This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

The U.S. government was so enthusiastic about this approach that it made the inclusion of carbon trading a deal breaker in the Kyoto negotiations. This led to what France’s former environment minister Dominique Voynet described as “radically antagonistic” conflicts between the United States and Europe, which saw the creation of a global carbon market as tantamount to abandoning the climate crisis to “the law of the jungle.” Angela Merkel, then Germany’s environment minister, insisted, “The aim cannot be for industrialized countries to satisfy their obligations solely through emissions trading and profit.”60 It is one of the great ironies of environmental history that the United States—after winning this pitched battle at the negotiating table—would fail to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and that the most important emissions market would become a reality in Europe, where it was opposed from the outset.