This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

The promise of liberation from nature that Watt was selling in those early days continues to be the great power of fossil fuels. That power is what allows today’s multinationals to scour the globe for the cheapest, most exploitable workforce, with natural features and events that once appeared as obstacles—vast oceans, treacherous landscapes, seasonal fluctuations—no longer even registering as minor annoyances. Or so it seemed for a time.

But what we have learned from atmospheric science is that the give-and-take, call-and-response that is the essence of all relationships in nature was not eliminated with fossil fuels, it was merely delayed, all the while gaining force and velocity. Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all.

Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels “capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings”; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms. It’s not that these substances are evil; it’s just that they belong where they are: in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions. Coal, when left alone, helpfully sequesters not just the carbon long ago pulled out of the air by plants, but all kinds of other toxins. It acts, as world-renowned Australian climate scientist Tim Flannery puts it, like “a natural sponge that absorbs many substances dissolved in groundwater, from uranium to cadmium and mercury.”

When coal is dug up and burned, however, those toxins are released in the ecosystem, eventually making their way into the oceans, where they are absorbed by krill and plankton, then by fish, and then by us. The released carbon, meanwhile, enters the atmosphere, causing global warming (not to mention coal’s contribution to the smog and particulate pollution that have plagued urban society since the Industrial Revolution, afflicting untold numbers of people with respiratory, heart, and other diseases).

rather than a society of grave robbers, we need to become a society of life amplifiers, deriving our energy directly from the elements that sustain life. It’s time to let the dead rest.

Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written in coal.

And there have been voices in all of these movements, moreover, that identified the parallels between the economic model’s abuse of the natural world and its abuse of human beings deemed worthy of being sacrificed, or at least uncounted.

Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for how to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.

But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge to large parts of the left as well as the right. It’s a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve. And it’s a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from rampant resource extraction.

It’s a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin’s project an abomination of core social justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly.

And why wouldn’t they be? Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion—whether through production for production’s sake, in the case of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption’s sake, in the case of consumer capitalism.

Yes, the wealth is better distributed, particularly among the urban poor, but outside the cities, the ways of life of Indigenous peoples and peasants are still being endangered without their consent, and they are still being made landless by ecosystem destruction.

When conservationism emerged as a powerful force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was primarily about men of privilege who enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking and who recognized that many of their favorite wilderness spots were under threat from the rapid expansion of industrialization. For the most part, these men did not call into question the frenetic economic project that was devouring natural landscapes all over the continent—they simply wanted to make sure that some particularly spectacular pockets were set aside for their recreation and aesthetic appreciation.

sounds like my dad

There were those in the movement, however, who saw in the threats to their country’s most beautiful places signs of a deeper cultural crisis. For instance, John Muir, the great naturalist writer who helped found the Sierra Club in 1892, excoriated the industrialists who dammed wild rivers and drowned beautiful valleys. To him they were heathens—“devotees of ravaging commercialism” who “instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”

In the mid-1800s, Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.”

beautifully put

But this persistent unwillingness to follow science to its conclusions also speaks to the power of the cultural narrative that tells us that humans are ultimately in control of the earth, and not the other way around. This is the same narrative that assures us that, however bad things get, we are going to be saved at the last minute—whether by the market, by philanthropic billionaires, or by technological wizards—or best of all, by all three at the same time. And while we wait, we keep digging in deeper. Only when we dispense with these various forms of magical thinking will we be ready to leave extractivism behind and build the societies we need within the boundaries we have—a world with no sacrifice zones, no new Naurus.

For traditional conservationists, it was a little like finding out that Amnesty International had opened its own prison wing at Guantánamo.

According to The Washington Post report, by 2003 there were just sixteen Attwater’s prairie chickens that The Nature Conservancy knew about on the preserve, down from thirty-six before the drilling began.

The hypocrisy is staggering: these organizations raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is preserving wildlife and attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet some have turned around and invested that money with companies that have made it abundantly clear, through their reserves, that they intend to extract several times more carbon than the atmosphere can absorb with any degree of safety.

In North America and Europe, it’s virtually impossible to do public interest work of any scale—in academia or journalism or activism—without taking money of questionable origin, whether the origin is the state, corporations, or private philanthropy.

And since it is generally accepted that fossil fuel money and conservative foundations have shaped the climate change denial movement, it seems fair to ask whether fossil fuel money and the values of centrist foundations have shaped parts of the movement that are in the business of proposing solutions.

This was a time when intervening directly in the market to prevent harm was still regarded as a sensible policy option. Confronted with unassailable evidence of a grave collective problem, politicians across the political spectrum still asked themselves: “What can we do to stop it?” (Not: “How can we develop complex financial mechanisms to help the market fix it for us?”)

Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.”

The EDF claims that it “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.” Which, judging by Walmart’s rather dismal environmental record since this partnership began—from its central role in fueling urban sprawl to its steadily increasing emissions—is not a very high standard at all.

Indeed a growing number of communications specialists now argue that because the “solutions” to climate change proposed by many green groups in this period were so borderline frivolous, many people concluded that the groups must have been exaggerating the scale of the problem. After all, if climate change really was as dire as Al Gore argued it was in An Inconvenient Truth, wouldn’t the environmental movement be asking the public to do more than switch brands of cleaning liquid, occasionally walk to work, and send money? Wouldn’t they be trying to shut down the fossil fuel companies?

