This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

climate change will test our moral character

environmentalists should sell climate action by playing up concerns about national security

Nuclear power and geoengineering are not solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess.

Hyper-patriotism, similarly, is an active barrier to coming up with any kind of global climate agreement, since it further pits countries against one another rather than encouraging them to cooperate.

As for pitching climate action as a way to protect America’s high-consumerist “way of life”—that is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of all exported to every corner of the globe.

How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions?

“To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,”

the culture that triumphed in our corporate age pits us against the natural world.

The green movement’s mantra that climate is not about left and right but “right and wrong” has gotten us nowhere.

the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—

“If the trade rules don’t permit all kinds of important measures to deal with climate change—and they don’t—then the trade rules obviously have to be rewritten. Because there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are.

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.

global environmental crisis was the result of developed countries’ “excessive consumption of all materials and through large-scale industrialization intended to support their styles of life.”

the commitments made in the climate negotiations all effectively functioned on the honor system, with a weak and unthreatening mechanism to penalize countries that failed to keep their promises. The commitments made under trade agreements, however, were enforced by a dispute settlement system with real teeth, and failure to comply would land governments in trade court, often facing harsh penalties.

“Rather than push for the recalibration of the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate protection . . . the Parties to the climate regime have ensured that liberalized trade and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade-restrictive climate policies.”

while trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump climate, under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump trade.

emissions from the transportation of goods across borders—all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly 400 percent over the last twenty years—are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting impact.

countries are responsible only for the pollution they create inside their own borders—not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods that are shipped to their shores; those are attributed to the countries where the goods were produced.

“A growing share of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions is released in the manufacture of products that are traded across international borders.”)

“One of the reasons why we’re in the climate crisis is because of this model of globalization,”

the constant drive for endless economic growth,

there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions,

The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it’s the cheapest way to produce.

they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.

thanks to the removal of virtually all barriers to capital flows, corporations could pick up and leave every time labor costs started rising.

“In order to combat climate change, there’s a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and what we’re purchasing and how it’s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law is you can’t privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy?

we will need to confront a logic even more entrenched than free trade—the logic of indiscriminate economic growth.

our growth-based economic logic is now in fundamental conflict with atmospheric limits.

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.

Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.’s top climate position until 2009, remarked recently that “the only way” negotiators “can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows-Larkin describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations.”

we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another.

changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.

Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green.

these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich.

GDP is traditionally understood to consist of consumption plus investment plus government spending plus net exports.

John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, envisions that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today.” If countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.

rescuing the idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care, education, food, and clean water.

the measures we must take to secure a just, equitable, and inspiring transition away from fossil fuels clash directly with our reigning economic orthodoxy at every level.

“For people it’s self-evident that goods on which everybody is dependent should belong to the public,”

“Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests.”

“The biggest obstacles are social and political—what you need is the will to do it.”

During good times, it’s easy to deride “big government” and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs.

“There’s no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events,”

In the United States, each major disaster seems to cost taxpayers upward of a billion dollars. The cost of Superstorm Sandy is estimated at $65 billion.

The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have actively blocked progress at every turn.

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.

how do we stop fossil fuel profits from continuing to hemorrhage into executive paychecks and shareholder pockets—