Review
------
“This may be the first truly honest book ever
written about climate change.” -- Bryan Walsh, Time
"The most momentous and contentious environmental book since
Silent Spring.” -- Rob Nixon, The New York Times Book Review
"This is the best book about climate change in a very long
time—in large part because it's about much more. It sets the most
important crisis in human history in the context of our other
ongoing traumas, reminding us just how much the powers-that-be
depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should
give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the
same as the fight for a livable one." -- Bill McKibben, author of
The End of Nature and co-founder of 350.org
“This Changes Everything is the work book for . . . [a] new, more
assertive, more powerful environmental movement.” -- Mark Bittman
"Naomi Klein applies her fine, fierce, and meticulous mind to the
greatest, most urgent questions of our times. . . . I count her
among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world
today." -- Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and
Capitalism: A Ghost Story
“Naomi Klein is a genius. She has done for politics what Jared
Diamond did for the study of human history. She skillfully blends
politics, economics and history and distills out simple and
powerful truths with universal applicability.” -- Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr.
“[A]robust new polemic. . . . Drawing on an impressive volume of
research, Ms. Klein savages the idea that we will be saved by new
technologies or by an incremental shift away from fossil fuels:
Both approaches, she argues, are forms of denial. . . . Ms. Klein
is aware of the intractability of the problems she describes, but
she manages optimism nonetheless.” -- Nathaniel Rich, The New
York Times
"Klein is a brave and passionate writer who always deserves to be
heard, and this is a powerful and urgent book." -- John Gray, The
Observer (UK)
“If global warming is a worldwide wake-up call, we’re all pretty
heavy sleepers. . . . We haven't made significant progress, Klein
argues, because we've been expecting solutions from the very same
institutions that created the problem in the first place. . . .
Klein's sharp analysis makes a compelling case that a mass
awakening is part of the answer.” -- Chris Bentley, The Chicago
Tribune
“Gripping and dramatic. . . . [Klein] writes of a decisive battle
for the fate of the earth in which we either take back control of
the planet from the capitalists who are destroying it or watch it
all burn.” -- Roy Scranton, Rolling Stone
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About the Author
----------------
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist,
columnist, and author of the New York Times and international
bestsellers The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, This Changes Everything,
and No Is Not Enough. A Senior Correspondent for The Intercept,
reporter for Rolling Stone, and contributor for both The
Nation and The Guardian, Klein is the inaugural Gloria Steinem
Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers
University. She is cofounder of the climate justice organization
The Leap.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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This Changes Everything
1 ( notes.html#intnt1 )
“I love that smell of the emissions.”
—Sarah Palin, 20112 ( notes.html#intnt2 )
A voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight
3935, scheduled to depart Washington, D.C., for Charleston, South
Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the
plane.
They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There
they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had
sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels
were lodged so 3 ( notes.html#intnt3 )
Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow
the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off,
three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline
blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures.”4 (
notes.html#intnt4 )
The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot.
(As they were the year before and the year after.) And it’s no
mystery why this has been happening: the profligate burning of
fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways was bound and
determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting
tarmac. This irony—the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is
so radically changing our climate that it is getting in the way
of our capacity to burn fossil fuels—did not stop the passengers
of Flight 3935 from reembarking and continuing their journeys.
Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news
coverage of the incident.
I am in no position to judge these passengers. All of us who live
high consumer lifestyles, wherever we happen to reside, are,
metaphorically, passengers on Flight 3935. Faced with a crisis
that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is
continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with
an extra dose of elbow grease behind it. Like the airline
bringing in a truck with a more powerful engine to tow that
plane, the global economy is upping the ante from conventional
sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous
versions—bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, oil from deepwater
drilling, gas from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), coal from
detonated mountains, and so on.
Meanwhile, each supercharged natural disaster produces new
irony-laden snapshots of a climate increasingly inhospitable to
the very industries most responsible for its warming. Like the
2013 historic floods in Calgary that forced the head offices of
the oil companies mining the Alberta tar sands to go dark and
send their employees home, while a train carrying flammable
petroleum products teetered on the edge of a disintegrating rail
bridge. Or the drought that hit the Mississippi River one year
earlier, push5 ( notes.html#intnt5 )
We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing
emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change
everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown,
ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a
very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of
their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and
extreme droughts. And we don’t have to do anything to bring about
this future. All we have to do is nothing. Just continue to do
what we are doing now, whether it’s counting on a techno-fix or
tending to our gardens or telling ourselves we’re unfortunately
too busy to deal with it.
All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis.
All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually
are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we
most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes.
No additional effort required.
There are ways of preventing this grim future, or at least making
it a lot less dire. But the catch is that these also involve
changing everything. For us high consumers, it involves changing
how we live, how our economies function, even the stories we tell
about our place on earth. The good news is that many of these
changes are distinctly un-catastrophic. Many are downright
exciting. But I didn’t discover this for a long while.
I remember the precise moment when I stopped averting my eyes to
6 ( notes.html#intnt6 )
Of course a Marshall Plan for the Earth would be very
costly—hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars (Navarro
Llanos was reluctant to name a figure). And one might have
thought that the cost alone would make it a nonstarter—after all,
this was 2009 and the global financial crisis was in full swing.
