This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

thanks to the removal of virtually all barriers to capital flows, corporations could pick up and leave every time labor costs started rising. That’s why many large manufacturers left South Korea for China in the late 1990s, and it’s why many are now leaving China, where wages are climbing, for Bangladesh, where they are significantly lower. So while our clothes, electronics, and furniture may be made in China, the economic model was primarily made in the U.S.A.

Why bother cutting our own emissions when everyone knows that the fast developing economies are the real problem, opening more coal plants every month than we could ever close?40 This argument is made as if we in the West are mere spectators to this reckless and dirty model of economic growth. As if it was not our governments and our multinationals that pushed a model of export-led development that made all of this possible. It is said as if it were not our own corporations who, with single-minded determination (and with full participation from China’s autocratic rulers), turned the Pearl River Delta into their carbon-spewing special economic zone, with the goods going straight onto container ships headed to our superstores. All in the name of feeding the god of economic growth (via the altar of hyper-consumption) in every country in the world.

We knew about the climate crisis when the rules of the new trade system were being written. After all, NAFTA was signed just one year after governments, including the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio. And it was by no means inevitable that these deals would go through. A strong coalition of North American labor and environmental groups opposed NAFTA precisely because they knew it would drive down labor and environmental standards. For a time it even looked as if they would win. Public opinion in all three countries was deeply divided, so much so that when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he pledged that he would not sign NAFTA until it substantively reflected those concerns.

The significance of the NAFTA signing was indeed historic, tragically so. Because if the environmental movement had not been so agreeable, NAFTA might have been blocked or renegotiated to set a different kind of precedent. A new trade architecture could have been built that did not actively sabotage the fragile global climate change consensus. Instead—as had been the promise and hope of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit—this new architecture could have been grounded in the need to fight poverty and reduce emissions at the same time. So for example, trade access to developing countries could have been tied to transfers of resources and green technology so that critical new electricity and transit infrastructure was low carbon from the outset. And the deals could have been written to ensure that any measures taken to support renewable energy would not be penalized and, in fact, could be rewarded. The global economy might not have grown as quickly as it did, but it also would not be headed rapidly off the climate cliff. The errors of this period cannot be undone, but it is not too late for a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade and build this needed architecture now. That doesn’t—and never did—mean an end to economic exchange across borders. It does, however, mean a far more thoughtful and deliberate approach to why we trade and whom it serves. Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no l...

According to Ilana Solomon, trade analyst for the Sierra Club, this is not a fight that the climate movement can avoid. “In order to combat climate change, there’s a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and what we’re purchasing and how it’s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law is you can’t privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy? . . . If we don’t think about how the economy is structured, then we’re actually never going to the real root of the problem.”46 These kinds of economic reforms would be good news—for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big box stores. And all of these constituencies would be needed to fight for these policies, since they represent the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power.

Challenging free trade orthodoxy is a heavy lift in our political culture; anything that has been in place for that long takes on an air of inevitability. But, critical as these shifts are, they are not enough to lower emissions in time. To do that, we will need to confront a logic even more entrenched than free trade—the logic of indiscriminate economic growth.

Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies—all while emissions ballooned—that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system.47 They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year—and they need to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance). But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly. Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.’s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that “the only way” negotiators “can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”48

we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another. So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.52 Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic boat, Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come to tell the truth, to “liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by the conclusions however uncomfortable . . . we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.”53 Interestingly, Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound challenge to economic growth. “This position is shared by many senior scientists and economists advising government,” Anderson reports.54 In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is e...

Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they “were unwittingly destabilizing the political and social order.”55 Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.”56

Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market logic—indeed, they encourage us to go out and buy more new, efficient, green cars and washing machines. Consuming less, however, means changing how much energy we actually use: how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last or to be replaced in two years, how large our homes are.

