This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government.

As recently as 2007, climate change was something most everyone acknowledged was happening—they just didn’t seem to care very much. (When Americans are asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change still consistently comes in

the Bay Area of California, local Tea Party activists have disrupted municipal meetings when minor sustainability strategies are being discussed, claiming they are part of a U.N.-sponsored plot to usher in world government.

The Heritage Foundation is hawking reports, as are the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute.

The climate change denial movement—far from an organic convergence of “skeptical” scientists—is entirely a creature of the ideological network on display here, the very one that deserves the bulk of the credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the last four decades.

striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises...

(increasingly common) are...

Many of these institutions were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In response, they launched a counterrevolution, a richly funded intellectual movement that argued that greed and the limitless pursuit of profit were nothing to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the world had ever known.

To address this structural inequity sufficiently to persuade fast-growing countries like China and India not to destabilize the global climate system, earlier emitters, like North America and Europe, will have to take a greater share of the burden at first. And there will obviously need to be substantial transfers of resources and technology to help battle poverty using low carbon tools.

Angélica Navarro Llanos meant when she called for a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

this war on carbon means to the very premise of global free trade, with its insistence that geographical distance is a mere fiction to be collapsed by Walmart’s diesel trucks and Maersk’s container ships.

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

Joseph Bast,

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.

In 2012, the Heartland Institute even landed itself in hot water by running a billboard campaign that compared people who believe in climate change (“warmists” in denialist lingo) to murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

For Heartlanders, denying climate science is part of a war, and they act like

James Delingpole

Heartland president Joseph Bast

For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing. . . . It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do

and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to disprove them.

This is a recipe for massive increase in government,”

But climate change creates, in his words, “a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate.” It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy—the classic teleological reversal of cause and

how can you win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the planet depends on intervening?

I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the “warmists” in the political center,

“climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”—funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully

Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.”

Willie Soon,

A February 2013 report in The Guardian revealed that between 2002 and 2010, a network of anonymous U.S. billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to “groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change . . .

(in parts of Appalachia, just 49 percent of Democrats believe in human-created climate change, compared with 72–77 percent in other parts of the country).

in Alberta, where incomes are soaring thanks to the tar sands, only 41 percent of residents told pollsters that humans are contributing to climate change.

“economic geologists”—scientists who study natural formations so that they can be commercially exploited by the extractive industries. Only 47 percent of these scientists believe in human-caused climate change.

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

Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary dep...

Overwhelmingly, climate change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with higher than average incomes.

they are more likely than other adults to be highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false.

as a group, conservative white men who expressed strong confidence in their understanding of global warming were almost six times as likely to believe climate change “will never happen” as the rest of the adults surveyed.

it should not be surprising that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate

display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for the victims of climate change. Larry Bell

Australian geologist Bob Carter offered that “the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer times.”

Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do what the French did after the devastating 2003 heat wave across Europe killed nearly fifteen thousand people in France alone: “they discovered Walmart and

What makes this callousness among deniers possible is their firm belief that if they’re wrong about climate science, a few degrees of warming isn’t something wealthy people in industrialized countries have to worry much about.

(“When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we find shade,” Texas congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and environment subcommittee

the World Bank

warned in a 2012 report that for poor countries, the increased cost of storms, droughts, and flooding is already so high that it “threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development.”)

It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to rationalize profiting from the meltdown.

Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind-set—which the cultural theorists describe as “hierarchical” and “individualistic”—is a matter of great urgency because climate change will test our moral character like little before.

She should get psychopathy then

Unless our culture goes through some sort of fundamental shift in its governing values, how do we honestly think we will “adapt” to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense and frequent natural

disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive on our shores in leaky boats? How will we cope as freshwater and food become ever more scarce?

When heat stress and vicious storms wipe out small farms and fishing villages, the land will be handed over to large developers for mega-ports, luxury resorts, and industrial farms.