This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate in Climate Change, Environment and Ecology

Nov 23, 2015 Brian Burt rated it really liked it

After finishing this book, I wasn't sure whether to feel inspired or utterly depressed... but it continues to stimulate much thought, and it left no doubt that this is a very important book for anyone concerned about the future of our species and our planet. Ms. Klein makes a compelling case that we are rapidly running out of time to avert an ecological disaster, that there are no easy, painless solutions that preserve our economic status quo. We may be at a crossroads where we're forced to choo ...more

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Apr 07, 2016 Michael Clevenger rated it really liked it

“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. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.”
-Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 2 “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. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.”
-Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 22

“We are all inclined to denial, when the truth is too costly. Whether emotionally, intellectually or financially. As Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to under something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” p. 46

"The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work changing human behavior.“ And worst of all, it tells us that, "should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go."
We know this escape story all too well, from Noah’s Ark to the Rapture. What we need are stories that tell us something very different: that this planet is our only home, and that what goes around comes around (and what goes up, stays up for a very long time, so we’d better be careful what we put there).
Indeed, if geoengineering has anything going for it, it is that it slots perfectly into our hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It’s the one that tells us that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved. And since our secular religion is technology, it won’t be god that saves us but Bill Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures.”
p. 289

"Historically marginalized people in the Global South, as well as communities of color in the Global North, are still at far greater risk of living downstream from a mine, next door to a refinery, or next to a pipeline, just as they are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. But in the era of extreme energy, there is no longer the illusion of discreet sacrifice zones anymore. As Deeohn Ferris, formerly with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, aptly put it, “we’re all in the same sinking boat, only people of color are closest to the hole." p. 314

“..this need to adapt to nature is what dries some people mad about renewables: even at a very large scale, they require a humility that is the antithesis of damming a river, blasting bedrock for gas, or harnessing the power of the atom. They demand that we adopt ourselves to the rhythms of natural systems, as opposed to bending those systems to our will with brute force engineering. Put another way, if extractive energy sources are NFL football players, bashing away at the earth, then renewables are surfers, riding the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way.” p. 394

“And it’s true: renewables, at least the way Henry Red Cloud sees them, require us to unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature—the “God Species”—and embrace the fact that we are in relationship with the rest of the natural world. But ours is a new level of relationship, one based on an understanding of nature that far surpasses anything our pre-fossil fuel ancestors could have imagined. We know enough to know how much we will never know, yet enough to find ingenious ways to amplify the systems provided by nature in what feminist historian Carolyn Merchant has described as a “partnership ethic.” p. 395

“As we have seen, emissions in North America and Europe still need to come down dramatically but, thanks largely to the offshoring of production enabled by the free-trade era, they have pretty much stopped growing. It’s the fast-rising economies of the Global South—with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa leading the pack—that are mostly responsible for the surge in emissions in recent years, which is why we are racing toward tipping points far more quickly than anticipated…The trouble is, the atmosphere can’t take it. As the atmospheric physicist and mitigation expert Alice Bows-Larkin put it in an interview, “The number of people that went through industrialization the first time around is like a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people going through industrialization this time.” And to quote President Obama in late 2013, if China’s and India’s energy consumption imitates U.S. model, “we’ll be four feet under water.” p. 412

“The truth is—and this is a humbling thing for cultures accustomed to assuming that our actions shape the destiny of the world to accept—the real battle will not be lost or won by us. It will be won or lost by those movements in the Global South that are fighting their own Blockadia-style struggles—demanding their own clean energy revolutions, their own green jobs, their own pools of carbon left in the ground. And they are up against powerful forces within their own countries that insist that it is their “turn” to pollute their way to prosperity and that nothing matters more than economic growth. Indeed, citing the rank unfairness of developing countries to bear the bulk of the burden for humanity avoiding climate catastrophe has become an enormously effective excuse for governments of the Global South to shirk their own responsibilities.” p. 412

“There is, however, much that can be done in the industrialized north to help tip the balance of forces toward a model of development that does not rely on endless growth and dirty fuels. Fighting the pipelines and export terminals that would send fossil fuels to Asia is one piece of the puzzle. So is battling new free-trade deals, reining in our own overconsumption and sensibly relocalizing our economies, since plenty of the carbon China is burning is going toward making useless stuff for us.
But the most important lever for change in the Global South is the same as in the Global North: the emergence of positive, practical, and concrete alternatives to dirty development that do not ask people to choose between higher living standards and toxic extraction. Because if dirty coal is the only way to turn on the lights in India, then that is how those lights will be turned on. ...more

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Oct 21, 2015 Wendy MacClinchy rated it it was amazing

The most important book I have read in a very long time. Shatters myths and exposes propaganda around not just climate change, but the entire economic model that created it. Deeply insightful and loaded with well edited set of references for further reading. An enormous evidence base with sound analysis and profound implications for our love affair with capitalism and righting inequality in our time.

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Apr 01, 2017 Morten Greve rated it really liked it

Shelves: critique

This is a difficult book to review (and rate).

On the one hand, I fully agree with Klein's argument that the only way to address the looming climate disaster involves systemic change. We need to transition away from an extractive model of society primarily serving the interests of a global oligarchy (under a veil of "free" market ideology) towards a regenerative, genuinely participatory model of society.

Just to provide a few examples, the book contains excellent chapters detailing the deeply corr ...more

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