This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

why would notoriously ruthless for-profit companies accept a business model that relies on them not competing with large parts of the energy sector (wind and solar), requires that they submit to a huge range of costly regulation, all with the eventual goal of putting themselves out of business? The answer is that they would not. Treating natural gas as a truly temporary transition fuel is anathema to the profit-seeking imperative that drives these corporations. After all, who is doing the fracking? It’s companies like BP and Chevron, with their long track records of safety violations and fending off tough regulation. These are companies whose business model requires that they replace the oil and gas they have in production with new reserves of fossil fuels or face a shareholder rebellion. That same growth-above-all model demands that they occupy as much of the energy market as possible—which means competing not just with coal but with every player in the energy market, including vulnerable renewables. To quote John Browne when he was chief executive of BP (he now heads the gas giant Cuadrilla): “Corporations have to be responsive to price signals. We are not public service.”15 True enough—but that was neither always the case with our energy companies, nor must it remain so. The bottom line is simple. No private company in the world wants to put itself out of business; its goal is to expand its market. Which is why, if natural gas is to serve as a short-term transition fuel...

the government is engaging in long-term national planning; it is deliberately picking winners in the market (renewables over nuclear power, which it is simultaneously closing down); it is fixing prices (a clear market interference); and creating a fair playing field for any potential renewable energy producer—big or small—to enter the market. And yet despite—or rather because of—these ideological heresies, Germany’s transition is among the fastest in the world. According to Hans Thie, the advisor on economic policy for the Left Party in the German parliament, who has been intensely involved in the transition, “Virtually all expansion estimates have been surpassed. The speed of expansion is considerably higher than had been expected.”20

Though often derided as the impractical fantasy of small-is-beautiful dreamers, decentralization delivers, and not on a small scale but on the largest scale of any model attempted thus far, and in highly developed postindustrial nations. It is also surely no coincidence that Denmark, a deeply social democratic country, introduced these policies well before it began its halfhearted embrace of neoliberalism, or that Germany—while prescribing brutal austerity to debtor countries like Greece and Spain—has never fully followed these prescriptions at home. These examples make clear that when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.

Based on the principle that farming should maximize species diversity and enhance natural systems of soil protection and pest control, agroecology looks different wherever its holistic techniques are practiced. But a report in National Geographic provides a helpful overview of how these principles translate in a few different contexts: the integration of “trees and shrubs into crop and livestock fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots; intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of green manures, which are quick-growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in the soil.”24 These methods and many others maintain healthy soil while producing nutritious food—more than industrial agriculture does, per unit area—and limit the need for farmers to buy expensive products like chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and patented seeds. But many farmers who have long used these methods have realized that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid fossil fuel–based fertilizers, and often use less carbon for transportation to market, in addition to better withstanding extreme weather and other climate impacts. And communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within the broader globalized food system. Which is why La Via Campesina, a global network of small farmers with ...

12 percent of the world’s power is currently supplied by nuclear energy, much of it coming from reactors that are old and obsolete.33 From a climate perspective, it would certainly be preferable if governments staggered their transitions away from high-risk energy sources like nuclear, prioritizing fossil fuels for cuts because the next decade is so critical for getting us off our current trajectory toward 4–6 degrees Celsius of warming. That would be compatible with a moratorium on new nuclear facilities, a decommissioning of the oldest plants and then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables had decisively displaced fossil fuels.

This state of affairs is, of course, yet another legacy of the free market counterrevolution. In virtually every country, the political class accepts the premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare—indeed the habitability of our shared home—are clearly at stake. The guiding ethos of light-touch regulation, and more often of active deregulation, has taken an enormous toll in every sector, most notably the financial one. It has also blocked commonsense responses to the climate crisis at every turn—sometimes explicitly, when regulations that would keep carbon in the ground are rejected outright, but mostly implicitly, when those kinds of regulations are not even proposed in the first place, and so-called market solutions are favored for tasks to which they are wholly unequipped.

