This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Nathan Myhrvold likens SRM to “having fire sprinklers in a building”—you hope you won’t need it, “but you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.”

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.

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.

There is no doubt that some of the people pushing geoengineering see these technologies not as emergency bridges away from fossil fuels, but as a means to keep the fossil fuel frenzy going for as long as possible.

Corporations that either dig up fossil fuels or that, like car companies, are responsible for a disproportionate share of their combustion, have a long track record of promoting geoengineering as a response to climate change, one that they clearly see as preferable to stopping their pollution.

And notably, it was BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin, who convened one of the first formal scientific gatherings on geoengineering back in 2008. The gathering produced a report outlining a decade-long research project into climate modification, with a particular focus on Solar Radiation Management. (Koonin left BP to work for the Obama administration as the Department of Energy’s under secretary for science.)51 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 engineeri...

The Indian author and activist Vandana Shiva, meanwhile, points out that shifting to an agriculture model based on agro-ecological methods would not only sequester large amounts of carbon, it would reduce emissions and increase food security. And unlike geoengineering, “It’s not a fifty-year experiment. It’s an assured, guaranteed path that has been shown to work.”55 Admittedly, such responses break all the free market rules. Then again, so did bailing out the banks and the auto companies. And they are still not close to as radical as breaking the primordial link between temperature and atmospheric carbon—all to meet our desire for planetary air-conditioning.

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.

It is awfully reassuring to imagine that a technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but, once again, far too little attention is being paid to the billions of people living in monsoon-fed parts of Asia and Africa who could well pay the price with their suffering, even their lives.

Since the doors to foreign investors were

flung open near the end of British colonial rule, oil companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its land, water, and people with undisguised disdain. Wastewater was dumped directly into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly, turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills. In an often cited statistic, an Exxon Valdez–worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty years, poisoning fish, animals, and humans.25 But none of this compares with the misery that is gas flaring. Over the course of extracting oil, a large amount of natural gas is also produced. If the infrastructure for capturing, transporting, and using that gas were built in Nigeria, it could meet the electricity needs of the entire country. Yet in the Delta, the multinational companies mostly opt to save money by setting it on fire, or

flaring it, which sends the gas into the atmosphere in great pillars of polluting fire. The practice is responsible for about 40 percent of Nigeria’s total CO2 emissions (which is why, as discussed, some companies are absurdly trying to collect carbon credits for stopping this practice). Meanwhile, more than half of Delta communities lack electricity and running ...

The new organization did more than beg the government for better conditions, it asserted the rights of the Ogoni people to control the resources under their lands and set about taking those rights back. Not only were oil installations shut down, but as Nigerian political ecologist and environmental activist Godwin Uyi Ojo writes that, on January 4, 1993, “an estimated 300,000 Ogoni, including women and children, staged a historic non-violent protest, and marched against Shell’s ‘ecological wars.’ ” That year, Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoni territory, forsaking significant revenues (though the company remains the biggest oil player in other parts of the Delta). Saro-Wiwa stated that the Nigerian state “will have to shoot and kill every Ogoni man, woman and child to take more of their oil.”28 To this day, oil production has ceased in Ogoniland—a fact that remains one of the most significant achievements of grassroots environmental activism anywhere in the world.

Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable. And for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacked political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class. And the people who lived in these condemned places knew they had been written off. To quote Paula Swearengin, an activist from a coal mining family near Beckley, West Virginia, a landscape ravaged by mountaintop-removal coal mining: “We live in the land of the

several of the largest zones targeted for sacrifice are located in some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. For instance, Daniel Yergin, energy industry consultant (and author of The Prize), euphorically described the newfound capacity to extract oil from “tight rock” formations—usually shale—as being akin to discovering whole new petrostates: “This is like adding another Venezuela or Kuwait by 2020, except these tight oil fields are in the United States.”40 And of course it’s not just the communities next to these new oil fields that are asked to sacrifice. So much oil is now being extracted in the U.S. (or “Saudi America,” as some market watchers call it) that the number of rail cars carrying oil has increased by 4111 percent in just five years, from 9,500 cars in 2008 to an estimated 400,000 in 2013.

