This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

The mantra of the early ecologists was “everything is connected”—every tree a part of an intricate web of life. The mantra of the corporate-partnered conservationists, in sharp contrast, may as well be “everything is disconnected,” since they have successfully constructed a new economy in which the tree is not a tree but rather a carbon sink used by people thousands of miles away to appease our consciences and maintain our levels of economic growth. But the biggest problem with this approach is that carbon markets have failed even on their own terms, as markets. In Europe, the problems began with the decision to entice companies and countries to join the market by handing out a huge number of cheap carbon permits. When the economic crisis hit a few years later, it caused production and consumption to contract and emissions to drop on their own.

Tired of this time wasting, in February 2013, more than 130 environmental and economic justice groups called for the abolition of the largest carbon-trading system in the world, the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), in order “to make room for climate measures that work.” The declaration stated that, seven years into this experiment, “The ETS has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions . . . the worst polluters have had little to no obligation to cut emissions at source. Indeed, offset projects have resulted in an increase of emissions worldwide: even conservative sources estimate that between 1/3 and 2/3 of carbon credits bought into the ETS ‘do not represent real carbon reductions.’ ”76 The system has also allowed power companies and others to pass on the cost of compliance to their consumers, especially in the early years of the market, leading to a 2008 estimate by Point Carbon of windfall profits between $32 and $99 billion for electric utilities in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland over a span of just five years.

“We’re not going to get a better deal,” Duke Energy’s then CEO Jim Rogers boasted. “Ninety percent is terrific.” Congressman Rick Boucher, a Democrat representing coal-rich southwestern Virginia, gushed that the bill had so many giveaways that it “ushered in a new golden age of coal.”79

Waxman-Markey, the primary piece of climate legislation based on the coalition’s blueprint, specifically barred the EPA from regulating carbon from many major pollution sources, including coal-fired power plants. Michael Parr, senior manager of government affairs at DuPont, summarized the corporate strategy succinctly: “You’re either at the table or on the menu.”

thinking they were playing a savvy inside game, Big Green was outmaneuvered on a grand scale. The environmentalists who participated in USCAP disastrously misread the political landscape. They chose a stunningly convoluted approach to tackling climate change, one that would have blocked far more effective strategies, specifically because it was more appealing to big emitters—only to discover that the most appealing climate policy to polluters remained none at all. Worse, once their corporate partners fled the coalition, they had no shortage of ammo to fire at their former friends. The climate bill was a boondoggle, they claimed (it was), filled with handouts and subsidies (absolutely), and it would pass on higher energy costs to cash-strapped consumers (likely).IX To top it all off, as pro-oil Republican congressman Joe Barton put it, “The environmental benefit is nonexistent” (as the left flank of the green movement had been saying all along).84

“It was quite an experience having a brilliant communicator like Al Gore give me a personal PowerPoint presentation,” Branson writes of the meeting. “Not only was it one of the best presentations I have ever seen in my life, but it was profoundly disturbing to become aware that we are potentially facing the end of the world as we know it. . . . As I sat there and listened to Gore, I saw that we were looking at Armageddon.”4 As he tells it, Branson’s first move following his terrifying epiphany was to summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin Group’s corporate and brand development director. Together “we carefully discussed these issues and took the decision to change the way Virgin operates on a corporate and global level. We called this new Virgin approach to business Gaia Capitalism in honor of James Lovelock and his revolutionary scientific view” (a reference to Lovelock’s theory that the earth is “one single enormous living organism and every single part of the ecosystem reacted with every other part”). Not only would Gaia Capitalism “help Virgin to make a real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed to make money at the same time,” but Branson believed it held the potential to become “a new way of doing business on a global level.”5

In short, Branson was volunteering to do precisely what our governments have been unwilling to legislate—require that the profits being earned from warming the planet be channeled into the costly transition away from these dangerous energy sources. The director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Move America Beyond Oil campaign said of Virgin’s renewable energy initiatives, “This is exactly what the whole industry should be looking at.” Furthermore, Branson pledged that if its transportation divisions weren’t profitable enough to meet the $3 billion target, “the money will come out of our existing businesses.” He would do “whatever it takes” to fulfill the commitment because “what is the point of holding back when there will be no businesses” if we fail to act?7

