This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

Drought and famine will continue to be used as pretexts to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into

In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do.

the Risky Business project, led by billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg,

former U.S. treasury secretary Henry Paulson

hedge fund founder and environmental philanthro...

warned that climate change would cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year as a result of rising sea levels alone, and that the corporate wor...

the insurance lobby has been, by far, the corporate sector most vocal about the mounting impacts, with the largest companies employing teams of climate scientists to help them prepare for the disasters to come. And yet the industry hasn’t done much to push more aggressive climate policy—on the contrary, many companies and trade groups have provided substantial funding to the think tanks that created the climate change denial

Insurance companies in the United States have even begun dispatching teams of private firefighters to their high-end customers when their mansions in California and Colorado are threatened by wildfires, a “concierge” service pioneered by

These, after all, are the fervent dismantlers of the state, whose ideology has eroded so many parts of the public sphere,

These are the voices that have been happy to pass on the federal budget crisis to the states and municipalities, which in turn are coping with it by not repairing bridges or replacing fire trucks.

The “freedom” agenda that they are desperately trying to protect from scientific evidence is one of the reasons that societies will be distinctly less prepared for disasters when they come.

Like Ebola in Texas!

Jim Geraghty

arguing that climate change “will help the U.S. economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States’ geopolitical power.” He explained that since climate change will be hardest on developing countries, “many potentially threatening states will find themselves in much more dire circumstances.” And this, he stressed, was a good thing: “Rather than our doom, climate change could be the centerpiece of ensuring a second consecutive American Century.”

Expect more of this

As the world warms, the ideology so threatened by climate science—the one that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature—will take us to a very cold place indeed. And it will only get colder,

Center for Strategic and International Studies,

R. James Woolsey

after Hurricane Sandy devastated large parts of New York and New Jersey, the Koch-backed organization Americans for Prosperity (AFP) launched a campaign to block the federal aid package going to these states.

Daily Mail

Unless we radically change course, these are the values that will rule our stormy future, even more than they already rule our present.

you hate government intrusion into people’s lives, you’d better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more towards activist government than scarcity and deprivation. . . . Only Big Government—which conservatives say they don’t want—can relocate millions of citizens, build massive levees, ration crucial resources like water and arable land, mandate harsh and rapid reductions in certain kinds of energy—all of which will be inevitable if we don’t act

If governments, including in the U.S., had started cutting emissions back when the scientific consensus first solidified, the measures for avoiding catastrophic warming would not have been nearly so jarring to the reigning economic model.

World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, held in Toronto in 1988, with more than three hundred scientists and policymakers from forty-six countries represented.

set the groundwork for the Rio Earth Summit,

recommending that governments cut emissions by 20 percent below ...

Since this was before the globalization juggernaut took hold, it would have created an opportunity for China and India and other fast-growing economies to battle poverty on low-carbon pathways.

(Which was the stated goal of “sustainable development”

Indeed this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for ...

“There’s a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere”: the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming.

Kevin Anderson,

Tyndall Centre for Climate Chan...

Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic

Dan Kahan

while those who poll as highly “hierarchical” and “individualist” bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big, centralized technologies that do not challenge their belief that humans can dominate nature.

Some of the subjects were given a story about how global warming could be solved through “anti-pollution” measures. Others were given a story that held up nuclear power as the solution. Some were shown no story at all. The scientific facts about global warming were identical in all news stories. The researchers discovered that hard-core conservatives who received the nuclear solution story were more open to the scientific facts proving that humans are changing the climate. However, those who received the story about fighting pollution “were even more skeptical about these facts than were hierarchs and individualists in a control group that received no newspaper

no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the ability to split the

Based on this research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell climate action by playing up concerns about national security and emphasizing responses such as nuclear power and “geoengineering”—global-scale technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for instance, blocking a portion of the sun’s rays, or by “fertilizing” the oceans so that they trap more carbon, among other untested, extraordinarily high-risk schemes. Kahan reasons that since climate change is perceived by many on the right as a gateway to dreaded anti-industry policies, the solution is “to remove what makes it threatening.”

Irina Feygina

John T....

advise policymakers to package environmental action as being about protecting “our way of life” and a form of patriotism, something they reve...

Breakthrough

Institute—a think tank that specialized in attacking grassroots environmentalism for its supposed lack of “modernity”—is forever charting this self-styled middle path, pushing nuclear power, fracked natural gas, and genetically modified crops as climate solutions, while attacking renewable energy programs.

in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups are constantly “reframing” climate action so that it is about pretty much anything other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth.

Instead climate action is about all the things conservatives are supposed to care about more than that, from cutting off revenues to Arab states to reasserting American economic dominance over China.

Jonathan

Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.

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.

think that all of us should take the word of 97 percent of climate scientists and their countless peer-reviewed articles, as well as every national academy of science in the world, not to mention establishment institutions like the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, all of which are telling us we are headed toward catastrophic levels of warming.

Wrong! We should check out the science ourselves.

Or we can choose to heed climate change’s planetary wake-up call and change course, steer away not just from the emissions cliff but from the logic that brought us careening to that precipice.