This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Are we masters, here to subdue and dominate, or are we one species among many, at the mercy of powers more complex and unpredictable than even our most powerful computers can model? As Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, puts it, climate science is for many conservatives “an affront to their deepest and most cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of ‘mankind’ to subdue the Earth and all its fruits and to establish a ‘mastery’ over Nature.” For these conservatives, he notes, “such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable and deeply offensive. Those preaching this doctrine have to be resisted and indeed denounced.”

Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them.

how can you win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the planet depends on intervening?

But most people don’t actually like it when their children’s lives are “discounted” in someone else’s Excel sheet, and they tend to have a moral aversion to the idea of allowing countries to disappear because saving them would be too expensive.

when it comes to the political and economic consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our liberalized and profit-seeking economy, they have their eyes wide open. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, it’s not a communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes to the scope and depth of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.

The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews—they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous—a shadowy individual who has given more than $8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.32

A February 2013 report in The Guardian revealed that between 2002 and 2010, a network of anonymous U.S. billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to “groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change . . . the ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama’s environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.”34

The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”36

Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much discussed paper on this topic by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap (memorably titled “Cool Dudes”) found that as a group, conservative white men who expressed strong confidence in their understanding of global warming were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” as the rest of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this discrepancy: “Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”37 But deniers’ relative economic and social privilege doesn’t just give them more to lose from deep social and economic change; it gives them reason to be more sanguine about the risks of climate change should their contrarian views turn out to be false.

What makes this callousness among deniers possible is their firm belief that if they’re wrong about climate science, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry much about.I (“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,”

free trade is hardly going to help islanders whose countries are disappearing, just as he is doubtlessly aware that most people on the planet who are hit hardest by heat and drought can’t solve their problems by putting a new AC system on their credit cards. And this is where the intersection between extreme ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to rationalize profiting from the meltdown. Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind-set—which the cultural theorists describe as “hierarchical” and “individualistic”—is a matter of great urgency because climate change will test our moral character like little before.

The corporate quest for natural resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be seized to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations, unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on top of the most plundered places on earth (as journalist Christian Parenti documents so well in Tropic of Chaos). When heat stress and vicious storms wipe out small farms and fishing villages, the land will be handed over to large developers for mega-ports, luxury resorts, and industrial farms. Once self-sufficient rural residents will lose their lands and be urged to move into increasingly crowded urban slums—for their own protection, they will be told. Drought and famine will continue to be used as pretexts to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt.42 In the wealthier nations, we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor and Indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas. We may well do the same on the planetary scale, deploying techno-fixes to lower global temperatures that will pose far greater risks to those living in the tropics than in the Global North (more on this later). And rather than recognizing that we owe a debt to migrants forced to flee their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigratio...

Tropic of chaos by Christian Parenti

In June 2014, the Risky Business project, led by billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson and hedge fund founder and environmental philanthropist Tom Steyer, warned that climate change would cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year as a result of rising sea levels alone, and that the corporate world must take such climate costs seriously.

Washington insider Eli Lehrer. What made Lehrer different from his Heartland colleagues, however, is that he is willing to state matter-of-factly, “Climate change is obviously real and obviously caused to a significant extent by people. I don’t really think there’s room for serious debate on either of those points.”45 So even as his Heartland colleagues were organizing global conferences designed specifically to manufacture the illusion of a serious scientific debate, Lehrer’s division was working with the insurance lobby to protect their bottom lines in a future of climate chaos. According to Lehrer, “In general there was no enormous conflict, day-to-day” between his work and that of his climate-change-denying colleagues.46 That’s because what many of the insurance companies wanted from Heartland’s advocacy was not action to prevent climate chaos but rather policies that would safeguard or even increase their profits no matter the weather. That means pushing government out of the subsidized insurance business, giving companies greater freedom to raise rates and deductibles and to drop customers in high-risk areas, as well as other “free market” measures.

The “freedom” agenda that they are desperately trying to protect from scientific evidence is one of the reasons that societies will be distinctly less prepared for disasters when they come. For a long time, environmentalists spoke of climate change as a great equalizer, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. It was supposed to bring us together. Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us further into a society of haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, at least for now, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states.

