This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false.

In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive—water—just to keep extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.

In truth, we never lost our connections with nature—they were always there, in our bodies and under our paved lives. A great many of us just forgot about them for a while.

And it’s an expression of the understanding that from here on, when we take, we must not only give back, but we must also take care.

Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism.