apologies for my bodgy job (and hold the jokes about gestation please), but I will reread at some point not just to refresh my memory but as therapy for burn out and political despair. It starts off with the bad news – so devastatingly sad I sobbed for all of us everywhere, humans and non-humans, all but doomed to a future of environmental devastation, so much so that a stranger (but fellow northener) gave up her seat on the tube for me 'you look like you need this more than I do, love'. The next day I was chuckling under my breath and punching the air with a suppressed 'Yes!' for the victories of Blockadia and PEOPLE POWER generally against extractivist corporations and their scary supporters in state power.

The keystone idea here is that the simple reason we're failing to do what we need to do and stop burning the damn fossil fuels already is that the things we need to do are in fundamental conflict with deregulated capitalism. I am in 100% agreement with this. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, we have the desire and wherewithall to help each other out, make sacrifices, work together and all that, we just have this bonkers system that is wired to kill us all. The fact that an elite minority currently has a stranglehold on the world economy is, in Klein's view, just really really bad timing. If climate scientists had got in a decade earlier, we'd be fixed up good by now, and if the whole ozone layer thing had been a little bit later, when governments can get sued for banning dangerous products, we'd probably be hiding behind specially coated windows and only going out at night. Witness the UK's current PM unbanning bee-killing neonicotinoids this year. Activists are working overtime on stuff like this because it gets harder and harder to win through legal channels while corporate forces crunch ahead tearing down regulatory structures designed to protect people from their depredations. Klein describes the past quarter-century for the corporate globalisation process as 'zooming from victory to victory'

But this is just from the intro, Klein goes deep and wide, crafting a thorough, unsparing philosophically rich analysis of the ideology of extractivism (which is associated with rightist groups now, but has an appalling history of support on the left too) and its effects, studded with illuminating case studies (like the island of Nauru). Colonialism is an extractivist ideology and practice – a response to the climate crisis must centre decolonisation. Klein explores the 'magical thinking' of bad solutions. These include the 'merger of big business and Big Green' when environmentalist groups attempt to 'translate [our arguments] into profits, earnings, productivity, and economic incentives for industry'. Some supposedly environmental protection groups even had their own fossil fuel contracts as well as being funded by Shell, BP et al and investing their funds in such companies. This links to the greenwash around fracking, billed as a 'bridge' to cleaner energy, which is pure bullshit – let it be cried from the rooftops please - renewables are now efficient and affordable enough to supply all the world's energy needs and all new investment in energy infrastructure needs to be put into installing them. Carbon credits get slammed here too, obviously.

Next up on the block are 'messiahs' like Richard Branson, who made a great song and dance about going green and throwing money behind green tech after watching that film by Al Gore. But he didn't actually do anything, just throw a bit of money at lower-emission aircraft fuel development and carry on as before. Carrying on as before just isn't going to be an option. This links into the geoengineering strand, which is the scariest thing ever. Klein calls it 'our culture's most powerful form of magical thinking'. The main idea discussed is that of dimming the sun with particulate emissions of some kind, so that the earth can cool down a bit while we... carry on burning fossil fuels. The two really obvious arguments against this are that then solar power wouldn't work (Klein points out the huge environmental racism of the idea – solar is going to be the biggest power source for the global south) and that it's impossible to test the effects of such an intervention in an extremely complex system-of-systems that we don't understand very well. Of course, we could try to predict the effects, but since we can't predict the weather for more than a week into the future with any accuracy........? Klein also points out that geoengineering is always 'plan b' but we haven't actually tried plan a – just stop burning fossil fuels. There's also an insightful critique of the 'astronaut's eye view' concept of saving the planet. The earth as a fragile blue ball we have to care for like a needy child. Actually, it's we who are fragile. She urges us to look at Earth not from outer space but from the roots and soil.

The hopeful leg of the book centres the residents-as-custodian perspective associated with indigenous people's beliefs and practices: love will save this place she says, people will stand up for the soil and water that nourishes them. The successes of blockadia, community movements to take local control of power generation (in Germany for instance), the wave of divestments under pressure from ordinary folks and so on speak to the potential of people power to win this, to force governments to do their job and protect people from unbridled capitalism instead of spurring it along. Put simply, fossil fuel companies have said that they will extract and burn five times more resource than scientists say the atmsphere can possibly take, then they are intent on suicide genocide ecocide on a total scale, and if we don't stop them, we and all our descendants are all dead.

One of my favourite parts of the book, 'The Right to Regenerate' presents a profound insight Klein had, which she came to through the new sensitivities and concerns that her painful struggle to become pregnant had brought to her. Reflecting on a day she spent on a boat in the Mississippi River Delta with people from an organisation dedicated to repairing the damage done to the wetlands by a major BP oil spill (she strongly suspected the exposure to chemicals at the time caused a miscarriage), she recalls that the guide was most concerned about something much harder to observe than the fouled water and the oil-streaked fish and vegetation; the vulnerability of all the eggs and larvae and other juvenile aquatic life, defenseless against the toxins, that normally spawns in the wetlands before populating the oceans and shores: crab, oysters, shrimp, tuna, swordfish, mackerel, marlin are among these species, and a whole generation of them would almost certainly be lost to the spill. 'I had the feeling we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multispecies miscarriage' she shares.

