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by
Naomi Klein
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December 27, 2017 - February 2, 2018
An Office of Price Administration pamphlet from 1942 argued that rationing was part of the American tradition. “What Is Rationing?” it asked. First, let’s be sure what rationing is not. It is not starvation, long bread lines, shoddy goods. Rather, it is a community plan for dividing fairly the supplies we have among all who need them. Second, it is not “un-American.” The earliest settlers of this country, facing scarcities of food and clothing, pooled their precious supplies and apportioned them out to everyone on an equal basis. It was an American idea then, and it is an American idea now, to
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This perception of fairness—that one set of rules applies to players big and small—has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change thus far.
there has been a drop in the willingness of individuals to bear the financial burden of responding to climate change, but not simply because economic times are hard. Western governments have responded to these hard times—which have been created by rampant greed and corruption among their wealthiest citizens—by asking those least responsible for the current conditions to bear the burden.
After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they not only created but continue to actively worsen?
The lesson from all this is not that people won’t sacrifice in the face of the climate crisis. It’s that they have had it with our culture of lopsided sacrifice, in which individuals are asked to pay higher prices for supposedly green choices while large corporations dodge regulation and not only refuse to change their behavior, but charge ahead with ever more polluting activities.
it is not that “we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it’s for a campaign contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.
climate action is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed.
Conservatives have managed to stall and roll back climate action amidst economic crisis by making climate about economics—about the pressing need to protect growth and jobs during difficult times (and they are always difficult).
Progressives can easily do the same: by showing that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.
trade unions can be counted on to fiercely protect jobs, however dirty, if these are the only jobs on offer.
when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.
Decentralized control over energy
“The future is something that is not relevant at the moment for some people because they’re surviving for the present,”
“It’s difficult to understand the concept of sustainability when people are fighting for food and to have energy to heat their homes.”
Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food.
a global transition to 100 percent renewable energy—“wind, water and solar”—is both technically and economically feasible “by as early as 2030.”
the kind of policies that would be enough “seem preposterous to the political and economic status quo.”
In virtually every country, the political class accepts the premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare—indeed the habitability of our shared home—are clearly at stake.
methane emissions linked to fracked natural gas are at least 30 percent higher than the emissions linked to conventional gas.
methane is an extraordinarily dangerous greenhouse gas, thirty-four times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide,
methane is an even more efficient trapper of heat in the first ten to fifteen years after it is released—indeed it carries a warming potential that is eighty-six times greater than that of carbon dioxide.
words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic—all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it’s not innovation, it’s madness.
“stranded assets”—investments that lose their projected value
the Carbon Tracker Initiative conducted a breakthrough study that added together the reserves claimed by all the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned. It found that the oil, gas, and coal to which these players had already laid claim—deposits they have on their books and which were already making money for shareholders—represented 2,795 gigatons of carbon (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons). That’s a very big problem because we know roughly how much carbon can be burned between now and 2050 and still leave us a solid chance (roughly 80 percent) of keeping warming below 2 degrees
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“In government it is usually easy to rectify a slight misalignment between two policies but near impossible to resolve a complete contradiction. Where there is a contradiction, the forces of incumbency start with a massive advantage.”
All these attempts to fix glaring and fundamental flaws in the system have failed because large corporations wield far too much political power—
Politicians must be prohibited from receiving donations from the industries they regulate, or from accepting jobs in lieu of bribes; political donations need to be both fully disclosed and tightly capped; campaigns must be given the right to access the public airwaves; and, ideally, elections should be publicly funded as a basic cost of having a democracy.
we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory.
The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were.
free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be.
Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself.
When climate justice wins we win the world that we want.
“How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?”
for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer.
climate change is also about the inescapable impact of the actions of past generations not just on the present, but on generations in the future.
We started treating the atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that.
“extractivism,” a term originally used to describe economies based on removing ever more raw materials from the earth, usually for export to traditional colonial powers, where “value” was added.
Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue.
fossil fuels, the energy sources of capitalism, destroy life—from the territories where they are extracted to the oceans and the atmosphere that absorb the waste.”
many climate responses reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere.
humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—
Bolivia and Ecuador have been at the forefront of the coalition of governments asking that the countries responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions help to pay for the Global South’s transition away from dirty energy and toward low-carbon development.
Forced to choose between poverty and pollution, these governments are choosing pollution, but those should not be their only options.
Carson’s focus was DDT, but for her the problem was not a particular chemical; it was a logic. “The ‘control of nature,’ ” Carson wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”
We may find new inputs—more oil or chromium—or invent substitutes, but we have not produced or discovered more natural sinks. The Earth’s capacity to absorb the filthy byproducts of global capitalism’s voracious metabolism is maxing out.
it’s hard and expensive to try to convince politicians to regulate and discipline the most powerful corporations in the world.
the refusal of so many environmentalists to consider responses to the climate crisis that would upend the economic status quo forces them to place their hopes in solutions—whether miracle products, or carbon markets, or “bridge fuels”—that are either so weak or so high-risk that entrusting them with our collective safety constitutes what can only be described as magical thinking.
fracked natural gas may leak enough methane to make its warming impact, especially in the near term, comparable to that of coal.
“If we are serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, the only safe place for shale gas remains in the ground.”
the most important preservation work that any environmental group can do is preserving the carbon in the ground, wherever it is.
