This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Venezuelan political scientist Edgardo Lander aptly puts it, “The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more important than life.”

We are used to thinking about extinction as a process that affects a species or cluster of species of every age group—the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs, or the way that our ancestors hunted a range of animals until they were all gone. And we still extinguish species that way, of course. But in the age of fossil fuels, we can render the earth less alive by far more stealthy means: by interfering with the capacity of adults to reproduce in the first place, and by making the first days of life simply too difficult to survive. No corpses, just an absence—more handfuls of nothing.