This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

That means that an oil company looking to reassure shareholders that it has a plan for what to do, say, when the oil in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay runs out, will be forced to go into higher-risk, dirtier territories. It is telling, for instance, that more than half of the reserves Exxon added in 2011 come from a single oil project: the massive Kearl mine being developed in the Alberta tar sands.56 This imperative also means that, so long as this business model is in place, no coastline or aquifer will be safe. Every victory against the fossil fuel companies, no matter how hard won, will be temporary, just waiting to be overtaken with howls of “Drill, Baby, Drill.” It won’t be enough even when we can walk across the Gulf of Mexico on the oil rigs, or when Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a parking lot for coal tankers, or when Greenland’s melting ice sheet is stained black from a spill we have no idea how to clean up. Because these companies will always need more reserves to top up their replacement ratios, year after year after year. From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.