She extends this thought to humans; drugs and chemicals are approved for safe use and exposure based on their effects on adults: 'more than three-quarters of the mass-produced chemicals in the United States have never been tested for their impacts on fetuses or children'. She goes on to discuss environmental racism in relation to fertility and children, as well as attacks on women's reproductive autonomy and lack of support for mothers in the US and Canada. Finally she writes about agroecology so movingly that I was fired with passion to become a farmer.

This chapter in particular highlights the salience of decolonising feminist perspectives in climate movements. Klein demonstrates in her own writing the shift required by coloniser peoples towards forms of knowledge drawn from emotional, personal sources, that comprehend human lives as part(s) of a whole. What is making headway in the struggle to save people from climate change is, unsurprisingly, grassroots movement, much of it led by indigenous activists and people in 'sacrifice zones'. Klein emphasises that racism has always directed much extractivist activity, that native people and other people of colour who have seen their environment violated have always protested and attempted to stand up to polluters, and that the main reason rich & powerful white folks are now all of a sudden interested in restoring broken treaties that guarantee rights to fish in such and such a river to such and such a band or nation is that climate change is making an impact even on their back yards now. She also warns aganst treating indigenous people and their non-extractivist relationships to nature as another resource to be mined. Colonists have always been liars, and in leveraging the rights that native peoples have not had to power to get enforced could be a kind of restorative justice, but there shouldn't be cookies for the simple act of keeping your word, let alone hundreds of years late. This reminded me of Onora O'Neill's concept of rights rooted in obligations – what obligations are created by the rights of indigenous people? What are the full implications of 'honouring the treaties'? Settlers will have to go further, Klein says, than raising money for legal battles: 'they will have to become the treaty and land-sharing partners that their ancestors failed to be.' Linking back to an interview with an indigenous man employed on the tar sands, who said he had to tell himself it was the Moon, not the Earth, to keep going, but was unable to find other work, she points out

The only people who will be truly empowered to say no to dirty development over the long term are people who see real, hopeful alternatives.

Again, cllimate change is political. After discussing 'the power of keeping our word' Klein turns to 'the power of paying our debts' – how rich nations must help others to improve the lives of their populations through green development, not through burning fossil fuels. And by 'help', what's meant here is meaningful economic assistance. Aid paid for by taxpayers isn't the source Klein has in mind, rather, the corporations extracting from poor countries and funnelling the riches to global elites should pay up, governments should stop subsidising fossil fuels (for real, I mean, why the hell is that happening?!) and pay for tech transfer instead and so on.

In short, battling climate change means & needs reparations, liberations, decolonisations, and all their implications. ...more

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May 07, 2018 Rebecca McNutt rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, political, science, environmental, pollution, industry

Please don't tar and feather me for this, but I really don't care about the themes within this book. It's the same tired old stuff I've been growing up with since I was a kid, the notion that the planet is dying and in (insert future year here) we'll have giant apocalyptic storms, dead whales and seals everywhere and no safe water left. Mind you, I always find it ironic that my mother, who grew up in the 1970's, has a saved playlist of 1960's-1970's YouTube PSA's predicting that these same thing ...more

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Aug 19, 2014 Len rated it liked it · review of another edition

I'm a big Naomi Klein fan and I consider myself an environmentalist so I was quite excited to read Klein's new book on climate change. I was worried that it would be depressing -- I don't know about you but with the passing of each day and nothing being done about climate change I get more and more resigned to the fact that the planet is doomed. Frankly I don't understand why it's not a bigger deal to everyone in the world. We should all be alarmed, but instead our heads our buried in the collec I'm a big Naomi Klein fan and I consider myself an environmentalist so I was quite excited to read Klein's new book on climate change. I was worried that it would be depressing -- I don't know about you but with the passing of each day and nothing being done about climate change I get more and more resigned to the fact that the planet is doomed. Frankly I don't understand why it's not a bigger deal to everyone in the world. We should all be alarmed, but instead our heads our buried in the collective sand. Perhaps that's because we may be past the point of doing anything as a species to save the planet from its man-made demise. Here's what NASA's Dr. James Hansen has to say about our situation:

“If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from [current levels] to at most 350 ppm.”
Dr. James Hansen

Right now we’re at 400 ppm, and we’re adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Unless we are able to rapidly turn that around and return to below 350 ppm this century, we risk triggering tipping points and irreversible impacts that could send climate change spinning truly beyond our control. This is not hyperbole. It's not a theory. It's not up for debate. It's science and the odds are against us.

Klein's hypothesis seems to be, and I am oversimplifying it, is that only a mass social movement like what we saw in the 1960s on equal rights or during the 1800s like we saw to end slavery will we be able to move the needle to avert this crisis. In fact, she argues that our entire way of life -- our capitalist society -- will need to change in order for us to turn things around. She may be right. For as long as extractionists continue to make obscene amounts of money from fossil fuels and control the political will of nations we will be fighting a losing battle.