“there is virtually no government policy which is aimed at changing the way we produce, incentivising farmers for low energy farming, or how we consume, incentivising consumption of local and seasonal food.” Similarly, “there are incentives to drive more efficient cars, but very little is done to discourage car dependent settlement patterns.”58

We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences.III, 59

The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s. Not exactly the various forms of hardship and deprivation evoked at Heartland conferences. As Kevin Anderson explains: “We need to give newly industrializing countries in the world the space to develop and improve the welfare and well-being of their people. This means more cuts in energy use by the developed world. It also means lifestyle changes which will have most impact on the wealthy. . . . We’ve done this in the past. In the 1960s and 1970s we enjoyed a healthy and moderate lifestyle and we need to return to this to keep emissions under control. It is a matter of the well-off 20 percent in a population taking the largest cuts. A more even society might result and we would certainly benefit from a lower carbon and more sustainable way of life.”60 There is no doubt that these types of policies have countless benefits besides lower emissions. They encourage civic space, physical activity, community building, as well as cleaner air and water. They also do a huge amount to reduce inequality, since it is low-income people, often people of color, who benefit most from improvements in public housing and public transit. And if strong living-wage and hire-local provisions were included in transition plans, they could also benefit most from the jobs building and running those expanded ser...

what is needed is a fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product. GDP is traditionally understood to consist of consumption plus investment plus government spending plus net exports. The free market capitalism of the past three decades has put the emphasis particularly on consumption and trade. But as we remake our economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less consumption (except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies), and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption. These reductions would be offset by increased government spending, and increased public and private investment in the infrastructure and alternatives needed to reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more redistribution, so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet’s capacity. Which is precisely why, when climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it’s not (only) because they are paranoid. It’s also because they are paying attention.

low-consumption activities like gardening and cooking

If countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.63 Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a basic annual income, a wage given to every person, regardless of income, as a recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for everyone and that it is counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption. As Alyssa Battistoni, an editor at the journal Jacobin, writes, “While making people work shitty jobs to ‘earn’ a living has always been spiteful, it’s now starting to seem suicidal.”64

desperate people can be counted on to do desperate things—which is why we all have a vested interest in taking care of one another so that many fewer communities are faced with those impossible choices. That means rescuing the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food, and clean water. Indeed, fighting inequality on every front and through multiple means must be understood as a central strategy in the battle against climate change.

it requires visionary long-term planning, tough regulation of business, higher levels of taxation for the affluent, big public sector expenditure, and in many cases reversals of core privatizations in order to give communities the power to make the changes they desire. In short, it means changing everything about how we think about the economy so that our pollution doesn’t change everything about our physical world.

“We have no option but to reinvent mobility . . . much of India still takes the bus, walks or cycles—in many cities as much as 20 percent of the population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich.” —Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment, 20131

“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing-planes.” —George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 19412

Modern day equivalent: Social Media Influencers

Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition—particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its future targets (the country is aiming for 55–60 percent renewables by 2035).6 The weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question of whether the decision to phase out nuclear energy has led to a resurgence of coal (more on that next chapter). In all of this analysis, however, scarce attention has been paid to one key factor that has made possible what may be the world’s most rapid shift to wind and solar power: the fact that in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, citizens have voted to take their energy grids back from the private corporations that purchased them. As Anna Leidreiter, a climate campaigner with the World Future Council, observed after the Hamburg vote, “This marks a clear reversal to the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, when large numbers of German municipalities sold their public services to large corporations as money was needed to prop up city budgets.”7 Nor is this some small trend. According to a Bloomberg report, “More than 70 new municipal utilities have started up since 2007, and public operators have taken over more than 200 concessions to run energy grids from private companies in that time.” And though there are no national statistics, the German Association of Local Utilities believes many more cities and towns than that have taken back control over t...

Public power grid with 100% renewable energy

Steve Fenberg of New Era explains, “We have one of the most carbon-intensive energy supplies in the country, and [Boulder] is an environmentally minded community, and we wanted to change that. We realized that we had no control over that unless we controlled the energy supply.”10

Though rarely mentioned in climate policy discussions, there is a clear and compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities to get off dirty energy. Many of the countries with the highest commitments to renewable energy are ones that have managed to keep large parts of their electricity sectors in public (and often local) hands, including the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway. In the U.S., some of the cities that have set the most ambitious green energy targets also happen to have public utilities. Austin, Texas, for instance, is ahead of schedule for meeting its target of 35 percent renewable power by 2020, and Sacramento, California’s, utility is gearing up to beat a similar target and has set a pioneering goal of reducing emissions by 90 percent by mid-century. On the other hand, according to John Farrell, senior researcher at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the attitude of most private players has been, “we’re going to take the money that we make from selling fossil fuels, and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way that we do business.”13

