This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

“By placing the interests of workers and the poor at the forefront of strategies to combat climate change we can simultaneously halt climate change and address our jobs bloodbath,”

This has encouraged small, noncorporate players to become renewable energy providers—farms, municipalities, and hundreds of newly formed co-ops. That has decentralized not just electrical power, but also political power and wealth: roughly half of Germany’s renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen groups, and almost nine hundred energy cooperatives. Not only are they generating power but they also have the chance to generate revenue for their communities by selling back to the grid. Over all, there are now 1.4 million photovoltaic installations and about 25,000 windmills. Nearly 400,000 jobs have been created.

But in several regions, these objections have been entirely neutralized with thoughtful planning. As Preben Maegaard, former president of the World Wind Energy Association, once put it, “When local people own the wind farms, and share in the benefits, they will support them. It won’t be NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), it will be POOL (Please On Our Land).”22

“The problem is that even with the Green Revolution, starvation continues—particularly in India, where the revolution was most intense. Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”

As comedian Bill Maher once observed, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”*32

which the fossil fuel industry is working: it is betting that governments are not going to get serious about emissions

cuts for the next twenty-five to forty years.

For a fossil fuel major, keeping up its reserve-replacement ratio is an economic imperative; without it, the company has no future. It has to keep moving just to stand still. And it is this structural imperative that is pushing the industry into the most extreme forms of dirty energy; there are simply not enough conventional deposits left to keep up the replacement ratios.

According to the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook report, global conventional oil production from “existing fields” will drop from 68 million barrels per day in 2012 to an expected 27 million in 2035.

As The Guardian reported in 2011, “At least 50 employees of companies including EDF Energy, npower and Centrica have been placed within government to work on energy issues in the past four years. … The staff

Politicians must be prohibited from receiving donations from the industries they regulate, or from accepting jobs in lieu of bribes; political donations need to be both fully disclosed and tightly capped; campaigns must be given the right to access the public airwaves; and, ideally, elections should

Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were.

And it’s a habit of thought that goes a long way toward explaining why an economic model based on endless growth ever seemed viable in the first place.

This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with disposable peripheries being harnessed to feed a glittering center, and it is bound up too with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones, you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered deserving of sacrifice.

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 need for new markets for these mass-produced consumer goods and new sources of raw material played a role in colonialism and the pursuit of empire. The market economy evolved as an efficient way of allocating such goods, and stimulating the production of even more.”

World Wildlife Fund)

World Resources Institute

Conservation International

The Nature Conservancy’s

Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council

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.

Then came the 1980s. “A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?”

It wasn’t that there was no role for the public. We were called upon periodically to write letters, sign petitions, turn off our lights for an hour, make a giant human hourglass that could be photographed from the sky. And of course we were always asked to send money to the Big Green groups that were supposedly just on the cusp of negotiating a solution to climate change on our behalf.

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers estimates that Virgin Trains has received more than £3 billion (the equivalent of $5 billion) in subsidies since British railways were privatized in the late 1990s—significantly more than Branson pledged to the green fund. As recently as 2010, Branson and the Virgin Group received £18 million in dividends from Virgin Trains. Branson insists that the characterization of him as a freeloader

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed less than a month after Trinity, the first successful nuclear test—despite the fact that many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project thought they were building a nuclear bomb that would be used only as a deterrent.

As the region mobilized to take its land back from Shell, thousands of Delta residents were tortured and killed and dozens of Ogoni villages were razed. In 1995, the military regime of General Sani Abacha tried Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his compatriots on trumped-up charges. And then all nine men were hanged, fulfilling Saro-Wiwa’s prediction that “they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.”30