This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, observes that having large parts of the green movement so dependent on the scions of a company that almost singlehandedly supersized the retail sector and exported the model around the world has had profound political implications. “Walmart’s money is exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems, and elevating certain kinds of approaches—notably those that reinforce, rather than challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society,” she writes.42 And this is the heart of the issue—not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be “win-win.” And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.