August 2011, with large parts of the world still suffering under record high temperatures, the conservative blogger Jim Geraghty published a piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that climate change “will help the U.S. economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States’ geopolitical power.” He explained that since climate change will be hardest on developing countries, “many potentially threatening states will find themselves in much more dire circumstances.” And this, he stressed, was a good thing: “Rather than our doom, climate change could be the centerpiece of ensuring a second consecutive American Century.” Got that? Since people who scare Americans are unlucky enough to live in poor, hot places, climate change will cook them, leaving the United States to rise like a phoenix from the flames of global warming.II, 50 Expect more of this monstrousness. As the world warms, the ideology so threatened by climate science—the one that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature—will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority, barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging comeback.III, 51 In the grossly unequal world this ideology has done so much to intensify and lock in, these theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the Glob...

Already, climate change is changing us, coarsening us. Each massive disaster seems to inspire less horror, fewer telethons. Media commentators speak of “compassion fatigue,” as if empathy, and not fossil fuels, was the finite resource.

The popular climate blogger Joe Romm, for instance, writes that “if you hate government intrusion into people’s lives, you’d better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and deprivation. . . . Only Big Government—which conservatives say they don’t want—can relocate millions of citizens, build massive levees, ration crucial resources like water and arable land, mandate harsh and rapid reductions in certain kinds of energy—all of which will be inevitable if we don’t act now.”55

The conference, which set the groundwork for the Rio Earth Summit, was a breakthrough, recommending that governments cut emissions by 20 percent below 1988 levels by 2005. “If we choose to take on this challenge,” remarked one scientist in attendance, “it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due.”56 If we had heeded this advice and got serious about meeting that goal immediately after the 1992 signing of the U.N. climate convention in Rio, the world would have needed to reduce its carbon emissions by about 2 percent per year until 2005.57 At that rate, wealthy countries could have much more comfortably started rolling out the technologies to replace fossil fuels, cutting carbon at home while helping to launch an ambitious green transition throughout the world.

Yale’s Dan Kahan points out that while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that do not challenge their belief that humans can dominate nature. In one of his studies, Kahan and his colleagues polled subjects on their views about climate change after showing some of them fake news stories. Some of the subjects were given a story about how global warming could be solved through “anti-pollution” measures. Others were given a story that held up nuclear power as the solution. Some were shown no story at all. The scientific facts about global warming were identical in all news stories. The researchers discovered that hard-core conservatives who received the nuclear solution story were more open to the scientific facts proving that humans are changing the climate. However, those who received the story about fighting pollution “were even more skeptical about these facts than were hierarchs and individualists in a control group that received no newspaper story.”59 It’s not hard to figure out why. Nuclear is a heavy industrial technology, based on extraction, run in a corporatist manner, with long ties to the military-industrial complex. And as renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton has noted, no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the atom.60

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t work: this has been the core messaging for many large U.S. green groups for five years (“Forget about climate change,” counsels Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. “Do you love America?”63) And as we have seen, conservative opposition to climate action has only hardened in this period. The far more troubling problem with this approach is that rather than challenging the warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster capitalism, it actively reinforces those values. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess. Just as we spewed greenhouse gases into the atmosphere thinking that tomorrow would never come, both of these hugely high-risk technologies would create even more dangerous forms of waste, and neither has a discernible exit strategy (subjects that I will be exploring in greater depth later on). Hyper-patriotism, similarly, is an active barrier to coming up with any kind of global climate agreement, since it further pits countries against one another rather than encouraging them to cooperate. As for pitching climate action as a way to protect America’s high-consumerist “way of life”—that is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of ...

What I am saying is that the science forces us to choose how we want to respond. If we stay on the road we are on, we will get the big corporate, big military, big engineering responses to climate change—the world of a tiny group of big corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers that we have imagined in virtually every fictional account of our dystopic future, from Mad Max to The Children of Men to The Hunger Games to Elysium. Or we can choose to heed climate change’s planetary wake-up call and change course, steer away not just from the emissions cliff but from the logic that brought us careening to that precipice. Because what the “moderates” constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It has changed many times before and can change again.

there is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of anti-environment views and behaviors. While a great deal of research has demonstrated that having politically conservative or “hierarchical” views and a pro-industry slant makes one particularly likely to deny climate change, there is an even larger number of studies connecting materialistic values (and even free market ideology) to carelessness not just about climate change, but to a great many environmental risks. At Knox College in Illinois, psychologist Tim Kasser has been at the forefront of this work. “To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,” write Kasser and British environmental strategist Tom Crompton in their 2009 book, Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity.

That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of mutual aid are responsible for our species’ greatest accomplishments. That greed must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable.