It’s easy to mistake a thriving private market in green energy for a credible climate action plan, but, though related, they are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to have a booming market in renewables, with a whole new generation of solar and wind entrepreneurs growing very wealthy—and for our countries to still fall far short of lowering emissions in line with science in the brief time we have left. To be sure of hitting those tough targets, we need systems that are more reliable than boom-and-bust private markets. And as a 2013 paper produced by a research team at the University of Greenwich explains, “Historically, the private sector has played little role in investing in renewable energy generation. Governments have been responsible for nearly all such investments. Current experience from around the world, including the markets of Europe, also shows that private companies and electricity markets cannot deliver investments in renewables on the scale required.”16 Citing various instances of governments turning to the public sector to drive their transitions (including the German experience), as well as examples of large corporate-driven renewable projects that were abandoned by their investors midstream, the Greenwich research team concludes, “An active role for government and public sector utilities is thus a far more important condition for developing renewable energy than any expensive system of public subsidies for markets or private investors.”17

Later published in the journal Energy Policy, the road map is one of several credible studies that have come out in recent years that show how wealthy countries and regions can shift all, or almost all, of their energy infrastructure to renewables within a twenty-to-forty-year time frame.18 Those studies demonstrating the potential for rapid progress include: • In Australia, the University of Melbourne’s Energy Institute and the nonprofit Beyond Zero Emissions have published a blueprint for achieving a 60 percent solar and 40 percent wind electricity system in an astonishing ten years.19 • By 2014, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had concluded from its own extensive research into weather patterns that cost-effective wind and solar could constitute nearly 60 percent of the U.S. electricity system by 2030.20 • Among more conservative projections, a major 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory argues that wind, solar, and other currently available green technologies could meet 80 percent of Americans’ electricity needs by 2050.21 Most promising of all is new work by a team of researchers at Stanford, led by Mark Jacobson (who coauthored the 2009 global plan). In March 2013, they published a study in Energy Policy showing that New York state could meet all of its power needs with renewables by 2030. Jacobson and his colleagues are developing similar plans for every U.S. state, and have already publishe...

There was no shortage of patients; in its first two weeks, Mohit estimated that the clinic helped hundreds of people. But on the day I visited, worries were mounting about the people still stuck in the high-rises. As volunteers went door-to-door distributing supplies in the darkened projects, flashlights strapped to their foreheads, they were finding alarming numbers of sick people. Cancer and HIV/AIDS meds had run out, oxygen tanks were empty, diabetics were out of insulin, and addicts were in withdrawal. Some people were too sick to brave the dark stairwells and multiple flights of stairs to get help; some didn’t leave because they had nowhere to go and no way to get off the peninsula (subways and buses were not operating); others feared that if they left their apartments, their homes would be burglarized. And without cell service or power for their TVs, many had no idea what was going on outside. Most shockingly, residents reported that until Occupy Sandy showed up, no one had knocked on their doors since the storm. Not from the Health Department, nor the city Housing Authority (responsible for running the projects), nor the big relief agencies like the Red Cross. “I was like ‘Holy crap,’ ” Mohit told me. “There was just no medical attention at all.”I, 28 Referring to the legendary abandonment of New Orleans’s poor residents when the city flooded in 2005, she said: “This is Katrina 2.0.”29

The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means “something uncovered” or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better health care system, there was much else uncovered and revealed when the floodwaters retreated in New York that October. The disaster revealed how dangerous it is to be dependent on centralized forms of energy that can be knocked out in one blow. It revealed the life-and-death cost of social isolation, since it was the people who did not know their neighbors, or who were frightened of them, who were most at risk. Meanwhile, it was the tightest-knit communities, where neighbors took responsibility for one another’s safety, that were best able to literally weather the storm. The disaster also revealed the huge risks that come with deep inequality, since the people who were already the most vulnerable—undocumented workers, the formerly incarcerated, people in public housing—suffered most and longest. In low-income neighborhoods, homes filled not only with water but with heavy chemicals and detergents—the legacy of systemic environmental racism that allowed toxic industries to build in areas inhabited mostly by people of color. Public housing projects that had been left to decay—while the city bided its time before selling them off to developers—turned into death traps, their ancient plumbing and electrical systems giving way completely. As Aria Doe, executive director of the Action Center for Education and Community Development in ...

During good times, it’s easy to deride “big government” and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs. And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

The costs of coping with increasing weather extremes are astronomical. In the United States, each major disaster seems to cost taxpayers upward of a billion dollars. The cost of Superstorm Sandy is estimated at $65 billion. And that was just one year after Hurricane Irene caused around $10 billion in damage, just one episode in a year that saw fourteen billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. alone. Globally, 2011 holds the title as the costliest year ever for disasters, with total damages reaching at least $380 billion. And with policymakers still locked in the vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more vulnerable during the next disaster—a classic vicious cycle.37 It was never a good idea to neglect the foundations of our societies in this way. In the context of climate change, however, that decision looks suicidal.