a recent investigation by Environment Canada contained several disturbing findings, including that diluted tar sands oil sinks in saltwater “when battered by waves and mixed with sediments” (rather than floating on the ocean surface where it can be partially recovered) and that dispersants like those used during BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster have only “a limited effect,” according to a report in The Globe and

Mail. And there has been virtually no formal research at all on the particular risks of transporting tar sands oil via truck or

And there are still no comprehensive studies on the impacts of this pollution on human health. On the contrary, some who have chosen to speak out have faced severe reprisals. Most notable had been the experience of John O’Connor, a gentle, gray-bearded family doctor who still speaks with an accent from his native Ireland. In 2003, O’Connor began to report that, while treating patients in Fort Chipewyan, he was coming across alarming numbers of cancers, including extremely rare and aggressive bile-duct malignancies. He quickly found himself under fire from federal health regulators, who filed several misconduct charges against him with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (including raising “undue alarm”). “I don’t know, personally, of any situation where a doctor has had to go through what I’ve gone through,” O’Connor has said of the reputational smears and the years spent fighting the allegations. He was, eventually, cleared of all charges and a subsequent investigation of cancer rates vindicated several of his

This is, of course, a strategy. Only by systematically failing to conduct basic research, and silencing experts who are properly tasked to investigate health and environmental concerns, can industry and government continue to make absurdly upbeat claims about how all is under control in the oil

A similar willful blindness pervades the rapid spread of hydraulic fracking. For years the U.S. gas industry responded to reports of contaminated water wells by insisting that there was no scientific proof of any connection between fracking and the fact that residents living near gas drilling suddenly found they could set their tap water on fire. But the reason there was no evidence was because the industry had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation—the so-called Halliburton Loophole, ushered in under the administration of George W. Bush. The loophole exempted most fracking from

regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, helping to ensure that companies did not have to report any of the chemicals they were injecting underground to the Environmental Protection Agency, while shielding their use of the riskiest chemicals from EPA oversight.75 And if no one knows what you are putting into the ground, it’s tough to make a definitive link when those toxins start coming out of people’s taps.

The links between fracking and small earthquakes are also solidifying. In 2012, a University of Texas research scientist analyzed seismic activity from November 2009 to September 2011 over part of the huge Barnett Shale region in Texas, which lies under Fort Worth and parts of Dallas,

and found the epicenters of sixty-seven small earthquakes.77 The most reliably located earthquakes were within two miles of an injection well. A July 2013 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research linked fracking-related waste injection to 109 small earthquakes that took place in a single year around Youngstown, Ohio, where an earthquake had not been previously recorded since monitoring began in the eighteenth century. The lead researcher of a similar study, published in Science, explained, “The fluids [in wastewater injection wells] are driving the faults to their tipping point.”

To put the health crisis in perspective, the World Health Organization sets the guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known as PM2.5) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit 671.

China’s unelected leaders have long since deflected demands for democracy and human rights by touting the ruling party’s record of delivering galloping economic growth. As Li Bo puts it, the rhetoric was always, “We get rich first, we deal with the environment problems second.” That worked for a long time, but now, he says, “their argument has all of a sudden suffocated in the smog.”

All this pushback from within China is of huge significance to the broader fossil-fuel resistance, from Australia to North America. It means that if tar sands pipelines and coal export terminals can be held off for just a few more years, the market for the dirty products the coal and oil companies are trying to ship to Asia could well dry up. Something of a turning point took place in July 2013 when the multinational investment banking firm Goldman Sachs published a research paper titled, “The Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing.” Less than six months later, Goldman Sachs sold its 49 percent stake in the company that is developing the largest of the proposed coal export terminals, the one near Bellingham, Washington, having apparently concluded that window had already closed.

