This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

But as longtime sustainability expert Ed Ayres wrote in God’s Last Offer, the “if we can put a man on the moon” boosterism “glosses over the reality that building rockets and building livable communities are two fundamentally different endeavors: the former required uncanny narrow focus; the latter must engage a holistic view. Building a livable world isn’t rocket science; it’s far more complex than that.”

Admittedly, such responses break all the free market rules. Then again, so did bailing out the banks and the auto companies. And they are still not close to as radical as breaking the primordial link between temperature and atmospheric carbon—all to meet our desire for planetary air-conditioning.

About eight hundred kilometers to the north of the Greek standoff, the farming village of Pungesti, Romania, was gearing up for a showdown against Chevron and its plans to launch the country’s first shale gas exploration well.9 In the fall of 2013, farmers built a protest camp in a field, carted in supplies that could hold them for weeks, dug a latrine, and vowed to prevent Chevron from drilling. As in Greece, the response from the state was shockingly militarized, especially in such a pastoral environment. An army of riot police with shields and batons charged through the farm fields attacking peaceful demonstrators, several of whom were beaten bloody and taken away in ambulances.

Over the course of extracting oil, a large amount of natural gas is also produced. If the infrastructure for capturing, transporting, and using that gas were built in Nigeria, it could meet the electricity needs of the entire country. Yet in the Delta, the multinational companies mostly opt to save money by setting it on fire, or flaring it, which sends the gas into the atmosphere in great pillars of polluting fire. The practice is responsible for about 40 percent of Nigeria’s total CO2 emissions (which is why, as discussed, some companies are absurdly trying to collect carbon credits for stopping this practice).

Fracking now covers so much territory that, according to a 2013 Wall Street Journal investigation, “more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a well that has been drilled and fracked since 2000.”

But the reason there was no evidence was because the industry had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation—the so-called Halliburton Loophole, ushered in under the administration of George W. Bush. The loophole exempted most fracking from regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, helping to ensure that companies did not have to report any of the chemicals they were injecting underground to the Environmental Protection Agency, while shielding their use of the riskiest chemicals from EPA oversight.

If it seems like there are more such spills and accidents than before, that’s because there are. According to a months-long investigation by EnergyWire, in 2012 there were more than six thousand spills and “other mishaps” at onshore oil and gas sites in the U.S. “That’s an average of more than 16 spills a day. And it’s a significant increase since 2010. In the 12 states where comparable data were available, spills were up about 17 percent.” There is also evidence that companies are doing a poorer job of cleaning up their messes: in an investigation of pipeline leaks of hazardous liquids (mostly petroleum-related), The New York Times found that in 2005 and 2006 pipeline operators reported “recovering more than 60 percent of liquids spilled”; between 2007 and 2010 “operators recovered less than a third.”

According to a 2012 study, modern fracking “events” (as they are called) use an average of five million gallons of water—“70 to 300 times the amount of fluid used in traditional fracking.” Once used, much of this water is radioactive and toxic. In 2012, the industry created 280 billion gallons of such wastewater in the U.S. alone—“enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon,” as The Guardian noted.

Developed countries, which represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas pollution that is now destabilizing the climate. (The United States alone, which comprises less than 5 percent of the global population, now contributes about 14 percent of all carbon emissions.)