“Virgin Earth Challenge”—a $25 million prize that would go to the first inventor to figure out how to sequester one billion tons of carbon a year from the air “without countervailing harmful effects.” He described it as “the largest ever science and technology prize to be offered in history.” This, Branson pronounced, was “the best way to find a solution to the problem of climate change,” elaborating in an official statement that, “If the greatest minds in the world today compete, as I’m sure they will, for The Virgin Earth Challenge, I believe that a solution to the CO2 problem could hopefully be found—a solution that could save our planet—not only for our children but for all the children yet to come.”9

With the $3 billion pledge, he would try to invent a low carbon fuel that could keep his airlines running at full capacity. If that failed, and carbon still needed to be burned to keep the planes in the air, then the prize would surely help invent a way to suck the heat-trapping gas out of the sky before it’s too late. To cover one more base, in 2009 Branson launched the Carbon War Room, an industry group looking for ways that different sectors could lower their emissions voluntarily, and save money in the process. “Carbon is the enemy,” Branson declared. “Let’s attack it in any possible way we can, or many people will die just like in any war.”11

Investments like these push us further down the road toward catastrophic warming, of course—and Buffett is poised to be one of the biggest winners there too. That’s because he is a major player in the reinsurance business, the part of the insurance sector that stands to profit most from climate disruption. As Eli Lehrer, the insurance industry advocate who defected from the Heartland Institute after its controversial billboard campaign, explains, “A large reinsurer like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway might simultaneously underwrite the risk of an industrial accident in Japan, a flood in the U.K., a hurricane in Florida, and a cyclone in Australia. Since there’s almost no chance that all of these events will happen at the same time, the reinsurer can profit from the premiums it earns on one type of coverage even when it pays out mammoth claims on another.” Perhaps it’s worth remembering that Noah’s Ark was not built to hold everyone, but just the lucky few.16

But unlike Branson, Steyer has done this by leaving the business that he founded, precisely because, as The Globe and Mail reported, “it valued a company’s bottom line, not its carbon footprint.” He further explained, “I have a passion to push for what I believe is the right thing. And I couldn’t do it in good conscience and hold down a job—and get paid very well for doing a job—where I wasn’t directly doing the right thing.”II This stance is very different from Branson’s, who is actively trying to prove that it is possible for a fossil-fuel–based company not just to do the right thing but to lead the transition to a clean economy.17 Nor is Branson in precisely the same category as Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, who have both used their philanthropy to aggressively shape the kinds of climate solutions on offer.

The real difference between Gates and Branson is that Branson still has a hands-on leadership role at Virgin and Gates left the top job at Microsoft years ago. Which is why when Branson entered the climate fray, he was really in a category of his own—promising to turn a major multinational, one with fossil fuels at its center, into an engine for building the next economy.

Which leaves us with Branson—his pledge, his prize, and his broader vision of voluntarily changing capitalism so that it is in keeping with the laws of “Gaia.” Almost a decade after Branson’s PowerPoint epiphany, it seems like a good time to check in on the “win-win” crusade. It’s too much to expect Branson to have changed the way business is done in less than a decade, of course. But given the hype, it does seem fair to examine how his attempts to prove that industry can lead us away from climate catastrophe without heavy government intervention have progressed. Because given the dismal track record of his fellow green billionaires on that front, it may be fair to conclude that if Branson can’t do it, no one can.

the first Virgin business was record sales, but Branson built his global brand by making sure that he not only owned the music stores, but the studio where the bands recorded, and the record label that represented them. Now he was applying the same logic to his airlines. Why pay Shell and Exxon to power Virgin planes and trains when Virgin could invent its own transport fuel? If it worked, the gambit would not only turn Branson into an environmental hero but also make him a whole lot richer. So the first tranche of money Branson diverted from his transportation divisions went to launch a new Virgin business, originally called Virgin Fuels and since replaced by a private equity firm called the Virgin Green Fund. In keeping with his pledge, Branson started off by investing in various agrofuel businesses, including making a very large bet of roughly $130 million on corn ethanol.IV And Virgin has attached its name to several biofuel pilot projects—one to derive jet fuel from eucalyptus trees, another from fermented gas waste—though it has not gone in as an investor. (Instead it mainly offers PR support, and a pledge to purchase the fuel if it becomes viable.)