Yep. Klein's book was depressing as hell. As she outlines all of the things that are wrong with our systems (political, social and otherwise) it becomes harder and harder to imagine humankind has the will or the desire to stand up to the status quo. Sure, she points out plenty of isolated cases of people rising up to stop pipelines or mining operations around the world. She calls this "blockadia" and suggests this is the start of a worldwide movement to fight for the planet. She makes a compelling case that the world's indigenous peoples will possibly lead this fight because they are perhaps the most threatened by climate change and extraction. She tried to be optimistic about the future, but frankly she doesn't convince me that anything will change on a massive scale, the kind it will take to keep us from raising global temperatures beyond the 2 degree barrier that so many scientists believe will mark the tipping point.

She argues as well that what we do as individuals (like recycling and using canvas bags at the grocery store) is not enough, that we need a movement to energize the masses. But Katrina didn't do it. Superstorm Sandy didn't do it. Drought hasn't done it. What will it take for the 99 percent to stand up to the thieves who are extracting us into extinction?

At one point her argument made me feel like we were all in some warped Hunger Games society, but there is no Katniss Everdeen to save us from the bad guys. Who will lead us to victory? Fredd Krupp? Robert Redford? Leonardo Dicaprio?

I agree with Klein's premise, that we need a Marshall Plan for the planet and our economic system is designed to propagate the problems. I just don't see how we'll drag people away from the Kardashians to do anything about it. Yes, I'm a pessimist. But I haven't seen anything to show me otherwise.

I'm not even sure what I can do about it. I am a good steward of my own environment, but it's not enough. And there's no global movement to join. Am I supposed to blow up fracking equipment and sabotage oil wells? I have a family -- I can't go to jail.

I guess I'll continue to stand by and wait for someone, anyone, to lead us out of this mess.

...more

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Sep 23, 2018 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: politics-and-polemic, non-fiction, 21st-century, science

A long book in a small font (view spoiler)

What I liked about this book is that she takes to heart her own dictum of never letting a good crisis go to waste and she says - when those on the political right criticise greening the economy on the grounds that it runs counter to 'invisible hand' "free" market ideologies, lets not be coy about it, let's own it and wear it as a badge of pride - seize the opportunity to ...more

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Nov 25, 2014 Katie rated it liked it

This is not the treatise against capitalism that some people have made it out to be, or that I was hoping for. I'm honestly pretty torn on what I think about it. On the one hand, Klein's focus on direct action is both necessary and inspiring, and I think this is an important step in challenging liberals to step outside their ineffective comfort zone of signing petitions, writing the occasional check to a green org, and calling their absolutely useless representatives who will never, ever listen This is not the treatise against capitalism that some people have made it out to be, or that I was hoping for. I'm honestly pretty torn on what I think about it. On the one hand, Klein's focus on direct action is both necessary and inspiring, and I think this is an important step in challenging liberals to step outside their ineffective comfort zone of signing petitions, writing the occasional check to a green org, and calling their absolutely useless representatives who will never, ever listen to them. On the other hand, I was disappointed that despite the title, she doesn't dig deep enough on the subject of capitalism. She makes a lot of really, really great points, but falls short of arriving at the conclusions that logically stem from those points. I think she actually might be doing some damage by dancing carefully around the subject of capitalism. By referring to it constantly as "deregulated capitalism", she has actually given people the false sense that capitalism itself is not the problem. She lays waste to major parts of capitalist theory then gives those who aren't open-minded enough to really question capitalism an escape route. After reading a number of reviews in which people flat out say that she shows that "capitalism itself isn't the problem, we just need to regulate it", it's painfully clear that her treatment of capitalism was too soft and that the right message isn't getting through to people.

For starters, this is less focused on capitalism and more on the human desire to conquer nature as opposed to learning to live in harmony with nature, which is all well and good, but I felt like she repeated this point way too much. In close to 500 pages of writing, she manages to frequently rephrase the same points while failing to expand on others that are very important. For example, she spends a whopping 2 paragraphs each on the food system and militarism, even though they represent a large portion of overall emissions and are huge climate-linked problems we need to tackle. Her points on these subjects were very compelling and I got really excited when she got to them, only to be disappointed when she quickly moved on to something else.

It would also be nice if she at least touched on the subject of resource depletion. I know that it is considered a separate topic from climate change, but it shouldn't be. Both climate change and resource depletion are the result of a constantly growing, profit-driven economic system that knows no bounds. If the goal of the book is to present evidence that capitalism is incompatible with stopping climate change (I'm beginning to wonder if that really was her goal here), why not put one more giant nail in the coffin? I personally think it's an extremely compelling argument that even in the absence of climate change, capitalism is driving us off an ecological cliff. Anyone who cares about the environment, or the fate of the human race for that matter, should also care that we are putting huge reserves of natural resources at risk of disappearing. There will be no clean energy if we use up all the nonrenewable metals to manufacture ipads and killer drones, or if we wait until oil is even harder and more expensive to extract to build out renewables. That's a very powerful, irrefutable point that she easily could have made.

