This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate
by
Naomi Klein

INTRODUCTION: One Way Or Another, Everything Changes.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril. p. 6

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what’s wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?

I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: 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. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made the decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988—the exact year that marked the dawning of what we call globalization, with the signing of the agreement representing the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the United States, later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the inclusion of Mexico. p. 18-9.

[Free trade] was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which could trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this broader agenda.

The three pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. p. 19

The bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. p. 21

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an issue to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. p. 25

When fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe to ourselves and one another.

But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it won’t go away. That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us have to give up, whole industries that will disappear. And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike. And that, it seems to me, is worth a great deal. p. 28

PART ONE: BAD TIMING

CHAPTER 1: The Right Is Right—The Revolutionary Power Of Climate Change.

The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest hierarchical views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a high risk, compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying egalitarian views.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between worldview and acceptance of climate science to cultural cognition, the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our preferred vision of the good society. If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion. p. 36-7

The Heritage Foundation is hawking reports, as are the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute. The climate denial movement—far from an organic convergence of skeptical scientists—is entirely a creature of the ideological network on display here, the very one that deserves the bulk of credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the last four decades. p. 38

Many of these institutions were created in the late. 1960s and early 1970s, when U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In response, they launched a counterrevolution, a richly funded intellectual movement that argued that greed and the limited pursuit of profit was nothing to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the world had ever known. Under this liberationist banner, they fought for such policies as tax cuts, free trade deals, for the auctioning off of core state assets from phones to energy to water—the package known in most of the world as neoliberalism. p. 38-9

They deny reality, in other words, because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable. p. 43

The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly—whether emotionally, intellectually or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. p. 46

As for pitching climate action as a way to protect America’s high-consumerist way of life—that is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of all exported to every corner of the globe. p. 58

[W]hat the moderates constantly trying to reframe as something more palatable are really asking is this: How can we create change so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solution? How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked megalomaniacal elite that they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

The answer is: you don’t. You make sure you have enough people on your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible knowing that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right. And rather than twisting yourself into knots trying to appease a lethal worldview, you set out to deliberately strengthen those values (egalitarian and communitarian as the cultural cognition studies cited here describe them) that are currently being vindicated, rather than refuted by the laws of nature. p. 58

CHAPTER 2: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat The Planet.

Yet rather than compete for the best, most effective supports for green energy, the biggest emitters in the world are rushing to the WTO to knock down each other’s windmills. p. 65

The biggest problem with these arguments [—that the goal should be to get the cheapest possible products to the consumer so that the green transition can happens as quickly as possible—] is the notion that there is any free market in energy to be protected from distortion. Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion 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.” The freebie is the real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy. p. 70

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put something together before they understood the issues, interfere with saving the planet?” p. 72

“If the trade rules don’t permit all kinds of important measures to deal with climate change—and they don’t—then the trade rules obviously have to be rewritten. Because there is no way in the world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade rules as they are. There’s no way at all.” [—Steven Shrybman] p. 72

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. p. 72

It is not that companies moving their production to China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended yet unavoidable consequence. p. 81-2

“One by one, former NAFTA opponents and skeptics became enthusiastic supporters, and said so publicly,” writes journalist Mark Dowie in his critical history of the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground. These Big Green groups even created their own pro-NAFTA organization, the Environmental Coalition for NAFTA—which included the National Wildlife Federation, The Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund—which, according to Dowie, provided its “unequivocal support to the agreement.” p. 84.

The errors of this period cannot be undone, but it is not too late for a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade and build this needed architecture now. That doesn’t—and never did—mean an end to economic exchange across borders. It does, however, mean a far more thoughtful and deliberate approach to why we trade and whom it serves. 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. (For example, 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.)

According to Llana Solomon, trade analyst for the Sierra Club, this is not a fight that the climate movement can avoid. “In order to combat climate change, there’s a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and what we’re purchasing and how it’s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law is you can’t privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy? …If we don’t think about how the economy is structured, then we’re actually never going to the real root of the problem.”

These kinds of economic reforms would be good new—for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big box stores. And all of these constituencies would be needed to fight for these policies, since they represent the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power. p. 85-86

Now, I realize that this can all send apocalyptic—as if reducing emissions requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value on those things that most of us cherish above all—a decent 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. p. 88

Changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.

The rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have take to calling “The Great Transition.” p. 89

Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start immediately. That means that if we wait for what Bows-Larkin describes as the “whiz-bang technologies” to come online “it will be too little too late.”