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

It’s rational for right-wing ideologues to deny climate change—to recognize it would be intellectually cataclysmic. But what is stopping so many who reject that ideology from demanding the kinds of powerful measures that the Heartlanders fear? Why aren’t liberal and left political parties around the world calling for an end to extreme energy extraction and full transitions to renewal and regeneration-based economies? Why isn’t climate change at the center of the progressive agenda, the burning basis for demanding a robust and reinvented commons, rather than an often forgotten footnote? Why do liberal media outlets still segregate stories about melting ice sheets in their “green” sections—next to viral videos of cuddly animals making unlikely friendships? Why are so many of us not doing the things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels?

Their vision—that greed should guide us, that, to quote the late economist Milton Friedman, “the major error” was “to believe that it is possible to do good with other people’s money”—has dramatically remade our world over the last four decades, decimating virtually every countervailing power.67 Extreme free-market ideology was locked in through the harsh policy conditions attached to much-needed loans issued by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It shaped the model of export-led development that dotted the developing world with free trade zones. It was written into countless trade agreements. Not everyone was convinced by these arguments, not by a long shot. But too many tacitly accepted Thatcher’s dictum that there is no alternative. Meanwhile, denigration of collective action and veneration of the profit motive have infiltrated virtually every government on the planet, every major media organization, every university, our very souls. As that American Geophysical Union survey indicated, somewhere inside each of us dwells a belief in their central lie—that we are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines. And if we are that, then what hope do we have of taking on the grand, often difficult, collective work that will be required to save ourselves in time? This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us tha...

we are, in fact, a mess of contradictions, with our desire for self-gratification coexisting with deep compassion, our greed with empathy and solidarity.

we need to take a much closer look at precisely how the legacy of market fundamentalism, and the much deeper cultural narratives on which it rests, still block critical, life-saving climate action on virtually every front. The green movement’s mantra that climate is not about left and right but “right and wrong” has gotten us nowhere. The traditional political left does not hold all the answers to this crisis. But there can be no question that the contemporary political right, and the triumphant ideology it represents, is a formidable barrier to progress. As the next four chapters will show, the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more). They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known—the oil and gas industry, which cannot survive in anything like its current form if we humans are to avoid our own extinction. In short, we have not responded to this challenge because we are locked in—politically, physically, and culturally. Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free.

HOT MONEY How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet

green energy programs—the strong ones that are needed to lower global emissions fast—were increasingly being challenged under international trade agreements, particularly the World Trade Organization’s rules. In 2010, for instance, the United States challenged one of China’s wind power subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained supports for local industry considered protectionist. China, in turn, filed a complaint in 2012 targeting various renewable energy programs in the European Union, singling out Italy and Greece (it has also threatened to bring a dispute against renewables subsidies in five U.S. states). Washington, meanwhile, has launched a World Trade Organization attack on India’s ambitious Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, a large, multiphase solar support program—once again, for containing provisions, designed to encourage local industry, considered to be protectionist. As a result, brand-new factories that should be producing solar panels are now contemplating closure. Not to be outdone, India has signaled that it might take aim at state renewable energy programs in the U.S.3 This is distinctly bizarre behavior to exhibit in the midst of a climate emergency.

The provision was an attempt to revive Ontario’s moribund manufacturing sector, which had long been centered on the Big Three U.S. automakers (Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors) and was, at that time, reeling from the near bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler. Compounding these challenges was the fact that Alberta’s tar sands oil boom had sent the Canadian dollar soaring, making Ontario a much costlier place to build anything.8 In the years that followed the announcement, Ontario’s efforts to get off coal were plagued by political blunders. Large natural gas and wind developers ran roughshod over local communities, while the government wasted hundreds of millions (at least) trying to clean up the unnecessary messes. Yet even with all these screwups, the core of the program was an undeniable success. By 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada and by 2013, it had only one working coal-fired power plant left. The local content requirements—as the “buy local” and “hire local” provisions are called—were also proving to be a significant boost to the ailing manufacturing sector: by 2014, more than 31,000 jobs had been created and a wave of solar and wind manufacturers had set up shop.9

