This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.

That’s tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept, since it challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism

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 time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

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.

what the “moderates” constantly trying to reframe climate action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions?

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 real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more).

“In many cases the green jobs argument is the deciding factor that convinces governments to dole out support. And such requirements, if attached to subsidies or investment privileges, violate WTO obligations.”

there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are.

when people wake up to the fact that our governments have locked us into dozens of agreements that make important parts of a robust climate change response illegal, they will have an awfully powerful argument to oppose any such new deals until the small matter of our planet’s habitability is satisfactorily resolved.

the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.

emissions from the transportation of goods across borders—all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly 400 percent over the last twenty years—are not formally attributed to any nation-state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting impact.

it should hardly come as a surprise that the mainstream environmental movement has been in no rush to draw attention to the disastrous climate impacts of the free trade era. To do so would only highlight their own active role in helping the U.S. government to, in Clinton’s words, “remake the world.” Much better, as we will see later on, to talk about light bulbs and fuel efficiency.

Challenging free trade orthodoxy is a heavy lift in our political culture; anything that has been in place for that long takes on an air of inevitability.

Now, I realize that this can all sound apocalyptic—as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another.

what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.

Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green.

The truth is that if we want to live within ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s.

Indeed, a number of researchers have analyzed the very concrete climate benefits of working less. John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute, envisions that “hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today.” If countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.

As Alyssa Battistoni, an editor at the journal Jacobin, writes, “While making people work shitty jobs to ‘earn’ a living has always been spiteful, it’s now starting to seem suicidal.”

there is a clear and compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities to get off dirty energy.

There is, however, no scenario in which we can avoid wartime levels of spending in the public sector—not if we are serious about preventing catastrophic levels of warming, and minimizing the destructive potential of the coming storms.

The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

So if we accept that governments are broke,

A federal government issuing its own fiat currency cannot ever go broke

roughly half of Germany’s renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen groups, and almost nine hundred energy cooperatives.

it’s neither big nationally owned monopolies nor large corporate-owned wind and solar operators that have the best track record for spurring renewable energy turnarounds—it’s communities, co-ops, and farmers, working within the context of an ambitious, well-designed national framework.

What industry calls innovation, in other 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.

The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.

we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment.

This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits. “How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?” asked Observer columnist Nick Cohen despondently.69 The answer is that you don’t. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that 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.

while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” blackened England’s skies

the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford.

humans have behaved in this shortsighted way not only under capitalist systems, but under systems that called themselves socialist as well (whether they were or not remains a subject of debate). Indeed the roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment Western culture is founded—myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable.

Though developed under capitalism, governments across the ideological spectrum now embrace this resource-depleting model as a road to development, and it is this logic that climate change calls profoundly into question.

Extractivism ran rampant under colonialism because relating to the world as a frontier of conquest—rather than as home—fosters this particular brand of irresponsibility. The colonial mind nurtures the belief that there is always somewhere else to go to and exploit once the current site of extraction has been exhausted.

“The transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry did not occur because water was scarce, less powerful, or more expensive than steam,” writes Swedish coal expert Andreas Malm. “To the contrary, steam gained supremacy in spite of water being abundant, at least as powerful, and decidedly cheaper.”

Steam engines also worked anywhere, regardless of the geography, which meant that factory owners could shift production from more remote areas to cities like London, Manchester, and Lancaster, where there were gluts of willing industrial workers, making it far easier to fire troublemakers and put down strikes.

Just as colonialism needed coal to fulfill its dream of total domination, the deluge of products made possible by both coal and colonialism needed modern capitalism.

that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the developed world has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion

One possible bright spot is Scandinavian-style Social Democracy, which has undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent of residents walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmark’s community-controlled wind power revolution.

The Nature Conservancy, I should stress, is the only green group (that I know of, at least) to actually sink its own oil and gas wells. But it is far from the only group to have strong ties with the fossil fuel sector and other major polluters.

The hypocrisy is staggering: these organizations raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is preserving wildlife and attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet some have turned around and invested that money with companies that have made it abundantly clear, through their reserves, that they intend to extract several times more carbon than the atmosphere can absorb with any degree of safety.

Often these compromises are rationalized according to the theory of “low-hanging fruit.” This strategy holds, in essence, that it’s hard and expensive to try to convince politicians to regulate and discipline the most powerful corporations in the world. So rather than pick that very tough fight, it’s wiser and more effective to begin with something easier. Asking consumers to buy a more expensive, less toxic laundry detergent, for instance. Making cars more fuel-efficient. Switching to a supposedly cleaner fossil fuel. Paying an Indigenous tribe to stop logging a forest in Papua New Guinea to offset the emissions of a coal plant that gets to stay open in Ohio.

Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.

“Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: ‘It’s easy to be healthy—smoke one less cigarette a month.’

Post–market crash and amidst ever more sinister levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

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. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change.

This makes geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine, whose goal is to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention. These technologies, by contrast, respond to the lack of balance our pollution has created by taking our ecosystems even further away from self-regulation.

Building a livable world isn’t rocket science; it’s far more complex than that.”