Furthermore, given the title, I was expecting a more detailed argument against capitalism and more discussion of possible economic alternatives. Klein does an absolutely great job of illustrating how some of the big green organizations betrayed their own goals by getting into bed with the fossil fuel industry. That is perhaps the most important points she makes. In doing so, she hits on a critical point regarding the corrupting nature of profit-driven markets. She does a fantastic job of explaining how the profit motive is failing us. However, she stops short of reaching the conclusion that if the profit motive doesn't produce what's best for society, if it actually produces a lot of things that hurt us, then we need to move away from it. It would have made sense at this point to discuss cooperatively owned and managed businesses, cooperative networks/markets, or participatory democracy/economics. It would have made sense to discuss ANY alternatives to capitalism at this point, but she didn't. I can't tell if this was a choice on her part to be soft on the issue of capitalism for fear of pushing people too hard, or if Klein herself still hasn't overcome her own cognitive dissonance. After all, how else can a person discuss how growth is killing us and how the profit motive only leads to greed without calling for a different system that doesn't center on those things? Taxing polluters and regulating emissions, while an important step in the right direction, is not a solution to these particular problems.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more confused I am by her conclusions. She demonstrates how destructive capitalism is, both environmentally and socially (she even discusses the colonial nature of capitalism), but doesn't seem to go beyond the typical liberal solutions of taxing and regulating. She calls for radical, direct action to demand a transition away from fossil fuels, but not for labor organizing to demand any of the economic changes that she says we need (but doesn't really talk about). I was surprised that in a book that confronts capitalism and calls for a "Green New Deal" there was no discussion at all about the labor organizing and strikes that brought us the first New Deal. I think this was a glaring omission.

Another very important point Klein makes is that decentralized, local clean power networks are a necessary part of the solution that will be fought tooth and nail by profit-seeking utility companies because such systems aren't profitable for them. The type of decentralized system she proposes, with public ownership and oversight, is actually the basis of what a new economy might look like, but again, she stops short of making this connection. She even asserts the need for economic planning (which is what has so many conservatives all riled up), but without getting into more detail on how this might be accomplished in an equitable, truly democratic way, she is likely scaring off a lot of people by giving the impression that we should trust our completely corrupt leaders to make those decisions for us. In general, I feel like all her references to a new economic paradigm are too vague. She could have easily made these connections, between decentralized systems and democratic management, and pointed people toward a real way forward, but instead, she leaves us with one vague notion after another. I didn't expect her to delve deeply into any particular economic solutions (there are already entire books dedicated to the subject), but she should have at least mentioned some. People are getting tired of hearing that we need change without presenting specific ideas of what that might entail. And without specific examples of what it might look like, promoting economic planning sounds an awful lot like central planning, which scares people for good reason.

I get the impression that Klein herself has only begun to realize the systemic problems of capitalism and may have written this book before she was adequately prepared to do so. Even after describing one way after another in which the market fails us, Klein falls right back into the market fallacies by saying things like this: "It's true that the market is great at generating technological innovation..." No, that's not "true" at all. It's a belief. It's not a fact. And I expect someone who does research-based writing to know the difference. While she goes on to talk about how the market also drives a lot of terrible behavior, there is no need to walk on eggshells like this. She needs to stop pretending the market is a tool that can be wielded for good, because all the evidence in the world suggests it's not. Plenty of the evidence she herself presents flies in the face of this completely unsubstantiated, ideological claim. I think she has a long way to go with her own understanding of what capitalism is and the difference between regulating it and changing the rules to create something totally new.

Given that her main audience seems to be liberal environmentalists who aren't open-minded enough or brave enough to really question capitalism, I think this book could serve a useful purpose. Most people are completely brainwashed into believing that capitalism is some law of nature or god that we dare not question and I give her a lot of credit for taking on such a controversial topic. Religious-like beliefs like that are hard to chip away at. People don't drastically change strong, ideological views over night and they need steps along the way. Hopefully, this provides a big step in the right direction for those people. Overall, she makes some really great points, pokes some giant holes in capitalist theory (whether she or her readers realize it or not), and offers a somewhat radical and very hopeful outlook on a subject that usually leaves people feeling utter despair. For that, I think she deserves a lot of credit. But for those who have already overcome those ideological barriers, there's nothing new here. The only exception is her discussion of Blockadia, but even that is just the latest in a long, global history of resistance movements that employ direct action. That part of the book at least left me hopeful. If someone with the reach of Naomi Klein can make an effective call for direct action and disobedience, maybe (hopefully) we will finally reach the critical mass needed to start turning things around. ...more

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Aug 25, 2014 Leo Robertson rated it liked it · review of another edition

Pretty good but very long.