Branson refused to answer direct questions about how much he had spent, writing that “it’s very hard to quantify the total amount we’ve invested in relation to climate change across the Group,” and his labyrinthine holdings make it hard to come up with independent estimates. “I’m not very good with figures,” the billionaire has said about another murky corner of Virgin’s empire, adding “I failed my elementary maths.” Part of the confusion stems from the fact that it’s unclear what should be counted toward the original $3 billion pledge. It began as a targeted quest for a miracle green fuel, then expanded to become a search for clean technologies generally, then, apparently, eco-anything. Branson now says that he is counting “investments made by individual Virgin companies in sustainability measures, such as more efficient fleets” of planes. More recently, Branson’s fight against global warming has centered around various attempts to “green” his two private islands in the Caribbean, one of which serves as his deluxe family compound and the other a $60,000 a night hotel. Branson claims the model he is setting will help nearby Caribbean nations to switch to renewable power themselves. Perhaps it will, but it’s all a long way from the pledge to transform capitalism back in 2006.31 The Virgin boss now plays down his original commitment, no longer referring to it as a “pledge” but rather a “gesture.”

Similar to amber beards donations of divorce settlement. FOS

When asked about the status of his $3 billion climate pledge, Branson tends to plead poor, pointing to the losses posted by his transportation businesses.39 But given the manic level of growth in these sectors, it’s an excuse that rings hollow. Not only have his trains been doing quite well, but given the flurry of new routes and new airlines, there was clearly no shortage of surplus money to spend. It’s just that the Virgin Group decided to follow the basic imperative of capital: grow or die. It’s also worth remembering that Branson was very clear when he announced the pledge that if his transportation divisions were not profitable enough to meet the target, he would divert funds from other parts of the Virgin empire.

removing carbon out of the air has long been technically possible. The problems have always been finding a means of removal that was not prohibitively costly, as well as storage and scale. In a market economy that means finding customers interested in buying a whole lot of captured carbon. Which is where the decision to pitch the eleven most promising entries in Calgary started to gel. Since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has been increasing its use of a method known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)—a set of techniques that mostly use high-pressure gas or steam injections to squeeze more oil out of existing fields. Most commonly, wells are injected with CO2 and research shows that this use of CO2 could cause the U.S. proven oil reserves to double or even, with “next-generation” technologies, quadruple. But there is a problem (other than the obvious planet-cooking one): according to Tracy Evans, former president of the Texas oil and gas company Denbury Resources, “The single largest deterrent to expanding production from EOR today is the lack of large volumes of reliable and affordable CO2.”50 With this in mind, several of Branson’s group of eleven finalists have pitched themselves as the start-ups best positioned to supply the oil industry with the steady stream of carbon dioxide it needs to keep the oil flowing. Ned David, president of Kilimanjaro Energy, one of Branson’s finalists, claimed that machines like his have the potential to release huge volumes of oil once assum...

He explained that if carbon that was removed from the air were used to extract oil, “you’re making hydrocarbon fuel with a very low life-cycle [of] carbon emissions.” Maybe not so low, because according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, EOR techniques are estimated to be almost three times as greenhouse-gas intensive as conventional extraction. And the oil is still going to be burned, thereby contributing to climate change. While more research is needed on the overall carbon footprint of EOR, one striking modeling study examined a similar proposal that would use CO2 captured not from the air but directly from coal plants. It found that the emissions benefit of sequestering CO2 would be more than canceled out by all that extra oil: on a system-wide basis, the process could still end up releasing about four times as much CO2 as it would save.

This wasn’t the only time Branson’s claims to be committed to waging war on carbon came into conflict with his hard-nosed business instincts. He came out against the proposed climate tax in Australia and blasted a plan for a global tax on airlines, claiming it “would tax the industry out of existence.”IX, 59 It’s this pattern that convinced Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth U.K. that Branson’s reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet wrecker volunteering to use his carbon profits to solve the climate crisis was little more than a cynical ploy. “It comes across as a charitable act,” Childs warned of the $3 billion pledge, “but I think he is also trying to take some of the heat out of aviation as a political issue. If you are running a transport company, you must have realized by now that climate change is going to be a massive issue for you.”60

But if we do grant Branson these good intentions, then the fact that all of these projects have failed to yield results is all the more relevant. Branson set out to harness the profit motive to solve the climate crisis—but the temptation to profit from practices worsening the crisis proved too great to resist. Again and again, the demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative—whether that meant lobbying against needed regulation, or putting more planes in the air, or pitching oil companies on using his pet miracle technologies to extract more oil. The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside and take a hard look at the results: at the celebrities and media conglomerates that were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were supposed to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were g...

