This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this much collective benefit in the name of stabilizing an economic system that makes daily life so much more expensive and precarious, then surely humans should be capable of making some important lifestyle changes in the interest of stabilizing the physical systems upon which all of life depends.

“If I burned your house the least I can do is welcome you into my house … and if I’m burning it right now I should try to stop the fire now.”

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. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.

“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.”

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Why are so many of us not doing the things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels? The short answer is that the deniers won, at least the first round. Not the battle over climate science—their influence in that arena is already waning. But the deniers, and the ideological movement from which they sprang, won the battle over which values would govern our societies.

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.”

Denmark has among the most successful renewable energy programs in the world, with 40 percent of its electricity coming from renewables, mostly wind. But it’s significant that 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-controlled energy projects putting up wind turbines (in 1980, new installations were subsidized by up to 30 percent).

In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature—the soil, forest, sea—was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who, after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an invitation to use nature as a convenience.

And fatefully, countries are responsible only for the pollution they create inside their own borders—not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods that are shipped to their shores; those are attributed to the countries where the goods were produced.34 This means that the emissions that went into producing, say, the television in my living room, appear nowhere on Canada’s emissions ledger, but rather are attributed entirely to China’s ledger, because that is where the set was made. And the international emissions from the container ship that carried my TV across the ocean (and then sailed back again) aren’t entered into anyone’s account book.