As I mentioned in a status update, if the purpose of this book is to empower and inform people, why make it so bloody big? And depressing? I dreaded opening this thing up again and again- what the hell is she going to tell me next? All the while resisting so I could prep some erudite review, wholeheartedly agreeing with the whole thing and proving myself oh so very clever, courageous persistent for keeping up with her to the very end. Well, I won't! And in s ...more

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Nov 09, 2014 Mary Sue Ireland rated it it was amazing

If you would like to read an unbiased view of environmental impacts such as global warming, fracking, coal mining, oil & gas pipelines, and how all of these are intertwined with politics and capitalism, then this is The Book for you. Come to think of it, if you DON'T want to know about these things, this is definitely Your Book. I read every word and I'm now scared as hell. Environmental solutions have been prevented, but not by what I thought. I figured it was people's general lack of aware If you would like to read an unbiased view of environmental impacts such as global warming, fracking, coal mining, oil & gas pipelines, and how all of these are intertwined with politics and capitalism, then this is The Book for you. Come to think of it, if you DON'T want to know about these things, this is definitely Your Book. I read every word and I'm now scared as hell. Environmental solutions have been prevented, but not by what I thought. I figured it was people's general lack of awareness, or nonchalance, or procrastination, or avoidance. Something like that. But it's nothing like that. Regardless of what the news agencies report, most people worldwide are aware of the environment impact problems and want solutions to them. The solutions have not come (and are not coming) from most governments and definitely not from big business because the politicians and capitalists don't want their profits and sleek way of life interrupted. There is also a prevailing view among the world's wealthy that poor people and people of color are expendable, that our lives do not matter. Reading this book changed my life in some surprising ways. (1) I no longer donate money to environmental groups just because they claim to support the cause. I found out, in fact, that almost all of the environmental groups own stock in the very oil/gas/coal companies that they claim to oppose. One of these groups has even drilled its own oil wells! (2) I no longer believe that recycling, water conservation and changing my light bulbs are solutions to anything. We've been told to do these things to ensure our complacency by making us feel that we are doing our part to help the environment. I continue to recycle, conserve water and turn off the lights, not because these things will solve any problems but because they are the right things to do. These activities alone will make no difference in the overall outcome. The solutions lie in the development of non-extractive sources of renewable power. (3) I joined Idle No More. (4) I moved even further to the left and I didn't think there was any more room over there. (5) I'm writing this review to persuade you to read this exceptionally important book and come to your own conclusions. ...more

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Oct 20, 2014 Joachim Stoop rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Not perfect, but just too important to give less than 5 stars

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Mar 02, 2018 David Schaafsma rated it really liked it

Shelves: environment, cli-fi-class-spr-18, politics, economics

“If you drink water and breath air, climate change is your business"--Klein

“If we are innately greedy, there’s no hope. What if a corrupt ‘human nature’ is not the problem, though. What if the problem is a story, one we have been telling us for 400 years, a story about capitalism and progress?”--Klein

That story, begun centuries ago: “The Earth is a machine, and we are its masters.” Mother Earth is a Mother Lode for Man to Progress With rather than Live With, in Balance. “If you drink water and breath air, climate change is your business"--Klein

“If we are innately greedy, there’s no hope. What if a corrupt ‘human nature’ is not the problem, though. What if the problem is a story, one we have been telling us for 400 years, a story about capitalism and progress?”--Klein

That story, begun centuries ago: “The Earth is a machine, and we are its masters.” Mother Earth is a Mother Lode for Man to Progress With rather than Live With, in Balance.

“Growth is the closest thing we have to a global deity”--Klein

I read this book and saw the documentary by the same name, which you can view for free online. Klein visits the Alberta Tar Sands, the largest industrial project on Earth, a project to extract oil from “flyover” land that is also very much sacred land, the province for centuries of indigenous tribes populating what we now know as Canada. She talks with a range of folks, those bent on extracting the oil and those who feel defiled by the rapacious activity. She investigates native collective action, resistance, and this is moving and inspirational (though at the same time almost, for me, hopeless, as there are so few and they are so poor and so typically powerless—I mean in an conventional institutional sense; they are amazingly powerful spiritually—standing up to the billionaires).

We travel to Montana to talk with people about the pipelines, we travel to South America; everywhere we see rapacious practices, short-term thinking, and local resistance. We travel to talk with the anti-mining solidarity committee of Greece. We go to growth-choked China--now committed to solar, it looks like--and to depressing India, still committed to aggressive coal expansion.

Core problem, and a long known one: An economic system that insists on “progress” and rapacious land use and disregard for ecosystem. A capitalist model of growth that is impossible to sustain. Exploitation, not management, of resources. Growth without Limits, at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

And there’s some local resistance, in pockets, sometimes whole countries. We see everywhere locals crying, shouting, resisting, locals committed to wise land use and management. Renewables, working in harmony with nature, and ecosystem. Spirit of the Sun.

The best thing about this book is that we talk to actual people that move us to act, indigenous activists. Klein is a big picture writer, but when she actually makes people come alive, she is at her most effective. Most people reading this review know all of this stuff by now, I suspect, but if you want a not-completely-hopeless book on the subject of capitalism and the environment, this is a good one.

For instance, Germany is a rapid energy transition, now getting 30% energy from renewables. 400,000 jobs have been created from renewable energy in that country in the past 5 years ago. The German government also enacts policies that are destructive, but—and this is the point--local people fought for alternative energy and against nuclear energy and coal. They run the energy grid themselves, through community-base cooperatives. A German woman says: “We realized; this is the moment.”

“Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. The only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.”--Klein ...more

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Jun 08, 2015 Ebba rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-and-reread-in-2015, non-fiction

This will be a difficult review to write because I have so much to say, yet I don't know what. It will probably make no sense at all but whatever, I'll try.

Going into this, I was a bit afraid. I've never read a non-fiction book outside from school (apart from biographies) before and especially not one that was this big. But it went really well, and even though it took me a really long time to finish it (by my standards), I'm so glad that I read it. This is exactly what the title suggests, a boo This will be a difficult review to write because I have so much to say, yet I don't know what. It will probably make no sense at all but whatever, I'll try.

Going into this, I was a bit afraid. I've never read a non-fiction book outside from school (apart from biographies) before and especially not one that was this big. But it went really well, and even though it took me a really long time to finish it (by my standards), I'm so glad that I read it. This is exactly what the title suggests, a book about the conflict between the climate and capitalism, and why we as a society must come together and form a new economic system that does not depend on exploiting the nature and other human beings. I will say that I already believed the main thesis that Naomi Klein puts out which obviously affected my reading experience. I'm active in the green party in my country, Sweden and I study sustainable devolopment so I knew a lot going into this. But still, there was so many different topics in this book that I haven't thought about before especially when it comes to the economy itself. You know, even though I am an enviromentalist, I always kind of felt stupid in some ways because every time a I discuss certain enviromental problems with people they always respond "yeah, I get it, but what about the economy?" and I never really knew how to answer because I couldn't really see any other realistic economical models. Well to put it the cliché way: this book changed everything.

I am a person that questions everything. I don't see things as black and white or right and wrong. But I started to realize while reading this book: I question every single thing around me except for the economical system that I live in even though I know that it is horrible from my point of view. I wanted a different world but I just couldn't see how that would be possible. Well, it might have been my education and my low age but I was seriously so stupid because let's face it, capitalism as we see it today has only existed since the 80's. Humans have polluted the earth for around 200 years but the current system isn't exactly ancient and that was one of the most important things that this book made me realize. We can and we must change it.

Naomi Klein has a way of putting a bit to much info and not enough discussion in my opinion. I prefered when she discussed a topic on several pages than those were she just "info dumped" statistics. It's necessary to know a lot before forming an opinion and she certainly is convincing but sometimes I found that to be a bit boring. But apart from that this book was wonderful and so important. I think this is the kind of book that everyone should read given that you know some basic information about climate change itself before. If you're kind of unsure if you believe it or not, I would recommend reading or watching (there's some really good and simple documentaires out there to watch) something else first. But if you do know about, read this book no matter of your political believes. I think everyone can gain something even though you don't agree on everything.

The book itself does not really deserve five stars but I do not rate my books on quality, I rate them on feeling and how much they impacted me. My heart is so weak when it comes to both climate change itself but also the amazing and powerful fight that is going on against it. I am 18 years old and I live in Sweden, one of the world's most privilage country when it comes to a future affected by climate change, both geographically, politically and economically. I will obviously be affected but not nearly as much as other people in this world. But I do care, I care so much that it hurts. I don't want to live in a world where people are dying in floods, heats, famines and drought. But I also don't want to see a future where my children won't play in the snow as I did when I was a kid. I think that's why I am so emotional when it comes to the fights against it. I'm not kidding, I was seriously crying throughout the third section of this book which is about the movement against climate change.

This book gave me guilt, fear for the future but also hope and it was exactly what my personal activism needed. It brings up the questions society doesn't allow us to ask and things media doesn't show us. It's so extremely important because climate change will in one way or another affect us all and I we do not act soon, it could kill millions of people and some of the things that we value the most. This book is a part of a new movement, the movement that can actually change everything and hopefully create a better future for all of us. ...more

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Sep 21, 2014 Sara rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: energy

Indianizing

[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].

Sloppy, shallow book, whos Indianizing

[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].

Sloppy, shallow book, whose intellectual shortcomings are topped by the celebrity-style vanity of sharing worldwide an alleged existential crisis (as the Guardian's Owen Jones puts it), brought about by maternity. Having outsourced research to two assistants (see Acknowledgements), the author does not really make an argument, but usefully reviews a number of environmental and anti-environmental movements, leaving it to the readers to wrap up.

Which I'm always happy to do.

What is climate action's greatest risk? As climate deniers aptly and presciently grasped, it is the inevitable shift from a centralized and hierarchical economic model based on fossil fuels to a distributed and flatter one based on renewables, which we can call 'indianized'. This shift will be matched by a more equitable distribution of income and rights. All the interests vested in the current (centralized and hierarchical) model oppose the shift (geoengineers and green billionaires stand out for originality). To accelerate the transition, struggles are required, possibly modeled after indigenous peoples' decade-long campaigns.