It’s no mystery where that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go to the kinds of ambitious emission-reducing projects already discussed—the smart grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our lives in traffic jams. The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

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...

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have actively blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history, with the top five oil companies pulling in $900 billion in profits from 2001 to 2010. ExxonMobil still holds the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States, earning $41 billion in 2011 and $45 billion in 2012. These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world. It is this situation that, most fundamentally, needs to change.41

As oil industry watcher Antonia Juhasz has observed, “You wouldn’t know it from their advertising, but the world’s major oil companies have either entirely divested from alternative energy or significantly reduced their investments in favor of doubling down on ever-more risky and destructive sources of oil and natural gas.”43

The question is: how do we stop fossil fuel profits from continuing to hemorrhage into executive paychecks and shareholder pockets—and how do we do it soon, before the companies are significantly less profitable or out of business because we have moved to a new energy system? As the Global Risks report suggests, communities severely impacted by climate change have made several attempts to use the courts to sue for damages, but so far they have been unsuccessful. A steep carbon tax would be a straightforward way to get a piece of the profits, as long as it contained a generous redistributive mechanism—a tax cut or income credit—that compensated poor and middle-class consumers for increased fuel and heating prices. As Canadian economist Marc Lee points out, designed properly, “It is possible to have a progressive carbon tax system that reduces inequality as it raises the price of emitting greenhouse gases.”45 An even more direct route to getting a piece of those pollution profits would be for governments to negotiate much higher royalty rates on oil, gas, and coal extraction, with the revenues going to “heritage trust funds” that would be dedicated to building the post–fossil fuel future, as well as to helping communities and workers adapt to these new realities.

Moreover, there is a simple, direct correlation between wealth and emissions—more money generally means more flying, driving, boating, and powering of multiple homes. One case study of German consumers indicates that the travel habits of the most affluent class have an impact on climate 250 percent greater than that of their lowest-earning neighbors.47 That means any attempt to tax the extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top of the economic pyramid, as documented so persuasively by Thomas Piketty among many others, would—if partially channeled into climate financing—effectively make the polluters pay. As journalist and climate and energy policy expert Gar Lipow puts it, “We should tax the rich more because it is the fair thing to do, and because it will provide a better life for most of us, and a more prosperous economy. However, providing money to save civilization and reduce the risk of human extinction is another good reason to bill the rich for their fair share of taxes.” But it must be said that a “polluter pays” principle would have to reach beyond the super rich. According to Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions. That would include the rich in every country in the world, notably in countries like China and India, as well significant parts of the middle classes...

In addition to the simple fact that the money is badly needed, there are practical political reasons why “polluter pays” should guide climate financing. As we have seen, responding to the climate crisis can offer real benefits to a majority of people, but real solutions will also, by definition, require short-and medium-term sacrifices and inconveniences. And what we know from past sacrifices made in the name of a crisis—most notably via rationing, conservation, and price controls during both world wars—is that success depends entirely on a perception of fairness. In Britain and North America during World War II, for instance, every strata of society was required to make do with less, even the very rich. And in fact, though overall consumption in the U.K. dropped by 16 percent, caloric intake for the poor increased during the war, because the rations provided low-income people with more than they could otherwise afford.56

An Office of Price Administration pamphlet from 1942 argued that rationing was part of the American tradition. “What Is Rationing?” it asked. First, let’s be sure what rationing is not. It is not starvation, long bread lines, shoddy goods. Rather, it is a community plan for dividing fairly the supplies we have among all who need them. Second, it is not “un-American.” The earliest settlers of this country, facing scarcities of food and clothing, pooled their precious supplies and apportioned them out to everyone on an equal basis. It was an American idea then, and it is an American idea now, to share and share alike—to sacrifice, when necessary, but sacrifice together, when the country’s welfare demands it.58

This perception of fairness—that one set of rules applies to players big and small—has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change thus far. For decades, regular people have been asked to turn off their lights, put on sweaters, and pay premium prices for nontoxic cleaning products and renewable energy—and then watched as the biggest polluters have been allowed to expand their emissions without penalty. This has been the pattern ever since President Jimmy Carter addressed the American public in July 1979 about the fact that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” He urged Americans “for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense—I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”60 The address was initially well received but came to be derided as the “malaise” speech and is frequently cited as one of the reasons Carter lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan. And though he was not talking about climate change but rather a broad “crisis of confidence” against a backdrop of energy scarcity, the speech is still invoked as proof that any politician who asks voters to sacrifice to solve an enviro...

