This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

What we now know is that Keystone was always about much more than a pipeline. It was a new fighting spirit, and one that is contagious. One battle doesn’t rob from another but rather causes battles to multiply, with each act of courage, and each victory, inspiring others to strengthen their resolve.

Not only had officials repeatedly accepted gifts from oil industry employees but, according to a report by the department’s inspector general, several officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” For a public that had long suspected that their public servants were in bed with the oil and gas lobby, this was pretty graphic proof.

Hard realities like these have posed a challenge to the highly paid spin doctors employed by the extractive industries, the ones who had grown accustomed to being able to gloss over pretty much any controversy with sleek advertising showing blond children running through fields and multiracial actors in lab coats expressing concern about the environment. These days that doesn’t cut it. No matter how many millions are spent on advertising campaigns touting the modernity of the tar sands or the cleanliness of natural gas, it’s clear that a great many people are no longer being persuaded.

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.

The Sierra Club’s hugely successful “Beyond Coal” campaign has, along with dozens of local partner organizations, succeeded in retiring 170 coal plants in the United States and prevented over 180 proposed plants since 2002.

“It’s not a fun time to be in the coal industry these days,” said Nick Carter, president and chief operating officer of the U.S. coal company Natural Resource Partners. “It’s not much fun to get up every day, go to work and spend your time fighting your own government.”

lol

But no matter how rich you are, there is no way to hide from the “blanket” of toxic air. “Nobody can do anything for special [air] delivery,” he says. “And that’s the beauty of it.”

the World Health Organization sets the guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known as PM2.5) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit 671.

Critics have been quick to point out that divestment won’t bankrupt Exxon; if Harvard, with its nearly $33 billion endowment, sells its stock, someone else will snap it up. But this misses the power of the strategy: every time students, professors, and faith leaders make the case for divestment, they are chipping away at the social license with which these companies operate.

And Cameron Fenton, one of the leaders of the divestment push in Canada, adds, “No one is thinking we’re going to bankrupt fossil fuel companies. But what we can do is bankrupt their reputations and take away their political power.”

But any parallel, peaceful coexistence is plainly impossible if one party is irrevocably altering and poisoning that shared land.

This is the way the oil and gas industry holds on to power: by tossing temporary life rafts to the people it is drowning.

Just as having been raped does not bestow the right to rape, or having been robbed the right to steal, having been denied the opportunity to choke the atmosphere with pollution in the past does not grant anyone the right to choke it today.

As biologist Sandra Steingraber has observed, “Entire regulatory systems are premised on the assumption that all members of the population basically act, biologically, like middle-aged men. . . . Until 1990, for example, the reference dose for radiation exposure was based on a hypothetical 5'7” tall white man who weighed 157 pounds.”

so stupid

Mossville is a textbook case of environmental racism: founded by freed slaves, it was once a safe haven for its residents, who enjoyed comfortable lives thanks in part to the rich hunting and fishing grounds in the surrounding wetlands. But beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, state politicians aggressively courted petrochemical and other industries with lavish tax breaks, and one giant plant after another set up shop on Mossville’s doorstep, some just a few hundred feet from the clapboard homes.

But that is decidedly not the case when baby dolphins start dying en masse, which is what happened in early 2011. In the month of February alone, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service reported that thirty-five dead baby dolphins had been collected on Gulf Coast beaches and in marshes—an eighteen-fold increase from the usual number (only two dead baby dolphins are found in a typical February).

oh god… im getting tears in my eyes. poor babies

In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines.

Once this pattern is recognized, it seems obvious: of course the very young are much more vulnerable than adults; of course even the most subtle environmental changes will hurt them more; and of course fertility is one of the first functions to erode when animals are under stress. And yet what struck me most in this research was the frequency with which all this came as a surprise, even to the experts in the field.

This is a far more expansive vision than the familiar eco-critique that stressed smallness and shrinking humanity’s impact or “footprint.” That is simply not an option today, not without genocidal implications: we are here, we are many, and we must use our skills to act.

The fact that our most heroic social justice movements won on the legal front but suffered big losses on the economic front is precisely why our world is as fundamentally unequal and unfair as it remains. Those losses have left a legacy of continued discrimination, double standards, and entrenched poverty—poverty that deepens with each new crisis.

What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to act is not because we are too selfish to care about an abstract or seemingly far-off problem—but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care?