Where the book is weakest is in its inability to distinguish between struggle and struggle, both contemporary and historical. The author's analysis of the abolitionist and civil rights movements is inaccurate and simplistic. The haste with which she blesses the divestment movement born on the most exclusive US campuses, worrisome. Clearly, now a mom, the author has decided that class is no longer an issue. Moral sentiments can replace it, and all our problems are just a matter of ethics succumbing to greed.

But capitalism is a class machine, by definition, from the outset. As the author points out, based on the work of promising scholar Andreas Malm, capitalism is a production system whose aim is to constantly gain the upper hand on nature and workers through technology and technocracy for its functioning and development. The author however does not draw any conclusion from this consideration, preferring to contemplate the moving beauty of (classless) 'people' joining forces against greedy corporations (classless too in their capacity as self-directed drones) to protect Naomi Klein's children and grandchildren's planet.

Effective climate action is probably based on taking, unlike Naomi Klein, an a-moral stance towards fossil fuel capitalism, which now can be simply understood as the root cause for dangerous climate change and as such has to be discarded. It is a technically focused, organizational restructuring, to be carried out in cold blood (as David in 2001: A Space Odyssey discards the dangerous HAL 9000 and super-humanly moves on). The resulting indianized economy can be a prosperous one. We need books that think through the indianization of our energy, financial and industrial systems, leaving to climate deniers to deal with the emotions of an elitist loss. ...more

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Nov 18, 2014 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction-read

The book could also be titled "This Changes Nothing," because only .1% of humans alive today have the native intelligence to understand why the issue of anthropogenic global climate disruption is a matter of life and death not only for humans but also for the myriad species who are our fellow travelers on planet Earth. Nevertheless, Naomi Klein sends an important message to those who have ears to hear. Increasing the GDP and facilitating consumerism in the name of saving the economy will cost us ...more

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Jul 05, 2019 Becky rated it it was amazing

Shelves: apocalyptic-types, dystopias, highly-recommended, politicalish, 2019, audiobook, yay-science, bad-shit-and-atrocities, non-fiction, reviewed

Sigh. This was not an easy book to listen to, and it's proving to be rather difficult to review, as well.

I live in a capitalist society, and it benefits me in more ways than I'm aware of, probably. And I am no economist, but I have never really understood the sustainability of the "growth growth growth" model, where ever more market share and profits must be made in order for "success". It seems to me that way back in 3rd grade or so, we learned of a thing called "non-renewable resources", so e ...more

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Oct 08, 2014 Richard C. rated it did not like it

A sickening collection of lies about the science of climate change and non-solutions to the crisis Klein claims. Sept 20-21 WSJ carried an article by Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration, admitting the computer models Klein cites as proof are worthless. There's also no mention of the 18-year lack of any global warming, measured on the ground and by balloons and satellites. At last count, there are more than 50 explanations of the "pause", the "hiatus" reve A sickening collection of lies about the science of climate change and non-solutions to the crisis Klein claims. Sept 20-21 WSJ carried an article by Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science in the Obama administration, admitting the computer models Klein cites as proof are worthless. There's also no mention of the 18-year lack of any global warming, measured on the ground and by balloons and satellites. At last count, there are more than 50 explanations of the "pause", the "hiatus" revealed more than a year ago in the NYT. Klein claims she researched this topic, but doesn't mention the NYT admission of no warming. Klein has no scientific credentials; she doesn't even have any journalistic cred (she almost finished an undergrad journalism degree).

Every crazy claim by the alarmists is in this rambling mess, including the sad story of Nauru - the island whose inhabitants destroyed it for the sake of mining guano. Somehow, in Klein's fevered mind, this is the fault of CO2 emissions?

Klein claims to fear that her young son - to whom the book is dedicated - will never see a moose, never see a starfish, destroyed by climate change. Never a word about the 4 million children who die annually of pulmonary disease, because their mothers cook indoors over open fires of wood and dung. Poverty and early death are worse than the phony climate change crisis Klein is milking.

Klein's greed and hypocrisy make Al Gore look like Mother Teresa. Klein is right about one thing: in a capitalist economy, some people will do anything for a buck. Klein is already married to a millionaire; she has thousands from previous books. She needed this schlock? Like her knowledge of atmospheric science, that's about as deep as her knowledge of economics goes.

Page after page contains the disgusting phrase"climate denier" or "climate denialist", adapted by Gore from "Holocaust Denier." Coming from Klein, it's ironic, to say the least.

Quite remarkable: a book about a "crisis" that doesn't exist and that offers no solution.

BTW, I'm a meteorologist with a specialization in radiative transfer; I understand the "greenhouse effect" quite well. The heating response to CO2 is logarithmic - rises sharply, then levels off to an asymptotic value. We're long past the "knee of the curve." That's why there's no "crisis."Adding additional CO2 has no additional heating effect.And, no, I don't work for the Koch family.

