This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein

Language: English

Pages: 576

ISBN: 1451697392

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

those estimates are inflated). Huge numbers of projects around the world, meanwhile, are generating carbon credits—the CDM alone had an estimated seven-thousand-plus registered projects in early 2014.61 But it didn’t take long for the flaws in the plan to show. Under the U.N. system, all kinds of dodgy industrial projects can generate lucrative credits. For instance, oil companies operating in the Niger Delta that practice “flaring”—setting fire to the natural gas released in the oil drilling

with these alarming projections. Several research teams have produced models that show significant losses of rainfall as a result of SRM and other sunlight-reflecting geoengineering methods. One 2012 study shows a 20 percent reduction in rainfall in some areas of the Amazon after a particularly extreme use of SRM. When another team modeled spraying sulfur from points in the Northern Hemisphere for a 2013 study, the results projected a staggering 60–100 percent drop in a key measure of plant

bumps up against a group of deeply rooted people with an intense love of their homeplace and a determination to protect it, the effect can be explosive. Love and Water When these very different worlds collide, one of the things that seems to happen is that, as in Bella Bella, communities begin to cherish what they have—and what they stand to lose—even more than before the extractive threat arrived. This is particularly striking because many of the people waging the fiercest anti-extraction

Manufacturing Action Plan,” Apollo Alliance, October 2010; Smart Growth America, “Recent Lessons from the Stimulus: Transportation Funding and Job Creation,” February 2011, p. 2. 10. “Working Towards Sustainable Development: Opportunities for Decent Work and Social Inclusion in a Green Economy,” International Labour Organization, May 2012. 11. “More Bang for Our Buck,” BlueGreen Canada, November 2012; Jonathan Neale, “Our Jobs, Our Planet: Transport Workers and Climate Change,” A report

standard of living, a measure of future security, and our relationships with one another. So what Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.52 Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the economic boat, Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come

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