This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large-scale impacts.

know that no one is safe, the most vulnerable least of all.

we don’t have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing.

There are ways of preventing this grim future, or at least making it a lot less dire. But the catch is that these also involve changing everything. For us high consumers, it involves changing how we live, how our economies function,

If the banks were allowed to fail, we were told, the rest of the economy would collapse. It was a matter of collective survival, so the money had to be found.

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.

what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts.

politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too.

Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is built to do;

A sudden rise in food prices helped create the conditions for the Arab Spring.

What was essential was building muscular mass movements capable of standing up to those defending a failing status quo,

the acute and painful realization that our “leaders are not looking after us . . . we are not cared for at the level of our very survival.”

This well-known target, which supposedly represents the “safe” limit of climate change, has always been a highly political choice that has more to do with minimizing economic disruption than with protecting the greatest number of people.

because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments.

climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.

virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim—

what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?

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.

It was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little in taxes as possible.

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the market itself.

Once carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere, it sticks around for hundreds of years,

our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.

So 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.

because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again,

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.

The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.

our problem has a lot less to do with

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.

A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.

“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.” —Victor Hugo, 18402

“Climate scientists agree: climate change is happening here and now. Based on well-established evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organization of experts in this field.”

United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of thousands of scientists and 195 governments.

“cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.”

it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered,

And there is also the matter of “global equity” that keeps coming up in the climate negotiations. The equity debate is based on the simple scientific fact that global warming is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over two centuries. That means that the countries that got a large head start on industrialization have done a great deal more emitting than most others. And yet many of the countries that have emitted least are getting hit by the impacts of climate change first and worst

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

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.

climate science is for many conservatives “an affront to their deepest and most cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of ‘mankind’ to subdue the Earth and all its fruits and to establish a ‘mastery’ over Nature.”

Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic.

They deny reality, in other words, because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews—they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate.

We do know that having a significant economic stake in the fossil fuel economy makes one more prone to deny the reality of climate change, regardless of political affiliation.

we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

One of the most interesting findings of the many recent studies on climate perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of climate change and social and economic privilege.

Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false.