This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

by Naomi Klein

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.

It found that while their emissions had stopped growing, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to move their dirty production overseas. The researchers concluded that the rise in emissions from goods produced in developing countries but consumed in industrialized ones was six times greater than the emissions savings of industrialized countries.

As previously mentioned, after the province of Quebec successfully banned fracking, the U.S.-incorporated oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources announced plans to sue Canada for at least $230 million under the North American Free Trade Agreement’s rules on expropriation and “fair and equitable treatment.” In arbitration documents, Lone Pine complained that the moratorium imposed by a democratically elected government amounted to an “arbitrary, capricious, and illegal revocation of the Enterprise’s valuable right to mine for oil and gas under the St. Lawrence River.” It also claimed (rather incredibly) that this occurred “with no cognizable public purpose”—not to mention “without a penny of compensation.”