Meanwhile, projects that were employing practices that claimed to be keeping carbon out of the atmosphere—whether by planting trees that sequester carbon, or by producing low carbon energy, or by upgrading a dirty factory to lower its emissions—could qualify for carbon credits. These credits could be purchased by polluters and used to offset their own emissions.

The scheme is so lucrative, in fact, that it has triggered a series of perverse incentives: in some cases, companies can earn twice as much by destroying an unintentional by-product as they can from making their primary product, which is itself emissions intensive. In the most egregious instance of this, selling carbon credits constituted a jaw-dropping 93.4 percent of one Indian firm’s total revenues in 2012.

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of “green” human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse.

When the Big Green groups refer to offsets as the “low-hanging fruit” of climate action, they are in fact making a crude cost-benefit analysis that concludes that it’s easier to cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries—that it’s easier to pick the fruit, in other words, than dig up the roots.

The problem is that by adopting this model of financing, even the very best green projects are being made ineffective as climate responses because for every ton of carbon dioxide the developers keep out of the atmosphere, a corporation in the industrialized world is able to pump a ton into the air, using offsets to claim the pollution has been neutralized.

But if climate change poses risks on par with nuclear war, then why are we not responding with the seriousness that that comparison implies? Why aren’t we ordering companies to stop putting our future at risk, instead of bribing and cajoling them? Why are we gambling?

Flush with oil money from the Koch brothers and pumped up by Fox News, the Tea Party stormed town-hall meetings across the country, shouting about how Obama’s health- care reform was part of a sinister plan to turn the United States into an Islamic/Nazi/socialist utopia. In short order, the president started sending signals that he was reluctant to pick another major legislative fight.

They chose a stunningly convoluted approach to tackling climate change, one that would have blocked far more effective strategies, specifically because it was more appealing to big emitters—only to discover that the most appealing climate policy to polluters remained none at all.

In other words, compromise some more, tone it down even further, assert ideas with less confidence, and try to be even more palatable to their opponents. Never mind that that is precisely what groups like EDF have been doing since Reagan.

Given these various explanations for falling short, it is worth taking a look at some of the things for which Richard Branson and Virgin did manage to find money in this key period. Like, for instance, a massive global push to put more carbon-spewing planes in the skies adorned with stylized “V”s on their tails.

Not only is leisure space travel a pointless waste of (planet-warming) energy, it is also yet another money pit: according to Fortune, by early 2013 Branson had spent “more than $200 million” on the vanity project, with much more in the works. That would be more than he appears to have spent on the search for a green fuel to power his planes.

Because in Calgary, the Virgin Earth Challenge was “reeingineered,” to use Knight’s word. While previously the goal had been to find technology capable of removing large amounts of carbon and safely storing it, Knight started referring to the prize as “an initiative to develop technology to recycle CO2 direct from the air into commercially viable products.”

We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results: at the celebrities and media conglomerates that were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were supposed to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus, succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not require any change from us; it just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more so.

The ancients called this hubris; the great American philosopher, farmer and poet Wendell Berry calls it “arrogant ignorance,” adding, “We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”

Boosters of Solar Radiation Management tend to speak obliquely about the “distributional consequences” of injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, and of the “spatial heterogeneity” of the impacts. Petra Tschakert, a geographer at Penn State University, calls this jargon “a beautiful way of saying that some countries are going to get screwed.”

sulfur dioxide injections “would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people.” Those monsoons provide precious freshwater to an enormous share of the world’s population. India alone receives between 70 and 90 percent of its total annual rainfall during its June through September monsoon season.

Ironically, the most reproduced of the earth-from-space photos was likely taken by Harrison Schmitt, a card-carrying climate change denier, former U.S. senator and a regular speaker at Heartland conferences. He was rather blasé about the experience: “You seen one Earth, you’ve seen them all,” he reportedly said.

In the towns of “Kaiama, Mbiama, and Yenagoa people were killed in the streets and women and young girls were raped in their homes as the state unleashed mayhem, ostensibly to defend oil installations.”

jesus fucking christ…

And why, by 2006, the area was in the throes of a full-blown armed insurgency, complete with bombings of oil infrastructure and government targets, rampant pipeline vandalism, ransom kidnapping of oil workers (designated as “enemy combatants” by the militants), and, more recently, amnesty deals that offered cash for guns.

Thanks to a combination of high commodity prices, new technologies, and depleted conventional reserves, the industry is going further on every front. It is extracting more, pushing into more territory, and relying on more risky methods. Each of these factors is fueling the backlash, so it’s worth looking at each in turn.

Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.

Through various feats of denialism and racism, it was possible for privileged people in North America and Europe to mentally cordon off these unlucky places as hinterlands, wastelands, nowheres—or unluckiest of all, as in the case of Nauru, middle of nowheres. For those fortunate enough to find ourselves outside those condemned borders, myself among them, it seemed as if our places—the ones where we live and to which we escape for pleasure (the assumed somewheres, the centers, or best of all, the centers of everywhere)—would not be sacrificed to keep the fossil fuel machine going.

And fracking opponents could only laugh when, in February 2014, it emerged that none other than Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson had quietly joined a lawsuit opposing fracking-related activities near his $5 million Texas home, claiming it would lower property values.

sociopath

In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphlet Common Sense, “It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.”48 Well, the distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide.