Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’
New York Times book review By Rob Nixon, Nov. 6, 2014
“Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the
day when this planet may no longer be habitable.” Thus spoke President Kennedy
in a 1961 address to the United Nations. The threat he warned of was not
climate chaos — barely a blip on anybody’s radar at the time — but the hydrogen
bomb. The nuclear threat had a volatile urgency and visual clarity that the
sprawling, hydra-headed menace of today’s climate calamity cannot match. How
can we rouse citizens and governments to act for concerted change? Will it
take, as Naomi Klein insists, nothing less than a Marshall Plan for Earth?
“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate”
is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable.
Klein’s fans will recognize her method from her prior books, “No Logo: Taking
Aim at the Brand Bullies” (1999) and “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism” (2007), which, with her latest, form an antiglobalization trilogy.
Her strategy is to take a scourge — brand-driven hyperconsumption, corporate
exploitation of disaster-struck communities, or “the fiction of perpetual
growth on a finite planet” — trace its origins, then chart a course of
liberation. In each book she arrives at some semihopeful place, where activists
are reaffirming embattled civic values.
To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to
limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There
is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “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.” On the green left,
many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian,
recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those
of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein,
Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological
disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated
zombie ideology.
That philosophy — neoliberalism — promotes a
high-consumption, carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism
has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and
labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon
to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the
history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet
the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public
coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to
treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”
So
much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up
the check.
Klein diagnoses impressively what hasn’t worked. No
more claptrap about fracked gas as a bridge to renewables. Enough already of
the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and
nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions. Klein dismantles the
boondoggle that is cap and trade. She skewers grandiose command-and-control
schemes to re-engineer the planet’s climate. No point, when a hubristic
mind-set has gotten us into this mess, to pile on further hubris. She reserves
a special scorn for the partnerships between Big Green organizations and
Immense Carbon, peddled as win-win for everyone, but which haven’t slowed
emissions. Such partnerships remind us that when the lamb and the lion lie down
together, only one of them gets eaten.
In
democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are
going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and
complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to
the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a
much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”
Klein reminds us that neoliberalism was once an
upstart counterrevolution. Through an epic case of bad timing, the
Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the rise of the anti-regulatory World Trade
Organization, and the cult of privatizing and globalizing everything coincided
with the rising public authority of climate science. In 1988, James Hansen,
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, delivered historic testimony at
Congressional hearings, declaring that the science was 99 percent unequivocal:
The world was warming and we needed to act collectively to reduce emissions.
Just one year earlier, Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “There is no such
thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In the battle since, between a collective
strategy for forging an inhabitable long-term future and the antisocial,
hyper-corporatized, hyper-carbonized pursuit of short-term growth at any cost,
well, there has been only one clear winner.
But counterrevolutions are reversible. Klein devotes
much of her book to propitious signs that this can happen — indeed is
happening. The global climate justice movement is spreading. Since the
mid-1990s, environmental protests have been growing in China at 29 percent per
year. Where national leaders have faltered, local governments are forging
ahead. Hundreds of German cities and towns have voted to buy back their energy
grids from corporations. About two-thirds of Britons favor renationalizing
energy and rail.
The divestment movement against Big Carbon is
gathering force. While it will never bankrupt the mega-corporations, it can
reveal unethical practices while triggering a debate about values that
recognizes that such practices are nested in economic systems that encourage,
inhibit or even prohibit them.
The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve
a choral force. We hear a Montana goat rancher describe how an improbable
alliance against Big Coal between local Native American tribes and settler
descendants awakened in the latter a different worldview of time and change and
possibility. We hear participants in Idle No More, the First Nations movement
that has swept across Canada and beyond, contrast the “extractivist mind-set”
with systems “designed to promote more life.”
One quibble: What’s with the subtitle? “Capitalism vs.
the Climate” sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight, but it
belies the sophistication and hopefulness of Klein’s argument. As is sometimes
said, it is easier to imagine the end of
the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Klein’s adversary is
neoliberalism — the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of extreme
extraction. Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never
land of capitalism’s global overthrow. What she does, brilliantly, is provide a
historically refined exposé of “capitalism’s drift toward monopoly,” of
“corporate interests intent on capturing and radically shrinking the public
sphere,” and of “the disaster capitalists who use crises to end-run around
democracy.”
To
change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable
than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes.
Yet “This Changes Everything” is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She
braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and
activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and
contentious environmental book since “Silent Spring.”
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