Trade Trumps Climate From a climate perspective, the WTO ruling was an outrage: if there is to be any hope of meeting the agreed-upon 2 degree Celsius target, wealthy economies like Canada must make getting off fossil fuels their top priority. It is a moral duty, one that the federal government undertook when it signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Ontario was putting real policies in place to honor that commitment (unlike the Canadian government as a whole, which has allowed emissions to balloon, leading it to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than face international censure). Most importantly, the program was working. How absurd, then, for the WTO to interfere with that success—to let trade trump the planet itself. And yet from a strictly legal standpoint, Japan and the EU were perfectly correct. One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something called “national treatment,” which requires governments to make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms outside their borders. Indeed, favoring local industry constitutes illegal “discrimination.” This was a flashpoint in the free trade wars back in the 1990s, precisely because these restrictions effectively prevent governments from doing what Ontario was trying to do: create jobs by requiring the sourcing of local goods as a condition of government support. This was just one of the many fateful battles that progressives lost in those years.

The biggest problem with these arguments is the notion that there is any free market in energy to be protected from distortion. Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.” That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13

Any attempt by a government to regulate the sale or extraction of particularly dirty kinds of fossil fuels is also vulnerable to similar trade challenges. The European Union, for instance, is considering new fuel quality standards that would effectively restrict the sales of oil derived from such high-carbon sources as the Alberta tar sands. It’s excellent climate policy, of the kind we need much more, but the effort has been slowed down by Canada’s not so subtle threats of trade retaliation. Meanwhile, the European Union is using bilateral trade talks to try to circumvent longstanding U.S. restrictions on oil and gas exports, including a decades-old export ban on crude oil. In July 2014, a leaked negotiating document revealed that Europe is pushing for a “legally binding commitment” that would guarantee its ability to import fracked gas and oil from North Dakota’s Bakken formation and elsewhere.

In some of these cases, governments may successfully defend their emission-reducing activities in trade court. But in too many others, they can be relied upon to cave in early, not wanting to appear anti–free trade (which is likely what is behind Ontario’s quiet acceptance of the WTO’s ruling against its green energy plan). These challenges aren’t killing renewable energy; in the U.S. and China, for instance, the solar market continues to grow impressively. But it is not happening fast enough. And the legal uncertainty that now surrounds some of the most significant green energy programs in the world is bogging us down at the very moment when science is telling us we need to leap ahead. To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness.

The same goes for all kinds of free market orthodoxies that threaten our capacity to respond boldly to this crisis, from the suffocating logic of austerity that prevents governments from making the necessary investments in low-carbon infrastructure (not to mention firefighting and flood response), to the auctioning off of electric utilities to private corporations that, in many cases, refuse to switch over to less profitable renewables. Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.

In 1965, the concept was so widely accepted among specialists that U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson was given a report from his Science Advisory Committee warning that, “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. . . . The climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”22

“This year the earth spoke, like God warning Noah of the deluge. Its message was loud and clear, and suddenly people began to listen, to ponder what portents the message held.” That message was so profound, so fundamental, he argued, that it called into question the founding myths of modern Western culture.

In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature—the soil, forest, sea—was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience.25

Within a decade, all that would be left standing would be their own extreme, pro-corporate ideology. Not only would the Western consumer lifestyle survive intact, it would grow significantly more lavish, with U.S. credit card debt per household increasing fourfold between 1980 and 2010.27 Simultaneously, that voracious lifestyle would be exported to the middle and upper classes in every corner of the globe—including, despite earlier protestations, India, where it would wreak environmental damage on a scale difficult to fathom. The victories in the new era would be faster and bigger than almost anyone predicted; and the armies of losers would be left to pick through the ever-growing mountains of methane-spewing waste.

What is most remarkable about these parallel processes—trade on the one hand, climate on the other—is the extent to which they functioned as two solitudes. Indeed, each seemed to actively pretend that the other did not exist, ignoring the most glaring questions about how one would impact the other. Like, for example: How would the vastly increased distances that basic goods would now travel—by carbon-spewing container ships and jumbo jets, as well as diesel trucks—impact the carbon emissions that the climate negotiations were aiming to reduce? How would the aggressive protections for technology patents enshrined under the WTO impact the demands being made by developing nations in the climate negotiations for free transfers of green technologies to help them develop on a low-carbon path? And perhaps most critically, how would provisions that allowed private companies to sue national governments over laws that impinged on their profits dissuade governments from adopting tough antipollution regulations, for fear of getting sued? These questions were not debated by government negotiators, nor was any attempt made to resolve their obvious contradictions. Not that there was ever any question about which side would win should any of the competing pledges to cut emissions and knock down commercial barriers ever come into direct conflict: the commitments made in the climate negotiations all effectively functioned on the honor system, with a weak and unthreatening mechanism to penal...