If the companies have miscalculated and we do get serious about leaving carbon in the ground, these huge projects will become what is known as “stranded assets”—investments that lose their projected value as a result of, for example, dramatic changes in environmental policy. When a company has a great deal of expensive stranded assets on its books, the stock market takes notice, and responds by bidding down the share price of the company that made these bad bets. This problem goes well beyond a few specific projects and is integrated into the way that the market assigns value to companies that are in the business of extracting finite resources from the earth. In order for the value of these companies to remain stable or grow, oil and gas companies must always be able to prove to their shareholders that they have fresh carbon reserves to exploit after they exhaust those currently in production. This process is as crucial for extractive companies as it is for a company that sells cars or clothing to show their shareholders that they have preorders for their future products. At minimum, an energy company is expected to have as much oil and gas in its proven reserves as it does in current production, which would give it a “reserve-replacement ratio” of 100 percent. As the popular site Investopedia explains, “A company’s reserve replacement ratio must be at least 100% for the company to stay in business long-term; otherwise, it will eventually run out of oil.”53

That means that an oil company looking to reassure shareholders that it has a plan for what to do, say, when the oil in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay runs out, will be forced to go into higher-risk, dirtier territories. It is telling, for instance, that more than half of the reserves Exxon added in 2011 come from a single oil project: the massive Kearl mine being developed in the Alberta tar sands.56 This imperative also means that, so long as this business model is in place, no coastline or aquifer will be safe. Every victory against the fossil fuel companies, no matter how hard won, will be temporary, just waiting to be overtaken with howls of “Drill, Baby, Drill.” It won’t be enough even when we can walk across the Gulf of Mexico on the oil rigs, or when Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a parking lot for coal tankers, or when Greenland’s melting ice sheet is stained black from a spill we have no idea how to clean up. Because these companies will always need more reserves to top up their replacement ratios, year after year after year. From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.

Those numbers also tell us that the very thing we must do to avert catastrophe—stop digging—is the very thing these companies cannot contemplate without initiating their own demise. They tell us that getting serious about climate change, which means cutting our emissions radically, is simply not compatible with the continued existence of one of the most profitable industries in the world. And the amounts of money at stake are huge. The total amount of carbon in reserve represents roughly $27 trillion—more than ten times the annual GDP of the United Kingdom. If we were serious about keeping warming below 2 degrees, approximately 80 percent of that would be useless, stranded assets. Given these stakes, it is no mystery why the fossil fuel companies fight furiously to block every piece of legislation that would point us in the right emissions direction, and why some directly fund the climate change denier movement.58

This dynamic will shift only when the power (and wealth) of the fossil fuel industry is seriously eroded. Which is very tough to do: the handy thing about selling natural resources upon which entire economies have been built—and about having so far succeeded in blocking policies that would offer real alternatives—is that most people keep having to buy your products whether they like you or not. So since these companies are going to continue being rich for the foreseeable future, the best hope of breaking the political deadlock is to radically restrict their ability to spend their profits buying, and bullying, politicians.

Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York, wrote in July 2013, “The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, we are climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment.”65 The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment.

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.

In fact the slogan long embraced by this movement has been “System Change, Not Climate Change”—a recognition that these are the two choices we face.67 “The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time,” Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), explains. “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.”68

The mainstream environmental movement, meanwhile, generally stands apart from these expressions of mass frustration, choosing to define climate activism narrowly—demanding a carbon tax, say, or even trying to stop a pipeline. And those campaigns are important. But building a mass movement that has a chance of taking on the corporate forces arrayed against science-based emission reduction will require the broadest possible spectrum of allies. That would include the public sector workers—firefighters, nurses, teachers, garbage collectors—fighting to protect the services and infrastructure that will be our best protection against climate change. It would include antipoverty activists trying to protect affordable housing in downtown cores, rather than allowing low-income people to be pushed by gentrification into sprawling peripheries that require more driving. As Colin Miller of Oakland-based Bay Localize told me, “Housing is a climate issue.” And it would include transit riders fighting against fare increases at a time when we should be doing everything possible to make subways and buses more comfortable and affordable for all. Indeed when masses of people take to the streets to stop such fare hikes and demand free public transit—as they did in Brazil in June and July of 2013—these actions should be welcomed as part of a global effort to fight climate chaos, even if those populist movements never once use the words “climate change.”72

more bad timing. Just when we needed to slow down and notice the subtle changes in the natural world that are telling us that something is seriously amiss, we have sped up; just when we needed longer time horizons to see how the actions of our past impact the prospects for our future, we entered into the never-ending feed of the perpetual now, slicing and dicing our attention spans as never before. To understand how we got to this place of profound disconnection from our surroundings and one another, and to think about how we might build a politics based on reconnection, we will need to go back a good deal further than 1988.

