This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

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

“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.”

Teachers observed that no issue had ever engaged the community’s young people like this—some even noticed a decline in depression and drug use. That’s a very big deal in a place that not long ago suffered from a youth suicide epidemic, the legacy of scarring colonial policies, including generations of children—the great-grandparents, grandparents, and sometimes the parents of today’s teens and young adults—being taken from their families and placed in church-run residential schools where abuse was rampant.

We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro.

“The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society.

Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.

a key determinant in how any community survives an extreme weather event is its connective tissue—the presence of small local businesses and common spaces where neighbors can get to know one another and make sure that elderly people aren’t forgotten during crushing heat waves or storms.

The greatest danger in times of stress or threat is isolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project—it’s a survival strategy.”

the historical claims being made by Indigenous peoples around the world as well as by developing countries for an honoring of historical debts indeed have the potential to act as counterweights to increasingly undemocratic and intransigent governments.

the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007 after 143 member states voted in its favor (the four opposing votes—United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—would each, under domestic pressure, eventually endorse it as well). The declaration states that, “Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands or territories and resources.” And further that they have “the right to redress” for the lands that “have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.”

in Canada, the United States, and Australia, these rights are not only ignored, but Indigenous people know that if they try to physically stop extractive projects that are clearly illegal, they will in all likelihood find themselves on the wrong side of a can of pepper spray—or the barrel of a gun.

some of the most marginalized people in my country—many of them, like all the senior members of the Lameman clan, survivors of the intergenerational trauma of abusive residential schools—are taking on some of the wealthiest and most powerful forces on the planet.

That is a huge burden to bear and that these communities are bearing it with shockingly little support from the rest of us is an unspeakable social injustice.

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

That many Indigenous people would view the extractive industries as their best of a series of bad options should not be surprising. There has been almost no other economic development in most Native communities, no one else offering jobs or skills training in any quantity.

if non-Native people are going to ask some of the poorest, most systematically disenfranchised people on the planet to be humanity’s climate saviors, then, to put it crassly, what are we going to do for them? How can this relationship not be yet another extractive one, in which non-Natives use hard-won Indigenous rights but give nothing or too little in return?

It is this powerfully seductive illusion of total control that a great many boosters of extractive energy are so reluctant to relinquish. Indeed at the climate change denial conference hosted by the Heartland Institute, renewables were derided as “sunbeams and friendly breezes”—the subtext was clear: real men burn coal.

Proponents of fossil and nuclear energy constantly tell us that renewables are not “reliable,” by which they mean that they require us to think closely about where we live, to pay attention to things like when the sun shines and when the wind blows, where and when rivers are fierce and where they are weak.

a 2012 study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives compared the public value from a $5 billion pipeline—the rough cost of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway—and the value that could be derived from investing the same amount in green economic alternatives. It found that if $5 billion is spent on a pipeline, it produces mostly short-term construction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy public costs for future environmental damage. But if $5 billion is spent on public transit, building retrofits, and renewable energy, economies can gain, at the very least, three times as many jobs in the short term, while simultaneously helping to reduce the chances of catastrophic warming in the long term. In fact, the number of jobs could be many times more than that, according to the institute’s modeling. At the highest end, green investment could create thirty-four times more jobs than just building another pipeline.

The problem, of course, is that while companies like Enbridge are putting dollars on the table to build pipelines, governments are unwilling to make comparable sums available for these alternatives. And yet in Canada a minimal national carbon tax of $10 a ton would raise $5 billion a year, the sum in question—and unlike a one-off pipeline investment, it would do so year after year.19 If policy options like that were on the table, the jobs vs. environment dichotomy would all but evaporate.

In the outpourings of volunteerism and donations, as well as the rage at any whiff of profiteering, these disasters also activate the latent and broadly shared generosity that capitalism works so hard to deny.

And yet financing a just transition in fast-developing economies has not been a priority of activists in the North. Indeed a great many Big Green groups in the United States consider the idea of climate debt to be politically toxic, since, unlike the standard “energy security” and green jobs arguments that present climate action as a race that rich countries can win, it requires emphasizing the importance of international cooperation and solidarity.

wealthy countries do not just need to help the Global South move to a low-emissions economic path because it’s the right thing to do. We need to do it because our collective survival depends on it.

there are, in the immediate term, plenty of affordable ways for Northern countries to begin to honor our climate debts without going broke

I would love to see a collaboration between Klein and Stephanie Kelton; MMT would be such an awesome input to avoid the dead-ends of ‘governments going broke’

Like the call to honor our treaties and other land-sharing agreements with Indigenous peoples, climate change is once again forcing us to look at how injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping our shared vulnerability to global climate collapse.