When the U.N. climate agreement was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it made clear that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute . . . a disguised restriction on international trade.” (Similar language appears in the Kyoto Protocol.) As Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley puts it, this was “the pivotal moment that set the shape of the relationship between the climate and trade regimes” because, “Rather than push for the recalibration of the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate protection . . . the Parties to the climate regime have ensured that liberalized trade and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade-restrictive climate policies.” This practically guaranteed that the negotiating process would be unable to reckon with the kinds of bold but “trade-restrictive” policy options that could have been coordinated internationally—from buy-local renewable energy programs to restrictions on trade in goods produced with particularly high carbon footprints.28

At the end of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Khor cautioned that there was a “general feeling among Southern country delegates . . . that events outside the [summit] process were threatening to weaken the South further and to endanger whatever positive elements exist in” the Rio agenda. The examples he cited were the austerity policies being pushed at the time by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the trade negotiations that would soon result in the creation of the WTO.

In a paper published in 2000, Shrybman argued that “the globalization of agricultural systems over recent decades is likely to have been one of the most important causes of overall increases in greenhouse gas emissions.”30 This had far less to do with current debates about the “food miles” associated with imported versus local produce than with the way in which the trade system, by granting companies like Monsanto and Cargill their regulatory wish list—from unfettered market access to aggressive patent protection to the maintenance of their rich subsidies—has helped to entrench and expand the energy-intensive, higher-emissions model of industrial agriculture around the world. This, in turn, is a major explanation for why the global food system now accounts for between 19 and 29 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions.

several negotiating documents for the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial new NAFTA-style trade deal spanning twelve countries, were released to the public via WikiLeaks and the Peruvian human rights group RedGE. A draft of the environment chapter had contained language stating that countries “acknowledge climate change as a global concern that requires collective action and recognize the importance of implementation of their respective commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).” The language was vague and nonbinding, but at least it was a tool that governments could use to defend themselves should their climate policies be challenged in a trade tribunal, as Ontario’s plan was. But a later document showed that U.S. negotiators had proposed an edit: take out all the stuff about climate change and UNFCCC commitments. In other words, while trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade.32

The emissions accounting system on which they settled was an odd relic of the pre–free trade era that took absolutely no account of the revolutionary changes unfolding right under their noses regarding how (and where) the world’s goods were being manufactured. For instance, emissions from the transportation of goods across borders—all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly 400 percent over the last twenty years—are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting impact. (And there remains little momentum at the U.N. for changing that, despite the reality that shipping emissions are set to double or even triple by 2050.)33 And fatefully, countries are responsible only for the pollution they create inside their own borders—not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods that are shipped to their shores; those are attributed to the countries where the goods were produced.34 This means that the emissions that went into producing, say, the television in my living room, appear nowhere on Canada’s emissions ledger, but rather are attributed entirely to China’s ledger, because that is where the set was made. And the international emissions from the container ship that carried my TV across the ocean (and then sailed back again) aren’t entered into anyone’s account book. This deeply flawed system has created a vastly distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions. It has all...

The reason for what Andreas Malm—a Swedish expert on the history of coal—describes as “the early 21st Century emissions explosion” is straightforward enough. When China became the “workshop of the world” it also became the coal-spewing “chimney of the world.” By 2007, China was responsible for two thirds of the annual increase in global emissions. Some of that was the result of China’s own internal development—bringing electricity to rural areas, and building roads. But a lot of it was directly tied to foreign trade: according to one study, between 2002 and 2008, 48 percent of China’s total emissions was related to producing goods for export.37 “One of the reasons why we’re in the climate crisis is because of this model of globalization,” says Margrete Strand Rangnes, executive vice president at Public Citizen, a Washington-based policy institute that has been at the forefront of the fight against free trade. And that, she says, is a problem that requires “a pretty fundamental re-formation of our economy, if we’re going to do this right.”38

referred to as the Washington Consensus. Underneath it all is the constant drive for endless economic growth, a drive that, as will be explored later on, goes much deeper than the trade history of the past few decades. But there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive. That’s because one of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America’s sweatshop maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea. But by the end of the 1990s, virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low, trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects—modern ports, sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive dams—all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader’s dream, in other words—and a climate nightmare. A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions, or as Malm puts it, “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions.”