So what to do in the meantime? Well, we do what we can. And what we can do—what doesn’t require technological infrastructure revolution—is to consume less, right away. p. 90

We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies and obsolescences. p. 91

A great deal of thought in recent years has gone into how reducing our use of material resources could be managed in ways that actually improve quality of life overall—what the French call selective degrowth. [In French, decroissance has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.] p. 93

CHAPTER 3: Public And Paid For

“For people it’s self-evident that goods on which everybody is dependent should belong to the public.” —campaign organizer Wiebke Hansen. p. 97

What stands out about Boulder’s experience is that, unlike some of the German campaigns, it did not begin with an opposition to privatization. Boulder’s local power movement began with the desire to switch to clean energy, regardless of who was providing it. Yet in the process of trying to achieve that goal, these residents discovered that they had no choice but to knock down the core ideological pillars of the free market era: that privately run services are superior to public ones. It was an accidental discovery very similar to the one Ontario residents made when it became clear that their green energy transition was being undermined by free trade commitments signed long ago. p. 99

On the other hand, according to John Farrell, senior researcher at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the attitude of most private players has been, “we’re going to make the money that we make from selling fossil fuels, and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way that we do business.” p.99-100

“Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests.” —Ralf Gauger, German anti-nuclear activist. p. 100

That’s because it is now clear that—at least from a technical perspective—it is entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables. p. 101

“It’s absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it’s a myth.” Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. p. 102

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 3,332—a five-fold boost. That is a staggering increase in just over thirty years, and clearly global warming cannot be said to have caused all of it. But the climate signal is also clear. “There’s no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events,” climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, “including drought, intense hurricanes and super typhoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves and potentially other types of extreme weather through the details are still being debated within the scientific community.” p. 107

This is why the persistent positing of population control as a solution to climate change is a distraction and moral dead end. As [the research of Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute] makes clear, the most significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich. p. 114

An Office of Price Administration pamphlet from 1942 argued that rationing was part of the American tradition. “What Is Rationing?” it asked:

First, let’s be sure what rationing is not. It’s not starvation, long bread lines, shoddy goods. Rather, it is a community plan for dividing fairly the supplies we have among all who need them. Second, it is not “un-American.” The earliest settlers of this country, facing scarcities of food and clothing, pooled their precious supplies and apportioned them out to everyone on an equal basis. It was an American idea then, and it is an American idea now, to share and share alike—to sacrifice, when necessary, but sacrifice together, when the country’s welfare demands it.

p. 115-116

CHAPTER 4: Planning And Banning.

[W]e know that the investment in public transportation pays off: a 2011 study by research and policy organization Smart Growth America found they create 31 percent more jobs per dollar than investment in new road and bridge construction. Investing in maintenance and repair of roads and bridges creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar than investment in new road and bridge construction. All of which means that making existing transportation infrastructure work better for more people is a smarter investment from both a climate and economic perspective than covering more land with asphalt. p. 126-127

In short these centralized monsters [big privately and publicly held oil companies] are fossils in every sense of the word, and need to to broken up and phased out whether they are held in public or private hands.

A better model would be an new kind of utility—run democratically, by the communities that use them, as co-ops or, as a commons, as author and activist David Bollier and other have outlined. p. 130

[M]any farmers who have long used these methods [of agroecology] have realized that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid fuel-based fertilizers and often use less carbon for transportation to market, in addition to better withstanding extremes weather and other climate impacts. And communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within the broader globalized food system. Which is why La Via Campersina, a global network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares “Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or, “small farms cool the planet.” p. 134

Even before I saw the giant mines, when the landscape out the window was still bright green boggy marshes and lush boreal forest, I could feel them—a catch in the back of my throat. Then, up and over a small elevation, there they were: the notorious Alberta tar sands, a parched, grey desert stretching to the horizon. Mountains of waste so large workers joke that they have their own weather systems. Tailing ponds so vast that they are visible from space. The second largest dam in the world, built to contain toxic waste. The earth, skinned alive. p. 139

[O]f course the Heartland audience cheered earnestly for the intellectual breakthrough that is hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) combined with horizontal drilling, the technology that has finally allowed the fossil fuel industry to screw us sideways. p. 142-143

The study found that methane emissions linked to fracked natural gas are are at least 30 percent higher than emissions linked to conventional gas. That’s because the fracking process is leaky—methane leaks at ever stage of production, processing, storage and distribution. And methane is an extraordinarily dangerous greenhouse gas, thirty-four times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, based on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates. p. 143

What industry calls innovations, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. p. 144