It means that in many of our key responses, we would not be embarking on this tremendous project from scratch but rather drawing on more than a century of progressive work. But truly rising to the climate challenge—particularly its challenge to economic growth—will require that we dig even deeper into our past, and move into some distinctly uncharted political territory.

Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on “solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” He explained that although this particular form of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived in sacrifice zones—lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging—it was fast becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a “new abnormal” wherever we happen to live. “As bad as local and regional negative transformation is, it is the big picture, the Whole Earth, which is now a home under assault. A feeling of global dread asserts itself as the planet heats and our climate gets more hostile and unpredictable,”

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S. official summed up his government’s analysis of what went wrong on the island: “Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow.”17 Fair enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into the atmosphere—because we can’t see them—will have no effect whatsoever. Or if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever mess we have made.

In The New York Times in 2011, for instance, then-president Marcus Stephen wrote that Nauru provides “an indispensable cautionary tale about life in a place with hard ecological limits.” It shows, he claimed, “what can happen when a country runs out of options. The world is headed down a similar path with the relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet’s climate, melting ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil or abundant food for granted.” In other words, Nauru isn’t the only one digging itself to death; we all are.22 But the lesson Nauru has to teach is not only about the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. It is about the mentality that allowed so many of us, and our ancestors, to believe that we could relate to the earth with such violence in the first place—to dig and drill out the substances we desired while thinking little of the trash left behind, whether in the land and water where the extraction takes place, or in the atmosphere, once the extracted material is burned. This carelessness is at the core of an economic model some political scientists call “extractivism,” a term originally used to describe economies based on removing ever more raw materials from the earth, usually for export to traditional colonial powers, where “value” was added. And it’s a habit of thought that goes a long way toward explaining why an economic model based on endless growth ev...

Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones—places that, to their extractors, somehow don’t count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress. This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with disposable peripheries being harnessed to feed a glittering center, and it is bound up too with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered deserving of sacrifice. Extractivism ran rampant under colonialism because relating to the world as a frontier of conquest—rather than as home—fosters this particular brand of irresponsibility. The colonial mind nurtures the belief that there is always somewhere else to go to and exploit once the current site of extraction has been exhausted. These ideas predate industrial-scale extraction of fossil fuels. And yet the ability to harness the power of coal to power factories and ships is what, more than any single other factor, enabled these dangerous ideas to conquer the world. It’s a history worth exploring in more depth, because it goes a long way toward explaining how the climate crisis challenges not only capitalism but the underlying civilizational narratives about endless growth and progress within which we are all, in one way or another, still trapped.

Water power, after all, had a lot going for it compared with coal. For one thing, it was free, while coal needed to be continually re-purchased. And contrary to the widespread belief that the steam engine provided more energy than water wheels, the two were actually comparable, with the larger wheels packing several times more horsepower than their coal-powered rivals. Water wheels also operated more smoothly, with fewer technical breakdowns, so long as the water was flowing. “The transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry did not occur because water was scarce, less powerful, or more expensive than steam,” writes Swedish coal expert Andreas Malm. “To the contrary, steam gained supremacy in spite of water being abundant, at least as powerful, and decidedly cheaper.”

Unlike the energy it replaced, power from fossil fuel always required sacrifice zones—whether in the black lungs of the coal miners or the poisoned waterways surrounding the mines. But these prices were seen as worth paying in exchange for coal’s intoxicating promise of freedom from the physical world—a freedom that unleashed industrial capitalism’s full force to dominate both workers and other cultures. With their portable energy creator, the industrialists and colonists of the 1800s could now go wherever labor was cheapest and most exploitable, and wherever resources were most plentiful and valuable. As the author of a steam engine manual wrote in the mid-1830s, “Its mighty services are always at our command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night—it knows of no intermission but what our wishes dictate.”29 Coal represented, in short, total domination, of both nature and other people, the full realization of Bacon’s dream at last. “Nature can be conquered,” Watt reportedly said, “if we can but find her weak side.”30