Yes, there has been a drop in the willingness of individuals to bear the financial burden of responding to climate change, but not simply because economic times are hard. Western governments have responded to these hard times—which have been created by rampant greed and corruption among their wealthiest citizens—by asking those least responsible for the current conditions to bear the burden. After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen? Most of these surveys, notably, don’t ask respondents how they feel about raising taxes on the rich and removing fossil fuel subsidies, yet these are some of the most reliably popular policies around. And it’s worth noting that a U.S. poll conducted in 2010—with the country still reeling from economic crisis—asked voters whether they would support a plan that “would make oil and coal companies pay for the pollution they cause. It would encourage the creation of new jobs and new technologies in cleaner energy like wind, solar, and nuclear power. The proposal also aims to protect working families, so it refunds almost all of the money it collects directly to the American people, like a tax refund, and most families end up better off.” The poll found that three quarters of voters, including the vast majority of Republi...

The lesson from all this is not that people won’t sacrifice in the face of the climate crisis. It’s that they have had it with our culture of lopsided sacrifice, in which individuals are asked to pay higher prices for supposedly green choices while large corporations dodge regulation and not only refuse to change their behavior, but charge ahead with ever more polluting activities. Witnessing this, it is perfectly sensible for people to shed much of the keener enthusiasm that marked the early days of the climate movement, and to make it clear that no more sacrifice will be made until the policy solutions on the table are perceived as just. This does not mean the middle class is off the hook. To fund the kind of social programs that will make a just transition possible, taxes will have to rise for everyone but the poor. But if the funds raised go toward social programs and services that reduce inequality and make lives far less insecure and precarious, then public attitudes toward taxation would very likely shift as well.

it is not that “we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it’s for a campaign contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.

changing the building blocks of our societies—the energy that powers our economies, how we move around, the designs of our major cities—is not about writing a few checks. It requires bold long-term planning at every level of government, and a willingness to stand up to polluters whose actions put us all in danger. And that won’t happen until the corporate liberation project that has shaped our political culture for three and a half decades is buried for good.

if we are to collectively meet the enormous challenges of this crisis, a robust social movement will need to demand (and create) political leadership that is not only committed to making polluters pay for a climate-ready public sphere, but willing to revive two lost arts: long-term public planning, and saying no to powerful corporations.

“A reliably green company is one that is required to be green by law.” —Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 20082

All told, three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus bill—were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future. Imagine if there had been a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed by the crashing economic model—demanding that Obama do no less.

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.)

trade unions can be counted on to fiercely protect jobs, however dirty, if these are the only jobs on offer. On the other hand, when workers in dirty sectors are offered good jobs in clean sectors (like the former autoworkers at the Silfab factory in Toronto), and are enlisted as active participants in a green transition, then progress can happen at lightning speed.

making existing transportation infrastructure work better for more people is a smarter investment from both a climate and an economic perspective than covering more land with asphalt. Renewable energy is equally promising, in part because it creates more jobs per unit of energy delivered than fossil fuels. In 2012, the International Labour Organization estimated that about five million jobs had already been created in the sector worldwide—and that is with only the most scattershot and inadequate levels of government commitment to emission reduction.10 If industrial policy were brought in line with climate science, the supply of energy through wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy (geothermal and tidal power, for example) would generate huge numbers of jobs in every country—in manufacturing, construction, installation, maintenance, and operation.

A bold coalition in South Africa, meanwhile, going under the banner of One Million Climate Jobs, is calling for mass job creation programs in areas ranging from renewable energy to public transit to ecosystem restoration to small-scale sustainable farming. “By placing the interests of workers and the poor at the forefront of strategies to combat climate change we can simultaneously halt climate change and address our jobs bloodbath,” the campaign states.11

The climate case for rethinking private ownership is particularly strong when it comes to natural gas, which is currently being touted by many governments as a “bridge fuel.” The theory is that, in the time it takes for us to make a full switch to zero carbon sources of energy, gas can serve as an alternative to dirtier fossil fuels like coal and oil. It is far from clear that this bridge is necessary, given the speed of the shift to renewables in countries like Germany.