This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril.

When the 2 degrees target was made official in Copenhagen, there were impassioned objections from many delegates who said the goal amounted to a “death sentence” for some low-lying island states, as well as for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact it is a very risky target for all of us: so far, temperatures have increased by just .8 degree Celsius and we are already experiencing many alarming impacts, including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2012 and the acidification of oceans far more rapidly than expected. Allowing temperatures to warm by more than twice that amount will unquestionably have perilous consequences.14

Indeed to support fuel conservation during World War II, pleasure driving was virtually eliminated in the U.K., and between 1938 and 1944, use of public transit went up by 87 percent in the U.S. and by 95 percent in Canada. Twenty million U.S. households—representing three fifths of the population—were growing victory gardens in 1943, and their yields accounted for 42 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed that year. Interestingly, all of these activities together dramatically reduce carbon emissions.22

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. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change. Cutthroat competition between nations has deadlocked U.N. climate negotiations for decades: rich countries dig in their heels and declare that they won’t cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in the global hierarchy; poorer countries declare that they won’t give up their right to pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all. For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.

“Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.”37

“There’s a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming.

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

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.

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.

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.

Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services—regardless of the costs. Public dollars also need to go to the equally important, though less glamorous projects and services that will help us prepare for the coming heavy weather. That includes things like hiring more firefighters and improving storm barriers. And it means coming up with new, nonprofit disaster insurance programs so that people who have lost everything to a hurricane or a forest fire are not left at the mercy of a private insurance industry that is already adapting to climate change by avoiding payouts and slapping victims with massive rate increases.

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

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?

But the extractive industries shouldn’t be the only targets of the “polluter pays” principle. The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world. In 2011, the Department of Defense released, at minimum, 56.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, more than the U.S.-based operations of ExxonMobil and Shell combined.46 So surely the arms companies should pay their share. The car companies have plenty to answer for too, as do the shipping industry and the airlines. 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

Taken together, there is no shortage of options for equitably coming up with the cash to prepare for the coming storms while radically lowering our emissions to prevent catastrophic warming.

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.

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.

The stimulus package could have been used to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. The auto industry could have been dramatically reengineered so that its factories built the machinery to power that transition—not just a few token electric cars (though those too) but also vast streetcar and high-speed rail systems across an underserved nation.

Retrofitting factories on that scale is expensive, to be sure, and that’s where the bailed-out banks could have come in. A government unafraid to use its newfound power could have used the leverage it had over the banks (having just pulled them from the precipice) to enlist them—kicking and screaming if necessary—in this great transformation.

The workers at these plants, as Gindin suggested, could have been given the chance to run their old factories as cooperatives, as happened in several hundred abandoned factories in Argentina after that country’s economic crisis in 2001.

If there is a lesson in this tremendous missed opportunity, it is this: if we are going to see climate action of the scale and speed required, the left is going to have to quickly learn from the right. Conservatives have managed to stall and roll back climate action amidst economic crisis by making climate about economics—about the pressing need to protect growth and jobs during difficult times (and they are always difficult). Progressives can easily do the same: by showing that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.

A better model would be a new kind of utility—run democratically, by the communities that use them, as co-ops or as a “commons,” as author and activist David Bollier and others have outlined.18 This kind of structure would enable citizens to demand far more from their energy companies than they are able to now—for example, that they direct their profits away from new fossil fuel exploration and obscene executive compensation and shareholder returns and into building the network of complementary renewables that we now know has the potential to power our economies in our lifetimes.

“A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the positive impacts of agroecology on food production, poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation—and this is what is needed in a world of limited resources,” says Olivier De Schutter, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2008 to 2014.26

“The problem is that even with the Green Revolution, starvation continues—particularly in India, where the revolution was most intense. Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”28

about 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.

The Canadian tar sands are the opposite: terra-deforming. Taking a habitable ecosystem, filled with life, and engineering it into a moonscape where almost nothing can live. And if this goes on, it could impact an area roughly the size of England. All to access a semisolid form of “unconventional” oil known as bitumen that is so difficult and energy-intensive to extract that the process is roughly three to four times as greenhouse gas intensive as extracting conventional oil.37

The study found that methane emissions linked to fracked natural gas are at least 30 percent higher than the emissions linked to conventional gas. That’s because the fracking process is leaky—methane leaks at every stage of production, processing, storage, and distribution.

Increasingly, these extreme extraction methods—blasting oil and gas out of rock, steaming oil out of tarlike dirt —are being used together, as when fracked natural gas is piped in to superheat the water that melts the bitumen in the tar sands, to cite just one example from the energy death spiral. What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic—all to get at the last drops and the final rocks.