In Ecological Economics, Herman Daly and Joshua Farley point out that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776—the same year that Watt produced his first commercial steam engine. “It is no coincidence,” they write, “that the market economy and fossil fuel economy emerged at essentially the exact same time. . . . New technologies and vast amounts of fossil energy allowed unprecedented production of consumer goods. The need for new markets for these mass-produced consumer goods and new sources of raw material played a role in colonialism and the pursuit of empire. The market economy evolved as an efficient way of allocating such goods, and stimulating the production of even more.”32 Just as colonialism needed coal to fulfill its dream of total domination, the deluge of products made possible by both coal and colonialism needed modern capitalism. The promise of liberation from nature that Watt was selling in those early days continues to be the great power of fossil fuels. That power is what allows today’s multinationals to scour the globe for the cheapest, most exploitable workforce, with natural features and events that once appeared as obstacles—vast

The harnessing of fossil fuel power seemed, for a couple of centuries at least, to have freed large parts of humanity from the need to be in constant dialogue with nature, having to adjust its plans, ambitions, and schedules to natural fluctuations and topographies. Coal and oil, precisely because they were fossilized, seemed entirely possessable forms of energy. They did not behave independently—not like wind, or water, or, for that matter, workers. Just as Watt’s engine promised, once purchased, they produced power wherever and whenever their owners wished—the ultimate nonreciprocal relationship. But what we have learned from atmospheric science is that the give-and-take, call-and-response that is the essence of all relationships in nature was not eliminated with fossil fuels, it was merely delayed, all the while gaining force and velocity. Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all.

a huge white marble statue of James Watt dominated St. Paul’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, commemorating a man who “enlarged the resources of his Country” and “increased the power of Man.” And Watt certainly did that: his engine massively accelerated the Industrial Revolution and the steamships his engine made possible subsequently opened sub-Saharan Africa and India to colonial pillage. So while making Europe richer, he also helped make many other parts of the world poorer, carbon-fueled inequalities that persist to this day. Indeed, coal was the black ink in which the story of modern capitalism was written.

The released carbon, meanwhile, enters the atmosphere, causing global warming (not to mention coal’s contribution to the smog and particulate pollution that have plagued urban society since the Industrial Revolution, afflicting untold numbers of people with respiratory, heart, and other diseases). Given this legacy, our task is not small, but it is simple: rather than a society of grave robbers, we need to become a society of life amplifiers, deriving our energy directly from the elements that sustain life.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.”I This was a straight repudiation of Francis Bacon’s casting of the earth as an inert machine whose mysteries could be mastered by the human mind. And almost a century after Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, whose book A Sand County Almanac was the touchstone for a second wave of environmentalists, similarly called for an ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals” and that recognizes “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” A “land ethic,” as he called it, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”50

As author Christian Parenti observed recently of the book’s lasting influence, “Limits combined the glamour of Big Science—powerful MIT computers and support from the Smithsonian Institution—with a focus on the interconnectedness of things, which fit perfectly with the new countercultural zeitgeist.” And though some of the book’s projections have not held up over time—the authors underestimated, for instance, the capacity of profit incentives and innovative technologies to unlock new reserves of finite resources—Limits was right about the most important limit of all. On “the limits of natural ‘sinks,’ or the Earth’s ability to absorb pollution,” Parenti writes, “the catastrophically bleak vision of Limits is playing out as totally correct. We may find new inputs—more oil or chromium—or invent substitutes, but we have not produced or discovered more natural sinks. The Earth’s capacity to absorb the filthy byproducts of global capitalism’s voracious metabolism is maxing out. That warning has always been the most powerful part of The Limits to Growth.”54

The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green

The Nature Conservancy has been in the oil and gas business for a decade and half. That this could happen in the age of climate change points to a painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions: large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests—they have merged with them. The Nature Conservancy, I should stress, is the only green group (that I know of, at least) to actually sink its own oil and gas wells. But it is far from the only group to have strong ties with the fossil fuel sector and other major polluters. For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy.