Climate activists are under no illusion that shutting down coal plants, blocking tar sands pipelines, and passing fracking bans will be enough to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as science demands. There are just too many extraction operations already up and running and too many more being pushed simultaneously. And oil multinationals are hyper-mobile—they move wherever they can dig. With this in mind, discussions are under way to turn the “no new fossil frontiers” principle behind these campaigns into international law. Proposals include a Europe-wide ban on

fracking (in 2012, more than a third of the 766 members of the European Parliament cast votes in favor of an immediate moratorium).34 There is a growing campaign calling for a worldwide ban on offshore drilling in the sensitive Arctic region, as well as in the Amazon rainforest. And activists are similarly beginning to push for a global moratorium on tar sands extraction anywhere in the world, on the grounds that it is sufficiently carbon-intensive to merit transnational action.

No tactic in the climate wars has resonated more powerfully. Within six months of the campaign’s official launch in November 2012, there were active divestment campaigns on over three hundred campuses and in more than one hundred U.S. cities, states, and religious institutions. The demand soon spread to Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Britain. At the time of publication, thirteen U.S. colleges and universities had announced their intention to divest their endowments of fossil fuel stocks and bonds, and the leaders of more than twenty-five North American cities had made similar commitments, including San Francisco and Seattle. Around forty religious institutions had done the same.

It is unsurprising, then, that as Blockadia victories mount, so do the corporate trade challenges. More investment disputes are being filed than ever before, with a great many initiated by fossil fuel companies—as of 2013, a full sixty out of 169 pending cases at the World Bank’s dispute settlement tribunal had to do with the oil and gas or mining sectors, compared to a mere seven extraction cases throughout the entire 1980s and 1990s. According to Lori

Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, of the more than $3 billion in compensation already awarded under U.S. free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, more than 85 percent “pertains to challenges against natural resource, energy, and environmental

None of this should be surprising. Of course the richest and most powerful companies in the world will exploit the law to try to stamp out real and perceived threats and to lock in their ability to dig and drill wherever they wish in the world. And it certainly doesn’t help that many of our governments seem determined to hand out even more lethal legal weapons in the form of new and expanded trade deals, which companies, in turn, will use against governments’ own domestic laws.

There may, however, be an unexpected upside to the aggressive use of trade law to quash environmental wins: after a decade lull when few seemed to be paying

attention to the arcane world of free trade negotiations, a new generation of activists is once again becoming attuned to the democratic threat these treaties represent. Indeed there is now more public scrutiny and d...

Indigenous rights in North America did not have powerful forces marshaled behind them and they had plenty of powerful forces standing in opposition. Not just government, industry, and police, but also corporate-owned media that cast them as living in the past and enjoying undeserved special rights, while those same media outlets usually failed to do basic public education about the nature of the treaties our governments (or rather their British predecessors) had signed.

The reason industry can get away with this has little to do with what is legal and everything to do with raw political power: isolated, often impoverished Indigenous peoples generally lack the monetary resources and social clout to enforce their rights, and anyway, the police are controlled by the state. Moreover the costs of taking on multinational extractive companies in court are enormous. For instance in the landmark “Rainforest Chernobyl” case in which Ecuador’s highest court ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages, a company spokesman famously said: “We’re going to fight this until hell freezes over—and then we’ll fight it out on the ice.” (And indeed, the fight still drags

And ironically, in many cases, climate change is further increasing the economic pressure on Indigenous communities to make quick-and-dirty deals with extractive industries. That’s because disruptive weather changes, particularly in northern regions, are making it much harder to hunt and fish (for example when the ice is almost never solid, communities in the far north become virtually trapped, unable to harvest food for months on end). All this makes it extremely hard to say no to offers of job training and resource sharing when companies like Shell come to town.

