This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

According to Amy Bach, cofounder of the San Francisco–based advocacy group United Policyholders, disaster insurance is becoming “very much like health insurance. We’re going to have to increasingly take the profit motive out of the system so that it operates efficiently and effectively, but without generating obscene executive salaries and bonuses and shareholder returns. Because it’s not going to be a sustainable model. A publicly traded insurance company in the face of climate change is not a sustainable business model for the end user, the consumer.”38 It’s that or a disaster capitalism free-for-all; those are the choices. These types of improvements are of course in far greater demand in developing countries like the Philippines, Kenya, and Bangladesh that are already facing some of the most severe climate impacts. Hundreds of billions of dollars are urgently needed to build seawalls; storage and distribution networks for food, water, and medicine; early warning systems and shelters for hurricanes, cyclones, and tsunamis—as well as public health systems able to cope with increases in climate-related diseases like malaria.39 Though mechanisms to protect against government corruption are needed, these countries should not have to spend their health care and education budgets on costly disaster insurance plans purchased from transnational corporations, as is happening right now. Their people should be receiving direct compensation from the countries (and companies) most r...