This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it. Al Gore called climate change “an inconvenient truth,” which he defined as an inescapable fact that we would prefer to ignore. Yet the truth about climate change is inconvenient only if we are satisfied with the status quo except for the small matter of warming temperatures. If, however, we see the need for transformation quite apart from those warming temperatures, then the fact that our current road is headed toward a cliff is, in an odd way, convenient—because it tells us that we had better start making that sweeping turn, and fast.