This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.

Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings.

Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do; left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing else.

“The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing.”

it was the moment when the realization truly sank in that no one was coming to save us.

Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim—or so our culture tells us every day.

we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.

our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.

we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.

“In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”

It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call.

“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.”

“People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.”

Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis.

no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the atom.

“a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions.”

“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.”

Consuming green just means substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a more efficient one.

Consuming less, however, means changing how much energy we actually use:

“hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today.”

“For people it’s self-evident that goods on which everybody is dependent should belong to the public,”

“Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or “small farmers cool the planet.”

the only thing politicians fear more than losing donations is losing elections.

“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.”

Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking.

“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.”

“To counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy boardrooms, and posh retreats.”

The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

“You know your government has failed when your grandma starts to riot.”

“We live in the land of the lost.”

“It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.”

“We get rich first, we deal with the environment problems second.”

the real problem is not that trade deals are allowing fossil fuel companies to challenge governments, it’s that governments are not fighting back against these corporate challenges.

The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation.

Desperate people do desperate things.

“If we can’t solve the climate problem, then all the rest of this is for naught.”

We learned that the only true green and sustainable things in life are how we treat each other.”

I couldn’t look at any body of water without imagining it covered in oil.

Gobble it all up before it’s gone.

we seem to be turning to high-risk technologies not just when no other options are available, but at the first sign of trouble—even as a convenient shortcut (“tick tock,” women of a certain age are told).

if the earth is indeed our mother, then far from the bountiful goddess of mythology, she is a mother facing a great many fertility challenges of her own.

surviving is not the same as thriving, not the same as living well.

Whether we choose to see the earth as a mother, a father, a parent, or an ungendered force of creation, what matters is that we are acknowledging that we are not in charge, that we are part of a vast living system on which we depend.

“What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

“Denial can—and I believe should—be understood as testament to our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and an underlying sense of moral imperative to respond, even as we fail to do so.”

History knocked on your door, did you answer?”