The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.

several large environmental organizations in the U.S.—including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the BlueGreen Alliance, and 350.org—took stands in support of demands for comprehensive reform of the U.S. immigration system, in part because migration is increasingly linked to climate and also because members of immigrant communities are often prevented from defending themselves against heightened environmental risks since doing so could lead to incarceration or deportation.70

The core of the problem comes back to the same inescapable fact that has both blocked climate action and accelerated emissions: all of us are living in the world that neoliberalism built, even if we happen to be critics of neoliberalism.

the truth is that, while contemporary, hyper-globalized capitalism has exacerbated the climate crisis, it did not create it. We started treating the atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that.

Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue.

precisely because our bodies are so effectively separated from our geographies, we who have access to this privilege have proven ourselves far too capable of ignoring the fact that we aren’t just changing our personal climate but the entire planet’s climate as well, warming not just the indoors but the outdoors too. And yet the warming is no less real for our failure to pay attention.

For one of those centuries, 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.

It’s not that these substances are evil; it’s just that they belong where they are: in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions. Coal, when left alone, helpfully sequesters not just the carbon long ago pulled out of the air by plants, but all kinds of other toxins.

When coal is dug up and burned, however, those toxins are released in the ecosystem, eventually making their way into the oceans, where they are absorbed by krill and plankton, then by fish, and then by us. 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).

there have been voices in all of these movements, moreover, that identified the parallels between the economic model’s abuse of the natural world and its abuse of human beings deemed worthy of being sacrificed, or at least uncounted. Karl Marx, for instance, recognized capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” while feminist scholars have long recognized that patriarchy’s dual war against women’s bodies and against the body of the earth were connected to that essential, corrosive separation between mind and body—and between body and earth—from which both the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution sprang.38

Space is opening up for a growing influence of Indigenous thought on new generations of activists, beginning, most significantly, with Mexico’s Zapatista uprising in 1994, and continuing, as we will see, with the important leadership role that Indigenous land-rights movements are playing in pivotal anti-extraction struggles in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. In part through these struggles, non-Indigenous progressive movements are being exposed to worldviews based on relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world that are the antithesis of extractivism. These movements have truly heard the message of climate change and are winning battles to keep significant amounts of carbon in the ground.

Carson’s focus was DDT, but for her the problem was not a particular chemical; it was a logic. “The ‘control of nature,’ ” Carson wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”53 Carson’s writing inspired a new, much more radical generation of environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem rather than as its engineers or mechanics, giving birth to the field of Ecological Economics. It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism—that there would always be more earth for us to consume—began to be forcefully challenged within the mainstream.

A great many progressives have opted out of the climate change debate in part because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars, had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake.

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

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.

We’ve tried it Branson’s way. (And Buffett’s, Bloomberg’s, Gates’s, and Pickens’s way.) The soaring emissions speak for themselves. There will, no doubt, be more billionaire saviors who make splashy entrances, with more schemes to rebrand capitalism. The trouble is, we simply don’t have another decade to lose pinning our hopes on these sideshows. There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.

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.

Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

certain, much rarer eruptions—Mount Pinatubo among them—send high volumes of sulfur dioxide all the way up to the stratosphere. When that happens, the sulfuric acid droplets don’t fall back down: they remain in the stratosphere, and within weeks can circulate to surround the entire planet. The droplets act like tiny, light-scattering mirrors, preventing the full heat of the sun from reaching the planet’s surface. When these larger volcanic eruptions occur in the tropics, the aerosols stay suspended in the stratosphere for roughly one to two years, and the global cooling effects can last even longer. That’s what happened after Pinatubo. The year after the eruption, global temperatures dropped by half a degree Celsius,

The cons are that, depending on which sun-blocking method is used and how intensively, a permanent haze could appear over the earth, potentially making clear blue skies a thing of the past.7 The haze could prevent astronomers from seeing the stars and planets clearly and weaker sunlight could reduce the capacity of solar power generators to produce energy (irony alert). But the biggest problem with the Pinatubo Option is that it does nothing to change the underlying cause of climate change, the buildup of heat-trapping gases, and instead treats only the most obvious symptom—warmer temperatures.

Oh, and another con: once you start spraying material into the stratosphere to block the sun, it would basically be impossible to stop because if you did, all the warming that you had artificially suppressed by putting up that virtual sunshade would hit the planet’s surface in one single tidal wave of heat, with no time for gradual adaptation.