This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

This decentralized ownership model has the added benefit of pushing against the trend toward utterly unsustainable wealth inequality; rather than simply propping up the current global system in which eighty-five people control as much wealth as half the world’s population, the ability to create wealth is gradually dispersed to the workers themselves, and the communities sustained by the presence of well-paying jobs.5 If that kind of coherent and sweeping vision had emerged in the United States in that moment of flux as the Obama presidency began, right-wing attempts to paint climate action as an economy killer would have fallen flat. It would have been clear to all that climate action is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed. But all of this would have required a government that was unafraid of bold long-term economic planning, as well as social movements that were able to move masses of people to demand the realization of that kind of vision. (The mainstream climate organizations in the U.S., in this crucial period, were instead narrowly focused on a failed attempt to get a piece of carbon-trading energy legislation through Congress, not on helping to build a broad movement.)