This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right.

Right on, sister!

you set out to deliberately strengthen those values (“egalitarian” and “communitarian” as the cultural cognition studies cited here describe them) that are currently being vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.

The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

in 1966, a survey of U.S. college freshmen found that only about 44 percent of them said that making a lot of money was “very important” or “essential.” By 2013, the figure had jumped to 82

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

“Many respondents in our focus groups were convinced that the underlying cause of environmental problems (such as pollution and toxic waste) is a pervasive climate of rampant selfishness and greed, and since they see this moral deterioration to be irreversible, they feel that environmental problems are

there is an even larger number of studies connecting materialistic values (and even free market ideology) to carelessness not just about climate change, but to a great many environmental risks.

Knox College in Illinois,

Tim K...

Tom Crompton

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human

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

if there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live—to wage, and win, a battle of cultural worldviews. That means laying out a vision of the world that competes directly

poverty amidst plenty is unconscionable.

It also means defending those parts of our societies that already express these values outside of capitalism, whether it’s an embattled library, a public park, a student movement demanding free university tuition, or an immigrant rights movement fighting for dignity and more open borders.

the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

Many are attempting to draw these connections and are expressing these alternative values in myriad ways. And yet a robust movement responding to the climate crisis is not emerging fast enough.

Why isn’t climate change at the center of the progressive agenda, the burning basis for demanding a robust and reinvented commons, rather than an often forgotten footnote?

Why are so many of us not doing the things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels?

shaped the model of export-led development that dotted the developing world with free trade zones.

As that American Geophysical Union survey indicated, somewhere inside each of us dwells a belief in their central lie—that we are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines. And if we are that, then what hope do we have of taking on the grand, often difficult, collective work that will be required to save ourselves in time?

Marcuse to the rescue 12:50 am 11/7/14

This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving

the existential crisis that is climate change has the power to release these suppressed values on a global and sustained scale, to provide us with a chance for a mass jailbreak from the house that their ideology

as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more).

They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known—the oil and gas industry,

no society, no matter how well financed or managed, can truly adapt to massive natural disasters when one comes fast and furious on the heels of the last.

II. In early 2011, Joe Read, a newly elected representative to the Montana state legislature, made history by introducing the first bill to officially declare climate change a good thing. “Global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana,” the bill stated. Read explained, “Even if it does get warmer, we’re going to have a longer growing season. It could be very beneficial to the state of Montana. Why are we going to stop this progress?” The bill did not pass.

American Freedom Alliance

Part of the Alliance’s stated mission is “to identify threats to Western civilization,”

Going Green by Chris Skates, a fictional “thriller” in which climate activists plot with Islamic terrorists to destroy America’s electricity grid.

“We always had hope that next year was gonna be better. And even this year was gonna be better. We learned slowly, and what didn’t work, you tried it harder the next time. You didn’t try something different. You just tried harder, the same thing that didn’t work.” —Wayne Lewis, Dust Bowl survivor, 2012

about three years ago, I started to notice that green energy programs—the strong ones that are needed to lower global emissions fast—were increasingly being challenged under international trade agreements,

In 2010, for instance, the United States challenged one of China’s wind power subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained supports for local industry considered protectionist.

As a result, brand-new factories that should be producing solar panels are now contemplating closure.

One year earlier, at the peak of the Wall Street financial crisis, the province had unveiled its climate action plan, the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, centered on a bold pledge to wean Canada’s most populous province completely off coal by 2014.

The catch was that in order for most of the energy providers to qualify, they had to ensure that a minimum percentage of their workforces and materials were local to Ontario. And the province set the bar high: solar energy developers had to source at least 40–60 percent of their content from within the

By 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada and by 2013, it had only one working coal-fired power plant left.

local content

Just as the U.S. has acted against local renewable supports in China and India, so Japan and then the European Union let it be known that they considered Ontario’s local-content requirement to be a violation of World Trade Organization rules.

The WTO ruled against Canada, determining that Ontario’s buy-local provisions were indeed illegal. And the province wasted little time in nixing the local-content rules that had been so central to its

“Seeing all those, for lack of a better term, mixed messages . . . was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

if there is to be any hope of meeting the agreed-upon 2 degree Celsius target, wealthy economies like Canada must make getting off fossil fuels their top

Ontario was putting real policies in place to honor that commitment (unlike the Canadian government as a whole, which has allowed emissions to balloon, leading it to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than face international censure).

One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something called “national treatment,” which requires governments to make no distinction between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms outside their borders.

fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies,

they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump—a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.”

governments need to take a range of aggressive steps—from price guarantees to straight subsidies—so that green energy has a fair shot at competing.

Denmark has among the most successful renewable energy programs in the world, with 40 percent of its electricity coming from renewables, mostly wind.

the program was rolled out in the 1980s, before the free trade era began, when there was no one to argue with the Danish government’s generous subsidies to the community-con...