Developed countries, which represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas pollution that is now destabilizing the climate. (The United States alone, which comprises less than 5 percent of the global population, now contributes about 14 percent of all carbon

Moreover, not everyone needs carbon for the same sorts of things. For instance, India still has roughly 300 million people living without electricity. Does it have the same degree of responsibility to cut its emissions as, say, Britain, which has been accumulating wealth and emitting industrial levels of carbon dioxide ever since James Watt introduced his successful steam engine in 1776?35 Of course not. That is why 195 countries, including the United States, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, which enshrines the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”

As we have seen, emissions in North America and Europe still need to come down dramatically but, thanks largely to the offshoring of production enabled by the free-trade era, they have pretty much stopped growing. It’s the fast-rising economies of the Global South—with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa leading the pack—that are mostly responsible for the surge in emissions in recent years, which is why we are racing toward tipping points far more quickly than anticipated. The reason for this shift in the source of emissions has everything to do with the spectacular success multinational corporations have had in globalizing the high-consumption-based economic model pioneered in wealthy western countries. The trouble is, the atmosphere can’t take it. As the atmospheric physicist and mitigation expert Alice Bows-Larkin put it in an interview, “The number of people that went through industrialization the first time around is like a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people going through industrialization this time.” And to quote President Obama in late 2013, if China’s and India’s energy consumption imitates the U.S. model, “we’ll be four feet under water.”

when the British Parliament ruled to abolish slavery in its colonies in 1833, it pledged to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their human property—a backward form of reparations for the perpetrators of slavery, not its victims. This led to payouts adding up to £20 million—a figure that, according to The Independent, “represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual spending budget and, in today’s terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.” Much of that money went directly into the coal-powered infrastructure of the now roaring Industrial Revolution—from factories to railways to steamships. These, in turn, were the tools that took colonialism to a markedly more rapacious stage, with the scars still felt to this

What we cannot expect is that the people least responsible for this crisis will foot all, or even most, of the bill. Because that is a recipe for catastrophic amounts of carbon ending up in our common atmosphere. Like the call to honor our treaties and other land-sharing agreements with Indigenous peoples, climate change is once again forcing us to look at how injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping our shared vulnerability to global climate collapse. With many of the biggest pools of untapped carbon on lands controlled by some of the poorest people on the planet, and with emissions rising most rapidly in what were, until recently, some of the poorest parts of the world, there is simply no credible way forward that does not involve redressing the real roots of poverty.

Accidental leaks are commonplace and explosions are frequent. But even when factories are running smoothly, they spew approximately four million pounds of toxic chemicals into the surrounding soil, air, and groundwater each year.12 Before arriving in Mossville, I had heard about cancer and respiratory illnesses, and I knew that some residents have dioxin levels three times the national average. What I was unprepared for were the stories of miscarriages, hysterectomies, and birth defects.

This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere. And catastrophic when these two forces combine in one ecosystem, as they did that winter on the Gulf Coast.

In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines. Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.

At least one species of coral is poised for a similar climate-related reproductive crisis: when water temperature reaches above 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit), egg fertilization stops. Meanwhile, high temperatures can make reef-building coral so hungry that they reabsorb their own eggs and sperm.23

For oysters along the Pacific Coast of Oregon and Washington State, the problem in recent years is that the water is acidifying with such alarming rapidity that larvae are unable to form their tiny shells in the earliest days of life, leading to mass die-offs. Richard Feely, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that before the die-offs began, “What we knew at the time was that many organisms as adults are sensitive to acidification. What we did not know is that the larval stages of those organisms are much more sensitive.” By 2014, the same problem was leading to a collapse of scallops off British Columbia. One of the largest scallop farming operations on the coast reported that some ten million mollusks had died in its operation alone.

On land, climate change is also hitting the very young first and worst. In West Greenland, for instance, there has been a

dramatic decrease in birth and survival rates of caribou calves. It seems that rising temperatures have changed the growing patterns of plants that are the source of critical energy for caribou calves, as well as for their mothers during reproduction and lactation. Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early. In Maine, Arctic tern chicks are starving to death for similar reasons: they rely on small fish that have fled for colder waters. Meanwhile, there are reports that around Canada’s Hudson Bay, birth dens of polar bears are collapsing in the thawing permafrost, which leaves tiny cubs dangerously

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.