If that were the case, the British people—with the climate crisis in mind—might have long ago decided to reinvest rail profits back into improving their public transit system, rather than allowing trains to become outdated and fares to skyrocket while shareholders of private rail companies like Branson’s pocketed hundreds of millions in returns from their taxpayer-subsidized operations. And rather than gambling on the invention of a miracle fuel, they might have decided to make it a top political priority to shift the entire system over to electric trains, with that power coming from renewable energy, rather than have the system partially powered by diesel, as it is now. No wonder 66 percent of British residents tell pollsters they support renationalizing the railway companies.64 Richard Branson got at least one thing right. He showed us the kind of bold model that has a chance of working in the tight time frame left: the profits from our dirtiest industries must be diverted into the grand and hopeful project of cleaning up their mess. But if there is one thing Branson has demonstrated, it is that it won’t happen on a voluntary basis or on the honor system. It will have to be legislated—using the kinds of tough regulations, higher taxes, and steeper royalty rates these sectors have resisted all along.

DIMMING THE SUN The Solution to Pollution Is . . . Pollution?

“Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.” —Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 20081

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.” —Wil...

the time has come for governments to prepare a technological Plan B. In a report published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most effective. Two years later it declared that planetary-scale engineering interventions that would block a portion of the sun’s rays “may be the only option for reducing global temperatures quickly in the event of a climate emergency.”3

Because governing geoengineering, as opposed to just testing it, is the focus of this retreat, the usual club has been temporarily expanded to include several climate scientists from Africa and Asia, as well as legal ethicists, experts in international treaties and conventions, and staffers from several green NGOs, including Greenpeace and WWF-UK (Greenpeace does not support geoengineering, but WWF-UK has come out in cautious support of “research into geo-engineering approaches in order to find out what is possible”).19 The organizers have also invited a couple of outspoken critics. Alan Robock, a famously gruff white-bearded climatologist from Rutgers University, is here. When I last saw him in action, he was presenting a slide show titled “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” ranging from “Whitening of the sky” (#7) to “Rapid warming if deployment stops” (#10). Most provocative is Australian climate expert Clive Hamilton, who has wondered aloud whether “the geoengineers [are] modern-day Phaetons, who dare to regulate the sun, and who must be struck down by Zeus before they destroy the earth?”20

Is the human that gave us the climate crisis capable of properly/safely regulating SRM? • In considering SRM regulation, are we not in danger of perpetuating the view that the earth can be manipulated in our interests? • Don’t we have to engage with these questions before we place ourselves in the triangle?

The risks can be debated and contested, of course—and they are. The most common response is that, yes, there could be negative impacts, but not as negative as the impacts of climate change itself. David Keith goes further, arguing that we have the power to effectively minimize the risks with appropriate design; he proposes an SRM program that would slowly ramp up and then down again, “in combination with cutting emissions and with a goal to reduce—but not eliminate—the rate of temperature rise.” As he explains in his 2013 book, A Case for Climate Engineering, “Crop losses, heat stress and flooding are the impacts of climate change that are likely to fall most harshly on the world [sic] poorest. The moderate amounts of geoengineering contemplated in this slow ramp scenario are likely to reduce each of these impacts over the next half century, and so it will benefit the poor and politically disadvantaged who are most vulnerable to rapid environmental change. This potential for reducing climate risk is the reason I take geoengineering seriously.”40

It’s true that it might be technically possible to conduct geoengineering in a way that distributed the risks more equitably. For instance, the same 2013 study that found that the African Sahel could be devastated by SRM done in the Northern Hemisphere—a common assumption about where the sulfur injections would take place—found that the Sahel could actually see an increase in rainfall if the injections happened in the Southern Hemisphere instead. However, in this scenario, the United States and the Caribbean could see a 20 percent increase in hurricane frequency, and northeastern Brazil could see its rainfall plummet. In other words, it might be possible to tailor some of these technologies to help the most vulnerable people on the planet, and those who contributed least to the creation of the climate crisis—but not without endangering some of the wealthiest and most powerful regions. So we are left with a question less about technology than about politics: does anyone actually believe that geoengineering will be used to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater risk of extreme weather?42

This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change. And what those risks tell us is that dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler system—unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray gasoline instead of water. Oh—and that, once turned on, we might not be able to turn off the system without triggering an inferno that could burn down the entire building. If someone sold you a sprinkler like that, you’d definitely want a refund.

