This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Like the well-understood strategy of sowing doubts about the science of climate change, this confusion effectively undermines the momentum away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

In order for multinational corporations to protect their freedom to pollute the atmosphere, peasants, farmers, and Indigenous people are losing their freedom to live and sustain themselves in peace.

the most appealing climate policy to polluters remained none at all.

earth is “one single enormous living organism and every single part of the ecosystem reacted with every other part”).

require that the profits being earned from warming the planet be channeled into the costly transition away from these dangerous energy sources.

“what is the point of holding back when there will be no businesses” if we fail to act?

“Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity, threatens our existence,”

“the odds are good that global warming is serious” and that even if there is a chance it won’t be “you have to build the ark before the rains come. If you have to make a mistake, err on the side of the planet. Build a margin of safety to take care of the only planet we have.”

not even counted in current proven reserves, which as we know already represents five times more than we can safely burn.

Any technology that can quadruple proven reserves in the U.S. alone is a climate menace, not a climate solution.

“Proponents of research on geoengineering simply keep ignoring the fact that the biosphere is a player (not just a responder) in whatever we do, and its trajectory cannot be predicted. It is a living breathing collection of organisms (mostly microorganisms) that are evolving every second—a ‘self-organizing, complex, adaptive system’ (the strict term). These types of systems have emergent properties that simply cannot be predicted. We all know this! Yet proponents of geoengineering research leave that out of the discussion.”

is it possible that geoengineering, far from a quick emergency fix, could make the impacts of climate change even worse for a great many people? And if so, who is most at risk and who gets to decide to take those risks?

climate models are at their weakest when predicting specific regional impacts—

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 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.

the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

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.

emissions containment is both costly and politically impractical—

for the fossil fuel companies and their paid champions, anything is preferable to regulating ExxonMobil, including attempting to regulate the sun.

Science tells us we need to keep the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.

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 we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands.

In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.

When we were finally able to see our world as an interconnected and holistic entity we at last would understand that this lonely planet is our only home and that it is up to us to be its responsible caretakers.IV

“This space voyage is totally precarious. We depend upon a little envelope of soil and a rather larger envelope of atmosphere for life itself. And both can be contaminated and destroyed.”

Kenneth Brower writes, “The notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.”

“Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” —The United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 19921

“You know your government has failed when your grandma starts to riot.”

“Why should we sacrifice new areas if fossil fuels should not be extracted in the first place?”

“Keystone isn’t simply a pipeline in the sand for the swelling national climate movement.” It’s an expression of the core principle that before we can effectively solve this crisis, we have to “stop making it worse. Specifically and categorically, we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel infrastructure that ‘locks in’ dangerous emission levels for many decades . . . step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging.”

the people reaping the bulk of the benefits of extractivism pretend not to see the costs of that comfort so long as the sacrifice zones are kept safely out of view.

This is coming as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that a big distant company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk—and never even ask my permission?

“we’re all in the same sinking boat, only people of color are closest to the hole.”

the fossil fuel companies treat politicians as their unofficial PR wings and the judiciaries as their own personal legal departments.

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.

Is not the hatred of the coal companies, or anger, but love will save that place.”

the real problem is not that trade deals are allowing fossil fuel companies to challenge governments, it’s that governments are not fighting back against these corporate challenges. And that has far less to do with any individual trade agreement than it does with the profoundly corrupted state of our political systems.

What is democracy if it doesn’t encompass the capacity to decide, collectively, to protect something that no one can live without?

Like the trees, soil, rocks, and clay that the industry’s machines scrape up, masticate, and pile into great slag heaps, democracy is getting torn into rubble too, chewed up and tossed aside to make way for the bulldozers.

“The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more important than life.”

“you cannot separate environmental impacts from subsistence impacts, for they are the same.”

The reason industry can get away with this has little to do with what is legal and everything to do with raw political power:

implementing Indigenous rights on the ground, starting with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, could tilt the balance of stewardship over a vast geography: giving Indigenous peoples much more control, and corporations much less. Which means that finally honoring Indigenous rights is not simply about paying off Canada’s enormous legal debt to First Nations: it is also our best chance to save entire territories from endless extraction and destruction. In no small way, the actions of Indigenous peoples—and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them—will determine the fate of the planet.

This is the way the oil and gas industry holds on to power: by tossing temporary life rafts to the people it is drowning.

the only people who will be truly empowered to say no to dirty development over the long term are people who see real, hopeful alternatives.

unlearn the myth that we are the masters of nature—the “God Species”—and embrace the fact that we are in relationship with the rest of the natural world.

there is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives.

Part of the job of the climate movement, then, is to make the moral case that the communities who have suffered most from unjust resource relationships should be first to be supported in their efforts to build the next, life-based economy now.

billions in damages serve dramatically to educate the public about the terrible costs of our current system, driving an argument for radical change that addresses the root, rather than only the symptoms, of the climate crisis.

wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO2 before developing countries had a chance to industrialize.