For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn, our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.

We have a global agricultural model that has succeeded in making it illegal for farmers to engage in the age-old practice of saving seeds, the building blocks of life, so that new seeds have to be repurchased each year.

Our economic system, meanwhile, does not value women’s reproductive labor, pays caregivers miserably, teachers almost as badly, and we generally hear about female reproduction only when men are trying to regulate it.

It’s not self-pity that keeps me returning to that sad place. It’s the conviction that there is something valuable in the body-memory of slamming up against a biological limit—of running out of second, third, and fourth chances—something that we all need to learn.

In “young” countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, which tend to have myths rather than memories, this remembering process is far more complex. For descendants of settlers and newer immigrants, it begins with learning the true histories of where we live—with reading treaties, for instance, and coming to terms with how we ended up with what we have, however painful.

The goal becomes not to build a few gigantic green solutions, but to infinitely multiply smaller ones, and to use policies—like Germany’s feed-in tariff for renewable energy, for instance—that encourage multiplication rather than consolidation. The beauty of these models is that when they fail, they fail on a small and manageable scale—with backup systems in place.

This is a far more expansive vision than the familiar eco-critique that stressed smallness and shrinking humanity’s impact or “footprint.” That is simply not an option today, not without genocidal implications: we are here, we are many, and we must use our skills to act. We can, however, change the nature of our actions so that they are constantly growing, rather than extracting life.

Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on.

postcolonial independence movements—which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions—were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites).

So climate change does not need some shiny new movement that will magically succeed where others failed. Rather, as the furthest-reaching crisis created by the extractivist worldview, and one that puts humanity on a firm and unyielding deadline, climate change can be the force—the grand push—that will bring together all of these still living movements. A rushing river fed by countless streams, gathering collective force to finally reach the sea.

One such lesson is that when major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization. At those junctures, activism becomes something that is not performed by a small tribe within a culture, whether a vanguard of radicals or a subcategory of slick professionals (though each play their part), but becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society—it’s rent payers associations, women’s auxiliaries, gardening clubs, neighborhood assemblies, trade unions, professional groups, sports teams, youth leagues, and on and on.

we are afraid—with good reason—that our political class is wholly incapable of seizing those tools and implementing those plans, since doing so involves unlearning the core tenets of the stifling free-market ideology that governed every stage of their rise to power.

we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small.

what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once—rules written into national laws and trade agreements, as well as powerful unwritten rules that tell us that no government can increase taxes and stay in power, or say no to major investments no matter how damaging, or plan to gradually contract those parts of our economies that endanger us all. And yet each of those rules emerged out of the same, coherent worldview. If that worldview is delegitimized, then all of the rules within it become much weaker and more vulnerable.

a fight for a minimal carbon tax might do a lot less good than, for instance, forming a grand coalition to demand a guaranteed minimum income.

the very process of arguing for a universal social safety net opens up a space for a full-throated debate about values—about what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity,

Indeed a great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.

What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to act is not because we are too selfish to care about an abstract or seemingly far-off problem—but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care?

in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism.

This kind of fiery, highly polarizing rhetoric was typical of a battle with so much at stake. As the historian David Brion Davis writes, abolitionists understood that their role was not merely to ban an abhorrent practice but to try to change the deeply entrenched values that had made slavery acceptable in the first place.

This same understanding about the need to assert the intrinsic value of life is at the heart of all major progressive victories, from universal suffrage to universal health care. Though these movements all contained economic arguments as part of building their case for justice, they did not win by putting a monetary value on granting equal rights and freedoms. They won by asserting that those rights and freedoms were too valuable to be measured and were inherent to each of us.

we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous, since they imply that there is an acceptable price for allowing entire countries to disappear, for leaving untold millions to die on parched land, for depriving today’s children of their right to live in a world teeming with the wonders and beauties of creation.

the real surprise, for all involved, is that we are so much more than we have been told we are—that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined.

It is slowly dawning on a great many of us that no one is going to step in and fix this crisis; that if change is to take place it will only be because leadership bubbled up from below.