This makes geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine, whose goal is to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention. These technologies, by contrast, respond to the lack of balance our pollution has created by taking our ecosystems even further away from self-regulation. We would require machines to constantly pump pollution into the stratosphere and would be unable to stop unless we invented other machines that could suck existing pollution out of the lower atmosphere, then store and monitor that waste indefinitely. If we sign on to this plan and call it stewardship, we effectively give up on the prospect of ever being healthy again. The earth—our life support system—would itself be put on life support, hooked up to machines 24/7 to prevent it from going full-tilt monster on us.

The dogged faith in technology’s capacity to allow us to leapfrog out of crisis is born of earlier technological breakthroughs—splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. And some of the players pushing most aggressively for a techno-fix for climate change were directly involved in those earlier technological triumphs—like Lowell Wood, who helped develop advanced nuclear weaponry, or Gates and Myrhvold, who revolutionized computing. But as longtime sustainability expert Ed Ayres wrote in God’s Last Offer, the “if we can put a man on the moon” boosterism “glosses over the reality that building rockets and building livable communities are two fundamentally different endeavors: the former required uncanny narrow focus; the latter must engage a holistic view. Building a livable world isn’t rocket science; it’s far more complex than that.”47

It’s much the same story at several influential think tanks that are generously funded with fossil fuel dollars. For instance, over a period of years, as it stoked the flames of climate change denial, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) took millions of dollars in donations from ExxonMobil. It continues to be the top recipient of money from conservative foundations eager to block climate action, bringing in at least $86.7 million from those sources since 2003. And yet, in 2008, the think tank launched a department called the Geoengineering Project. The project has held several conferences, published multiple reports, and sent experts to testify before congressional hearings—all with the consistent message that geoengineering isn’t a Plan B should emission cuts fail, but rather a Plan A. Lee Lane, who for several years was AEI’s main spokesperson on the subject, explained in 2010, “For those of us who believe that climate change might, at some point, pose a grave threat—and that emissions containment is both costly and politically impractical—climate engineering is beginning to look like the last, best hope.”52

If we were staring down the barrel of an imminent and unavoidable climate emergency, the kinds of monstrous calculations implicit in geoengineering—sacrifice part of Latin America in order to save all of China, or save the remaining glaciers and land ice to prevent catastrophic global sea level rise but risk endangering India’s food source—might be unavoidable. But even if we acquire enough information to make those kinds of calculations (and it’s hard to imagine how we could), we notably are not at that point. We have options, ones that would greatly decrease the chances of ever confronting those impossible choices, choices that indeed deserve to be described as genocidal. To fail to exercise those options—which is exactly what we are collectively doing—knowing full well that eventually the failure could force government to rationalize “risking” turning whole nations, even subcontinents, into sacrifice zones, is a decision our children may judge as humanity’s single most immoral act.

The reinvention of a major climate polluter into a climate savior based on little more than good PR. The assumption that dangling enough money can solve any mess we create. And the certainty that the solutions to climate change must come from above rather than below.

When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent, the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely. That knowledge should inform all we do—especially the decision about whether to gamble on geoengineering.

The danger is not so much that these visions will be realized; geoengineering the earth is a long shot, never mind terraforming Mars. Yet as Branson’s own emissions illustrate so elegantly, these fantasies are already doing real damage in the here and now. As environmental author Kenneth Brower writes, “The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.” And worst of all, it tells us that, “should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go.”63 We know this escape story all too well, from Noah’s Ark to the Rapture. What we need are stories that tell us something very different: that this planet is our only home, and that what goes around comes around (and what goes up, stays up for a very long time, so we’d better be careful what we put there).

“The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them. “The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.” —Arundhati Roy, 20101