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by
Naomi Klein
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March 23 - April 14, 2019
“global equity” that keeps coming up in the climate negotiations.
The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially.
hugely high-risk technologies would create even more dangerous forms of waste, and neither has a discernible exit strategy
nuclear power
deniers—rejecting possible solutions because they threaten my ideological worldview.
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.
short, we have not responded to this challenge because we are locked in—politically, physically, and culturally. Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free.
fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but 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.” That freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.13
trade deals may even give multinationals the power to overturn landmark grassroots victories against highly controversial extractive activities like natural gas fracking:
there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive.
A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions, or as Malm puts it, “a causal link between the quest for cheap and disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions.”
Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system’s goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.
growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy intensive than growing it in warmer regions and shipping it by light rail.)
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.63
Many of the countries with the highest commitments to renewable energy are ones that have managed to keep large parts of their electricity sectors in public (and often local) hands, including Austria and Norway.
Over the course of the 1970s, there were 660 reported disasters around the world, including droughts, floods, extreme temperature events, wildfires, and storms. In the 2000s, there were 3,322—a fivefold boost.
in the near-term nuclear is “not carbon-free, no matter what the advocates tell you. Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the 10 to 19 years that it takes to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically takes two to five years.)”
methane is an extraordinarily dangerous greenhouse gas, thirty-four times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide,
high rate of methane leakage in the fracking process.
breakthrough study that added together the reserves claimed by all the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned. It found that the oil, gas, and coal to which these players had already laid claim—deposits they have on their books and which were already making money for shareholders—represented 2,795 gigatons of carbon dioxide (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons). That’s a very big problem because we know roughly how much carbon can be burned between now and 2050 and still leave us a solid chance (roughly 80 percent) of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. According to one highly
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the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87 percent jump from the 2008 elections.
underlying logic of extractivism—that there would always be more earth for us to consume—began to be forcefully challenged within the mainstream.
fracked natural gas may leak enough methane to make its warming impact, especially in the near term, comparable to that of coal.
cost-benefit analysis that concludes that it’s easier to cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries—that
our culture’s most intoxicating narrative: the belief that technology is going to save us from the effects of our actions.
Kenneth Brower writes, “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.”
This is the Catch-22 of the fossil fuel economy: precisely because these activities are so dirty and disruptive, they tend to weaken or even destroy other economic drivers:
A growing body of independent, peer-reviewed studies is building the case that fracking puts drinking water, including aquifers, at risk.
as if economic growth still has a meaning on a planet convulsing in serial disasters.
the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that could be harmed.
coal-to-liquids plant, a noxious process that turns coal rock into a highly polluting form of liquid fuel, which emits twice as much carbon as regular gasoline when burned.
climate change is the result of cumulative emissions: the carbon dioxide we emit stays in the atmosphere for approximately one to two centuries, with a portion remaining for a millennium or even more.32 And since the climate is changing as a result of two-hundred-odd
Developed countries, which represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population, have emitted almost 70 percent of all the greenhouse gas pollution that is now destabilizing the climate.
Carbon leaves an unmistakable trail, the evidence etched in coral and ice cores. We can accurately measure how much carbon we can collectively emit into the atmosphere and who has taken up what share of that budget over the past two hundred years or so.
one of the most lasting legacies of the BP disaster may well be an aquatic infertility crisis,
For sea turtles—an ancient species that managed to survive the asteroid collision that killed the dinosaurs—the
A man stands up at a climate summit and asks, “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
why salmon have disappeared from about 40 percent of their historical range in the Pacific Northwest
linear, one-way relationships of pure extraction are being replaced with systems that are circular and reciprocal.
living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated:
deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind, and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources.
only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We
Meeting science-based targets will mean forcing some of the most profitable companies on the planet to forfeit trillions of dollars of future earnings by leaving the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground.
The economic impacts of slavery abolition in the mid-nineteenth century have some striking parallels with the impacts of radical emission reduction,
the wild idea that real equality means equal access to the basic services that create a dignified life.
when major shifts in the economic balance of power take place, they are invariably the result of extraordinary levels of social mobilization.
As the sociologist Kari Norgaard puts it in Living in Denial, a fascinating exploration of the way almost all of us suppress the full reality of the climate crisis, “Denial can—and I believe should—be understood as testament to our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and an underlying sense of moral imperative to respond, even as we fail to do so.”15