There are, moreover, large parts of the green movement that have never engaged in these types of arrangements—they don’t have endowments to invest or they have clear policies prohibiting fossil fuel holdings, and some have equally clear policies against taking donations from polluters. These groups, not coincidentally, tend also to be the ones with track records of going head-to-head with big oil and coal: Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have been battling Shell’s and Chevron’s alleged complicity with horrific human rights abuses in the Niger Delta since the early 1990s (though Shell has agreed to pay out $15.5 million to settle a case involving these claims, it continues to deny wrongdoing, as does Chevron); Rainforest Action Network has been at the forefront of the international campaign against Chevron for the disaster left behind in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Food & Water Watch has helped secure big victories against fracking; 350.org helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement and has been at the forefront of the national mobilization against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Sierra Club is a more complex case: it has also been a part of these campaigns and is the bane of the U.S. coal industry—but between 2007 and 2010, the group secretly took millions from a natural gas company. But under new leadership—and facing pressure from the grass roots—it has cut ties with the fossil fuel sector.19

The big, corporate-affiliated green groups don’t deny the reality of climate change, of course—many work hard to raise the alarm. And yet several of these groups have consistently, and aggressively, pushed responses to climate change that are the least burdensome, and often directly beneficial, to the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet—even when the policies come at the direct expense of communities fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rather than advancing policies that treat greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants demanding clear, enforceable regulations that would restrict emissions and create the conditions for a full transition to renewables, these groups have pushed convoluted market-based schemes that have treated greenhouse gases as late-capitalist abstractions to be traded, bundled, speculated upon, and moved around the globe like currency or subprime debt. And many of these same groups have championed one of the main fossil fuels—natural gas—as a supposed solution to climate change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it releases, particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us into catastrophic levels of warming (as explained in chapter four). In some cases, large foundations have collaborated to explicitly direct the U.S. green movement toward these policies.

The “market-based” climate solutions favored by so many large foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole. For one, they succeeded in taking what began as a straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through a jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue came to seem too complex and arcane for nonexperts to understand, seriously undercutting the potential to build a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters. As Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle has observed, “The movement to technical and market-based analyses as the core of reform environmentalism gutted whatever progressive vision” the movement had previously held. “Rather than engaging the broader public, reform environmentalism focuses debate among experts in the scientific, legal, and economic communities. It may provide technical solutions to specific problems but it neglects the larger social dynamics that underlie environmental degradation.”22

With emissions up by about 57 percent since the U.N. climate convention was signed in 1992, the failure of this polite strategy is beyond debate. And yet still, at the upper echelons of the climate movement, our soaring emissions are never blamed on anything as concrete as the fossil fuel corporations that work furiously to block all serious attempts to regulate emissions, and certainly not on the economic model that demands that these companies put profit before the health of the natural systems upon which all life depends. Rather the villains are always vague and unthreatening—a lack of “political will,” a deficit of “ambition”—while fossil fuel executives are welcomed at U.N. climate summits as key “partners” in the quest for “climate solutions.”23

Confronted with unassailable evidence of a grave collective problem, politicians across the political spectrum still asked themselves: “What can we do to stop it?” (Not: “How can we develop complex financial mechanisms to help the market fix it for us?”) What followed was a wave of environmental victories unimaginable by today’s antigovernment standards. In the United States, the legislative legacy is particularly striking: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Air Quality Act (1967), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the revised Clean Air Act (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976). In all, twenty-three federal environmental acts became law over the course of the 1970s alone, culminating in the Superfund Act in 1980, which required industry, through a small levy, to pay the cost of cleaning up areas that had become toxic.

Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation: ban or severely limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the polluter to pay for the cleanup. As journalist Mark Dowie outlines in his history of the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground, the real-world results of this approach were concrete and measurable. “Tens of millions of acres have been added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now required for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living again. . . . Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere; DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in either cows’ milk or mothers’ milk.” And Dowie stressed: “What all these facts have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or production of the substances in question.”III, 27

“A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?” With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, and the ascendency of many think-tank ideologues to powerful positions in his administration, the goalposts were yanked to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.” Using messaging that would have fit right in at a Heartland conference three decades later, James Watt, Reagan’s much despised interior secretary, accused greens of using environmental fears “as a tool to achieve a greater objective,” which he claimed was “centralized planning and control of the society.” Watt also warned darkly about where that could lead: “Look what happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the forces that this thing can evolve into.”28

In the 1980s, extreme free market ideology became the discourse of power, the language that elites were speaking to one another, even if large parts of the general public remained un-persuaded. That meant that for the mainstream green movement, confronting the antigovernment logic of market triumphalism head-on would have meant exiling themselves to the margins. And many of the big-budget green groups—having grown comfortable with their access to power and generous support from large, elite foundations—were unwilling to do that. Gus Speth, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and served as a top environmental advisor to Jimmy Carter during his presidency, described the problem like this: “We didn’t adjust with Reagan. We kept working within a system but we should have tried to change the system and root causes.”31 (After years in high-level jobs inside the U.N. system and as a dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Speth has today thrown his lot in with the radicals, getting arrested to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and co-founding an organization questioning the logic of economic growth.)