I can't imagine what prompted the high ratings others have awarded to this propaganda - other than ideology.

...more

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Sep 20, 2014 Xavier Shay rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Best book I have read this year. Couldn't put it down. I highlighted 95 passages, many for me to dig into further.

Not only does it savage the existing fossil fuel companies in detail, from pollution to human rights abuse, but also hits futurists and billionaire do-gooders. Which is all pretty standard for a book on climate change, though did cover some new areas for me: abuses of the ETS, under-reported adverse impact of oil spills on young animal populations that are screwing them o ...more

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Oct 27, 2014 Dave rated it liked it

A lot of other reviews I've seen have been accusing Naomi Klein of being a crazy Marxist against western civilization or something, as if that's even a possible combination. My views are much more radical than hers (in my opinion anything resembling a large-scale green socialist system should only be seen as a temporary stage on the way "back" to bioregionalism and the use of democratic technics) so I think those criticisms are completely ridiculous. What she's advocating doesn't even appear to A lot of other reviews I've seen have been accusing Naomi Klein of being a crazy Marxist against western civilization or something, as if that's even a possible combination. My views are much more radical than hers (in my opinion anything resembling a large-scale green socialist system should only be seen as a temporary stage on the way "back" to bioregionalism and the use of democratic technics) so I think those criticisms are completely ridiculous. What she's advocating doesn't even appear to be totally socialist and she's definitely not anti-civ, although she does seem to have a hint of that sentiment. It's kind of a strange analysis actually. From the title I was expecting her to lay out some sort of proposal for a totally new system. The vast majority of the book is just a cathartic denunciation of the fossil fuel industry. Bashing these industries is fine but if environmentalists insist on constantly putting out 500 page books they need to get beyond the clever rewordings of the same things we've already heard a million times. It's nice that progressives are slowly headed in the right direction, challenging economic growth, fighting for a revival of the commons, localized production, redistribution of wealth and land, agroecological food production, etc. But they're stuck on this green city model of sustainability that has no chance of ever being sustainable. Even when acknowledging things like planned obsolescence and how much less production is really necessary to have the same standard of living if things are designed to last they still use the green jobs argument to push their ideas. It should be obvious that cutting working hours and production is the way to go but politically no mainstream group can handle that. Even when acknowledging the basic income idea (free money, potentially enough to survive on, to every adult whether they work or not) progressives still get sucked into the competition with the right-wing about which direction will give us more work to do. It's just inconsistent logic. And one of the things she says over and over is that our inability to solve the climate issue is due to "bad timing", as if this all would have worked out if it happened earlier, when corporations had less power, or later, when corporations had gotten all possible profits from fossil energy and they decided to go green themselves because it was just an economic necessity. Yet she knows that growth imperatives are the problem and she admits that they've been with us even before capitalism. So clearly she knows it's not just a bad coincidence of timing. It just feels like she was afraid of saying anything unpopular with her fan club. After 500 pages I still don't really get what she's promoting besides the typical solar panel and wind turbine run high-tech modern middle-class fantasy world. I don't want to create the impression that this book is terrible. A lot of people will benefit from reading it. It's just disappointing that she's still sticking with such a mainstream vision of the future when she seemed so close to actually getting it. We need more people to be honest about how far from sustainable we really are. ...more

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Dec 07, 2014 Carmen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is, as Louise Erdrich said, right now the only book that matters. It is a rousing call to action and activism, a meticulously researched analysis of the science and politics behind the climate crises, and miraculously hope filled.

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Jun 15, 2019 Lee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: educational, books-to-own, favorites, fav-science, science, fav-educational

This is a book everyone needs to read.
The few people who gave it 1-3 stars need to read the whole thing and look up the science.
It's not bashing anyone other than the ones who refuse to make the necessary changes we all need to make in order for us ALL TO SURVIVE.
It's so important that people understand what is happening in the world, to the world, TO US ALL.
Knowing and understanding is half the battle.
The other half is making the necessary adjustments and not allowing ourselves t ...more

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Sep 18, 2014 Matt Hill rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Someone told me Naomi Klein's new book would make me see climate change in a totally different way. I didn't believe it - but it's true. It's terrifying, thrilling and inspiring - and it's the most important book about politics to be published since... well, since Naomi Klein's last book. http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/Ber...

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Sep 22, 2014 Miles rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Every human struggle needs an image of a better future for supporters to rally around, but it’s never enough to simply know where we want to end up. The accomplishment of profound societal change, if sought peacefully, also demands a set of linguistic and psychological frames revolutionaries can use to inform, impassion, and ultimately persuade people to join the cause of converting aspirations into economic and political realities. Additionally, successful movements require hard data and concre ...more

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This is a very controversial book but what do others think?	2	56	Jun 21, 2018 01:22AM
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About Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein

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Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. She is a senior correspondent for The Intercept and her writing appears widely in such publications as The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and The Nation, where she is a contributing editor. Klein iand Theas The

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“our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.” — 47 likes

“So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” — 38 likes

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