This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

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 pres...

And since it is generally accepted that fossil fuel money and conservative foundations have shaped the climate change denial movement, it seems fair to ask whether fossil fuel money and the values of centrist foundations have shaped parts of the movement that are in the business of proposing solutions. And there is a good deal of evidence that these ties have indeed had a decisive influence.

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.

Most infamously within the movement, a 2007 road map titled “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”—which was sponsored by six large foundations—advocated carbon trading as a response to climate change and supported both natural gas and expanded nuclear power. And as these policies were being turned into political campaigns, the message sent to green groups was essentially “step in line, or else you’re not going to get your share of the money,” recalls Jigar Shah, a

renowned solar entrepreneur, former Greenpeace USA board member, and one-time director of the industry-focused Carbon War Room.21 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.

These policies have also fed the false perception that a full transition to renewable energy is technically impossible—since if it were possible, why would all these well-meaning green groups be spending so much of their time pushing trading schemes and singing the praises of natural gas, even when extracted through the ecologically destructive method of fracking?

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.”

In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson’s warnings. The group’s unofficial slogan was, “Sue the bastards,” and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle.25 This was a time when intervening directly in the market to prevent harm was still regarded as a sensible policy option. 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 cl...

As a result, many of these newly professional environmentalists came to pride themselves on being the ultimate insiders, able to wheel and deal across the political spectrum. And so long as the victories kept coming, their insider strategy seemed to be working.

Then came the 1980s. “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 sympto...

the movement’s core beliefs about the need to respond to environmental threats by firmly regulating corporations were being casually cast into the dustbin of history.

the EDF pushed for the first full-fledged cap-and-trade system. These rules did not tell polluters that they had to cut their sulfur emissions but, instead, set a nationwide cap on sulfur dioxide, beneath which big emitters like coal-fired power plants could do as they pleased—pay other companies to make reductions for them, purchase allowances permitting them to pollute as much as they had before, or make a profit by selling whatever permits they didn’t use.38 The new approach worked and it was popular among foundations and private

donors, particularly on Wall Street, where financiers were understandably attracted to the idea of harnessing the profit motive to solve environmental ills. Under Krupp’s leadership, the EDF’s annual budget expanded from $3 million to roughly $120 million. Julian Robertson, founder of the hedge fund Tiger Management, underwrote the EDF’s work to the tune of $40 million, a staggering sum for a single benefactor.V, 39 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.”

It wasn’t that there was no role for the public. 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

But when the Clinton administration came to the negotiations, it proposed an alternate route: create a system of international carbon trading modeled on the cap-and-trade system used to address

acid rain (in the run-up to Kyoto, the EDF worked closely on the plan with Al Gore’s office).59 Rather than straightforwardly requiring all industrialized countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by a fixed amount, the scheme would issue pollution permits, which they could use, sell if they didn’t need them, or purchase so that they could pollute more.

National programs would be set up so that companies could similarly trade these permits, with the country staying within an overall emissions cap. Meanwhile, projects that were employing practices that claimed to be keeping carbon out of the atmosphere—whether by planting trees that sequester carbon, or by producing low carbon energy, ...

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.”

From 2005 through 2010, the World Bank estimates that the various carbon markets around the globe saw over $500 billion in trades (though some experts believe those estimates are inflated). Huge numbers of projects around the world, meanwhile, are generating carbon credits—the CDM alone had an estimated seven-thousand-plus registered projects in early

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.

It should hardly be surprising that so many questionable offset projects have come to dominate the emissions market. The prospect of getting paid real money based on projections of how much of an invisible substance is kept out of the air tends to be something of a scam magnet. And the carbon market has attracted a truly impressive array of grifters and hustlers who scour biologically rich but economically poor nations like Papua New Guinea, Ecuador, and Congo, often preying on the isolation of Indigenous people whose forests can be classified as offsets. These carbon cowboys, as they have come to be called, arrive bearing aggressive contracts (often written in English, with no translation) in which large swaths of territory are handed over

to conservation groups on the promise of money for nothing. In the bush of Papua New Guinea, carbon deals are known as “sky money”; in Madagascar, where the promised wealth has proved as ephemeral as the product being traded, the Betsimisaraka people talk of strangers who are “selling the wind.”

For instance, in Paraná, Brazil, at a project providing offsets for Chevron, GM, and American Electric Power and administered by The Nature Conservancy and a Brazilian NGO, Indigenous Guarani were not allowed to forage for

wood or hunt in the places they’d always occupied, or even fish in nearby waterways. As one local put it, “They want to take our home from us.” Cressant Rakotomanga, president of a community organization in Madagascar where the Wildlife Conservation Society is running an offset program, expressed a similar sentiment. “People are frustrated because before the project, they were completely free to hunt, fish and cut down the forests.”69 Indeed the offset market has created a new class of “green” human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse.

The added irony is that many of the people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet. They have strong reciprocal relationships with nature, drawing on local ecosystems on a small scale while

caring for and regenerating the land so it continues to provide for them and their descendants.