This open-for-business approach was so adept at attracting big donors and elite access that many older, more established green groups raced to get with the agreeable program, taking an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude to brazen extremes. It was in this period that the Nature Conservancy started loosening its definition of “preservation” so that conservation lands would eventually accommodate such dissonant activities as mansion building and oil drilling (laying the foundation for the group to get in on the drilling action itself). “I used to say that the only things not allowed on Nature Conservancy reserves were mining and slavery, and I wasn’t sure about the latter,” said Kierán Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Now I may have to withdraw the former as well.”33 Indeed the pro-corporate conversion of large parts of the green movement in the 1980s led to deep schisms inside the environmental movement. Some activists grew so disillusioned with the willingness of the big groups to partner with polluters that they broke away from the mainstream movement completely. Some formed more militant, confrontation-oriented groups like Earth First!, whose members attempted to stop loggers with sabotage and direct action.

Members of grassroots groups like the Love Canal Homeowners Association, the Bhopal Action Resource Group, and the National Toxics Campaign handed out pamphlets that read in part, “Who is destroying the earth—are we all equally to blame? No! We say go to the source. We say take it to Wall Street!” The pamphlets went on: “The polluters would have us believe that we are all just common travelers on Spaceship Earth, when in fact a few of them are at the controls, and the rest of us are choking on their exhaust.”34 This confrontational rhetoric—a foreshadowing of Occupy Wall Street two decades later, as well as the fossil fuel divestment movement—was an explicit critique of the corporate infiltration of the green movement. Daniel Finkenthal, a spokesperson for the anticorporate protests, declared, “Real environmental groups are disgusted with the corporate buyout of Earth Day,” telling one journalist that sponsors are “spending more money on Earth Day promotion than they are on actual corporate reform and the environment.”35

The Environmental Defense Fund has always insisted that it does not take donations from the companies with which it forms partnerships—that, writes EDF senior vice president for strategy and communications Eric Pooley, “would undermine our independence and integrity.” But the policy doesn’t bear much scrutiny. For instance, one of the EDF’s flagship partnerships is with Walmart, with whom it collaborates to “make the company more sustainable.” And it’s true that Walmart doesn’t donate to the EDF directly. However, the Walton Family Foundation, which is entirely controlled by members of the family that founded Walmart, gave the EDF $65 million between 2009 and 2013. In 2011, the foundation provided the group with nearly 15 percent of its funding. Meanwhile, Sam Rawlings Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on the EDF’s board of trustees (identified merely as “Boatman, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur” on the organization’s website).40

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.

We were called upon periodically to write letters, sign petitions, turn off our lights for an hour, make a giant human hourglass that could be photographed from the sky. And of course we were always asked to send money to the Big Green groups that were supposedly just on the cusp of negotiating a solution to climate change on our behalf. But most of all, regular, noncelebrity people were called upon to exercise their consumer power—not by shopping less but by discovering new and exciting ways to consume more.VII And if guilt set in, well, we could click on the handy carbon calculators on any one of dozens of green sites and purchase an offset, and our sins would instantly be erased.44 In addition to not doing much to actually lower emissions, these various approaches also served to reinforce the very “extrinsic” values that we now know are the greatest psychological barriers to climate action—from the worship of wealth and fame for their own sakes to the idea that change is something that is handed down from above by our betters, rather than something we demand for ourselves. They may even have played a role in weakening public belief in the reality of human-caused climate change. Indeed a growing number of communications specialists now argue that because the “solutions” to climate change proposed by many green groups in this period were so borderline frivolous, many people concluded that the groups must have been exaggerating the scale of the problem. After all, if clima...

