This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Unlike the energy it replaced, power from fossil fuel always required sacrifice zones—whether in the black lungs of the coal miners or the poisoned waterways surrounding the mines. But these prices were seen as worth paying in exchange for coal’s intoxicating promise of freedom from the physical world—a freedom that unleashed industrial capitalism’s full force to dominate both workers and other cultures. With their portable energy creator, the industrialists and colonists of the 1800s could now go wherever labor was cheapest and most exploitable, and wherever resources were most plentiful and valuable. As the author of a steam engine manual wrote in the mid-1830s, “Its mighty services are always at our command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night—it knows of no intermission but what our wishes dictate.”29 Coal represented, in short, total domination, of both nature and other people, the full realization of Bacon’s dream at last. “Nature can be conquered,” Watt reportedly said, “if we can but find her weak side.”30