As solar entrepreneur Jigar Shah put it: “When you look at these companies that were in USCAP, they were not interested in regulating carbon. They were interested in a huge amount of wealth being transferred to their companies in exchange for their vote on climate

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 going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender. 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.

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.

But 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, and as Oliver Morton noted in Nature, “Had there not been a simultaneous El Niño, 1992 would have been 0.7 degrees cooler, worldwide, than 1991.”

That figure is notable because we have warmed the earth by roughly the same amount thus far with our greenhouse gas emissions. Which is why some scientists have become convinced that if they could just find a way to do artificially what those large eruptions do naturally, then they could force down the temperature of the earth to counteract global warming.

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. That might help control something like glacial melt, but would do nothing about the increased atmospheric carbon that the ocean continues to soak up, causing rapid acidification that is already taking a heavy toll on hard-shelled marine life from coral to oysters, and may have cascading impacts through the entire aquatic food chain.

many of the most aggressive advocates of geoengineering research are associated with planet-hacking start-ups, or hold patents on various methods.

Several research teams have produced models that show significant losses of rainfall as a result of SRM and other sunlight-reflecting geoengineering methods. One 2012 study shows a 20 percent reduction in rainfall in some areas of the Amazon after a particularly extreme use of SRM. When another team modeled spraying sulfur from points in the Northern Hemisphere for a 2013 study, the results projected a staggering 60–100 percent drop in a key measure of plant productivity in the African countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Sudan)—that means, potentially, a complete crop collapse in some areas.

Critics of sun shielding also draw on history to bolster their arguments, and when they look back, they see much more than pretty sunsets and “proof of harmlessness.” In fact, a great deal of compelling research shows a connection between large volcanic eruptions and precisely the kinds of droughts some computer models are projecting for SRM. Take the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo itself. When it erupted, large swaths of Africa were already suffering from drought due to natural fluctuations. But after the eruption, the situation grew much worse. In the following year, there was a 20 percent reduction in precipitation in southern Africa and a 10–15 percent reduction in precipitation in South Asia. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) described the drought as “the most severe in the last century”; an estimated 120 million people were affected. The Los Angeles Times reported crop losses of 50–90 percent, and half the population of Zimbabwe required food aid.

If Pinatubo was the only large eruption to have been followed by severe and life-endangering drought, that might not be enough to draw clear conclusions. But it fits neatly into a larger pattern. Alan Robock, a leading expert on the effect of volcanoes on climate, points in particular to two other eruptions—Iceland’s Laki in 1783 and Alaska’s Mount Katmai in 1912. Both were sufficiently powerful to send a high volume of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and, like Pinatubo, it turns out that both were followed by a series of terrible, or badly worsening regional droughts.

Reliable records of rainfall go back only roughly one hundred years, but as Robock informed me, “There’s one thing that’s been measured for 1,500 years, and that’s the flow of the Nile River. And if you look back at the flow of the Nile River in 1784 or 1785”—the two years following Laki’s eruption in Iceland—“it was much weaker than normal.”

Scholars have noted that in the years immediately following the eruption, drought and famine gripped Japan and India, claiming millions of lives, although there is much debate and uncertainty surrounding Laki’s contribution.

In Western and Central Europe, meanwhile, a brutally cold winter led to flooding and high mortality rates. Expert estimates of the global death toll from the eruption and the resulting extreme weather range widely, from over one-and-a-half million to as many as six million people. At a time when world population was less than one billion, those are stunningly high numbers, making Laki quite possibly the deadliest volcano in recorded history.

“there haven’t been that many big eruptions but they all tell you the same stories. . . . The global average precipitation went down. In fact, if you look at global average precipitation for the last fifty years, the three years with the lowest global precipitation were after the three largest volcanic eruptions. Agung in 1963, El Chichón in 1982, and Pinatubo in 1991.” The connections are so clear, Robock and two coauthors argued in one paper, that the next time there is a large “high-latitude volcanic eruption,” policymakers should start preparing food aid immediately, “allowing society time to plan for and remediate the consequences.”39

“Creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix.”

In contrast, it is all too easy to imagine scenarios wherein geoengineering could be used in a desperate bid to, say, save corn crops in South Dakota, even if it very likely meant sacrificing rainfall in South Sudan. And we can imagine it because wealthy-country governments are already doing this, albeit more passively, by allowing temperatures to increase to levels that are a danger to hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, rather than introducing policies that interfere with short-term profits. This is why African delegates at U.N. climate summits have begun using words like “genocide” to describe the

collective failure to lower emissions. And why Mary Ann Lucille Sering, climate change secretary for the Philippines, told the 2013 summit in Warsaw, Poland, “I am beginning to feel like we are negotiating on who is to live and who is to die.” Rob Nixon, an author and University of Wisconsin English professor, has evocatively described the brutality of climate change as a form of “slow violence”; geoengineering could well prove to be a tool to significantly speed that up.

Bill Gates describes geoengineering as “just an insurance policy,” something to have “in the back pocket in case things happen faster.”