We now know that fracked natural gas may leak enough methane to make its warming impact, especially in the near term, comparable to that of coal. Anthony Ingraffea, who coauthored the breakthrough Cornell study on methane leakage and describes himself as “a longtime oil and gas engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy Department,” wrote in The New York Times, “The gas extracted from shale deposits is not a ‘bridge’ to a renewable energy future—it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.”49 We also know, from experience in the U.S., that cheap and abundant natural gas doesn’t replace only coal but also potential power from renewables. This has led the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin Anderson to conclude, “If we are serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, the only safe place for shale gas remains in the ground.” Biologist Sandra Steingraber of New Yorkers Against Fracking puts the stark choice like this: we are “standing at an energy crossroads. One signpost points to a future powered by digging fossils from the ground and lighting them on fire. The other points to renewable energy. You cannot go in both directions at once. Subsidizing the infrastructure for one creates disincentives for the other.”50

The Nature Conservancy’s job has been to identify habitat preservation and conservation projects to “offset the impacts of oil and gas drilling pads and infrastructure.” From a climate change perspective, this is an absurd proposition, since these projects have no hope of offsetting the most damaging impact of all: the release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Which is why the most important preservation work that any environmental group can do is preserving the carbon in the ground, wherever it is. (Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy, which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas).52

The former mayor’s personal and philanthropic fortune—worth over $30 billion—is managed by investment firm Willett Advisors, which was established by Bloomberg and his associates. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, and confirmed by Bloomberg Philanthropies (which shares a building with the firm), Willett “invests in real assets focusing on oil and natural gas areas.” Michael Bloomberg did not respond to repeated requests for comment.55

When the first study arrived in September 2013, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it made news by identifying fugitive methane leakage rates from gas extraction that were ten to twenty times lower than those in most other studies to date.56 But the study’s design contained serious limitations, the most glaring of which was allowing the gas companies to choose the wells they wanted inspected. Robert Howarth, the lead author of the breakthrough 2011 Cornell study on the same subject, pointed out that the EDF’s findings were “based only on evaluation of sites and times chosen by industry,” and that the paper “must be viewed as a best-case scenario,” rather than a reflection of how the industry functions as a whole. He added, “The gas industry can produce gas with relatively low emissions, but they very often do not do so. They do better when they know they are being carefully watched.” These concerns, however, were entirely upstaged by the priceless headlines inspired by the Environmental Defense Fund study: “Study: Leaks at Natural Gas Wells Less Than Previously Thought” (Time); “Study: Methane Leaks from Gas Drilling Not Huge” (Associated Press); “Fracking Methane Fears Overdone” (The Australian); and so on.57

As Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award–nominated documentary on fracking, Gasland, puts it: “I think that what’s happening here is a squandering of the greatest political will that we’ve ever had towards getting off of fossil fuels.”58 Because while green groups battle over the research and voluntary codes, the gas companies are continuing to drill, leak, and pour billions of dollars into new infrastructure designed to last for many decades.

The U.S. government was so enthusiastic about this approach that it made the inclusion of carbon trading a deal breaker in the Kyoto negotiations. This led to what France’s former environment minister Dominique Voynet described as “radically antagonistic” conflicts between the United States and Europe, which saw the creation of a global carbon market as tantamount to abandoning the climate crisis to “the law of the jungle.” Angela Merkel, then Germany’s environment minister, insisted, “The aim cannot be for industrialized countries to satisfy their obligations solely through emissions trading and profit.”60 It is one of the great ironies of environmental history that the United States—after winning this pitched battle at the negotiating table—would fail to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and that the most important emissions market would become a reality in Europe, where it was opposed from the outset.

Under the U.N. system, all kinds of dodgy industrial projects can generate lucrative credits. For instance, oil companies operating in the Niger Delta that practice “flaring”—setting fire to the natural gas released in the oil drilling process because capturing and using the potent greenhouse gas is more expensive than burning it—have argued that they should be paid if they stop engaging in this enormously destructive practice. And indeed some are already registered to receive carbon credits under the U.N. system for no longer flaring—despite the fact that gas flaring has been illegal in Nigeria since 1984 (it’s a law filled with holes and is largely ignored).62 Even a highly polluting factory that installs a piece of equipment that keeps a greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere can qualify as “green development” under U.N. rules. And this, in turn, is used to justify more dirty emissions somewhere else.