The long time frames attached to all these projections tell us something critical about the assumptions under which the fossil fuel industry is working: it is better that government s are not going to get serious about emissions cuts for the next twenty-five to forty years. And yet climate experts tell us that if we want to have a shot at keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, then developed country economics need to have begun their energy turnaround by the end of this decade and to be almost completely weaned from fossil fuels before 2050. p. 146

From the prospective of a fossil fuel company, going after they high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook. p. 148

In 2011, a think tank in London called the Carbon Tracker Initiative conducted a 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 credible study, that amount of carbon dioxide is 565 gigatons between 2011 and 2049. And as Bill Mckibben points out, “The thing to notice is, 2,795 is five times 565. It’s not even close,” He adds: “What those numbers mean is quite simple. This industry has announced in filings to the SEC and in promises to shareholders, that they’re determined to burn five times more fossil fuel than the plant’s atmosphere can absorb.”

Those numbers also tell us that the very things we must do to avert catastrophe—stop digging—is the very thing these companies cannot contemplate without initiating their own demise. They tell us that getting serious about climate change, which means cutting our emissions radically, is simply not compatible with the continued existence of one of the most profitable industries in the world. p. 148

The total amount of carbon in reserve represents roughly $27 trillion—more than ten times the annual GDP of the United Kingdom. If we were serious about keeping warming below 2 degrees, approximately 80 percent of that would be useless, stranded assets. Given those stakes, it is no mystery why the fossil fuel companies fight furiously to block every piece legislation that would point us to the right emissions direction, and why some directly fund the climate change denier movement. p. 148-149

It also helps that these companies are so profitable that they have money not just to burn, but to bribe—especially when that bribery is legal. In 2013 in 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. p. 149

“In government it is usually easy to rectify a light misalignment between two policies but near impossible to resolve a complete contradiction. Where there is a contradiction, the forces of incumbency start with a massive advantage.” —John Ashton, special representative for climate change to three successive UK governments between 2006 and 2012.

This dynamic will shift only when the power (and wealth) of the fossil fuel industry is seriously eroded. Which is very tough to do: the handy thing about selling natural resources upon which entire economies have been built—and about having so far succeeded in blocking policies that would offer real alternatives—is that most people keep having to buy your product whether they like you or not. So since these companies are going to continue being rich for the foreseeable future, the best hope of breaking the political deadlock is to radically restrict their ability to spend their profits buying and bullying politicians. p. 150-151

[T]he solutions are clear. 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 be publicly funded as a basic cost of having a democracy. p. 152

When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crises made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities and all other major problems one could name… relatively insignificant by comparison. Which helps explain why the great radical journalist I.F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure.”

They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency. As Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York wrote in July, 2013, “The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, we are climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment.” p. 153

CHAPTER 5: Beyond Extractivism p. 161

PART TWO: MAGICAL THINKING

CHAPTER 6: The Disastrous Merger Of Big Business And Big Green.

The Environmental Defense Fund has always insisted that it does not take donations from the companies with which it forms partnerships—that, writes EDF vice president for strategy and communications Eric Pooley, “would undermine our independence and integrity.” But the policy doesn’t bear much scrutiny. For instance, one of the EDF’s flagship partnerships is with Walmart, with whom it collaborates to “make the company more sustainable.” And it’s true that Walmart doesn’t donate to the EDF directly. However, the Walton Family Foundation, which is entirely controlled by members of the family that founded Walmart, gave the EDF $65 million between 2009 and 2013. In 2011, the foundation provided the group with nearly 15 percent of its funding. Meanwhile, Sam Rawlings Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on the EDF’s board of trustees (identified merely as “Boatman, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur” on the organization’s website.)

The EDF claims that it “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.” Which, judging from Walmart’s rather dismal environmental record since this partnership began—from its central role in fueling urban sprawl to its steadily increasing emissions—is not a very high standard at all.

Nor is the Environmental Defense Fund the only environmental organization to have benefited from the Walton family largess. Their foundation is one of the top green funders, handing out more than $71 million in grants for environmental causes in 2011, with about half of the money going to the EDF, Conservation International and the Marine Stewardship Council. All have partnerships with Walmart, whether to lower emissions, stamp an eco label on some of the seafood the company sells or to co-launch a line of “mine to market”jewelry. Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, observes that having large parts of the green movement so dependent on the scions of a company that almost singlehandedly supersized the retail sector and exported the model around the world has had profound political implications. “Walmart’s money is exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems and elevating certain kinds of approaches—notably those that reinforce, rather than challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society,” she writes.

And this is the heart of the issue—not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be “win-win.” And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global degregulatory framework that has done so much to send emission soaring. p. 208-10