Yet the grinding logic of austerity—passing on the bankers’ bills
7 ( notes.html#intnt7 )
Listening to Navarro Llanos describe Bolivia’s perspective, I
began to understand how climate change—if treated as a true
planetary emergency akin to those rising flood waters—could
become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just
safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and
fairer in all kinds of other ways as well. The resources required
to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming
heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty,
providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to
electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just
surviving or enduring climate change, beyond “mitigating” and
“adapting” to it in the grim language of the United Nations. It
is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap
somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right
now.
After that conversation, I found that I no longer feared
immersing myself in the scientific reality of the climate threat.
I stopped avoiding the articles and the scientific studies and
read everything I could find. I also stopped outsourcing the
problem to the environmentalists, stopped telling myself this was
somebody else’s issue, somebody else’s job. And through
conversations with others in the growing climate justice
movement, I began to see all kinds of ways that climate change
could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could
be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the
rebuilding and reviving of local economies; to reclaim our
democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful
new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving
public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing;
to take back ownership of essential services like energy and
water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much
healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is
linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land
rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels of
inequality within our nations and between them.
And I started to see signs—new coalitions and fresh
arguments—hinting at how, if these various connections were more
widely understood, 8 ( notes.html#intnt8 )
And in a moment of candor, the weapons giant Raytheon explained,
“Expanded business opportunities are likely to arise as consumer
behaviour and needs change in response to climate change.” Those
opportunities include not just more demand for the company’s
privatized disaster response services but also “demand for its
military products and services as security concerns may arise as
results of droughts, floods, and storm events occur as a result
of climate change.”9 ( notes.html#intnt9 ) This is worth
remembering whenever doubts creep in about the urgency of this
crisis: the private militias are already mobilizing.
Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities
besides a growing demand for men with guns. Between 2008 and
2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing
“climate-ready” crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme
weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were
controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and
Syngenta. Superstorm Sandy, meanwhile, has been a windfall for
New Jersey real estate developers who have received millions for
new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues to
be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much
as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina played out in New
Orleans.10 ( notes.html#intnt10 )
None of this is surprising. Finding new ways to privatize the
commons and profit from disaster is what our current system is
built to do; left to its own devices, it is capable of nothing
else. The shock doctrine, however, is not the only way societies
respond to crises. We have all witnessed this in recent years as
the financial meltdown that began on Wall Street in 2008
reverberated around the world. A sudden rise in food prices
helped create the conditions for the Arab Spring. Austerity
policies have inspired mass movements from Greece to Spain to
Chile to the United States to Quebec. Many of us are getting a
lot better at standing up to those who would cynically exploit
crises to ransack the public sphere. And yet these protests have
also shown that saying no is not enough. If opposition movements
are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need
a comprehensive 11 ( notes.html#intnt11 )
In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent
“dangerous” levels of climate change has not only failed to make
progress over its twenty-odd years of work (and more than ninety
official negotiation meetings since the agreement was adopted),
it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding.
Our governments wasted years fudging numbers and squabbling over
start dates, perpetually trying to get extensions like undergrads
with late term papers.
The catastrophic result of all this obfuscation and
procrastination is now undeniable. Preliminary data shows that in
2013, global carbon dioxide emissions were 61 percent higher than
they were in 1990, when negotiations toward a climate treaty
began in earnest. As MIT economist John Reilly puts it: “The more
we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are
growing.” Indeed the only thing rising faster than our emissions
is the output of words pledging to lower them. Meanwhile, the
annual U.N. climate summit, which remains the best hope for a
political breakthrough on climate action, has started to seem
less like a forum for serious negotiation than a very costly and
high-carbon group therapy session, a place for the
representatives of the most vulnerable countries in the world to
vent their grief and rage while low-level representatives of the
nations largely responsible for their tragedies stare at their
shoes.12 ( notes.html#intnt12 )
This has been the mood ever since the collapse of the much-hyped
2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. On the last night of that
massive gathering, I found myself with a group of climate justice
activists, including one of the most prominent campaigners in
Britain. Throughout the summit, this young man had been the
picture of confidence and composure, briefing dozens of
journalists a day on what had gone on during each 13 (
notes.html#intnt13 ) No matter how many times we have been
disappointed by the failings of our politicians, this realization
still comes as a blow. It really is the case that we are on our
own and any credible source of hope in this crisis will have to
come from below.
In Copenhagen, the major polluting governments—including the
United States and China—signed a nonbinding agreement pledging to
keep temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius
above where they were before we started powering our economies
with coal. (That converts to an increase of 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit.) This well-known target, which supposedly represents
the “safe” limit of climate change, has always been a highly
political choice that has more to do with minimizing economic
disruption than with protecting the greatest number of people.
When the 2 degrees target was made official in Copenhagen, there
were impassioned objections from many delegates who said the goal
amounted to a “death sentence” for some low-lying island states,
as well as for large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact it is a
very risky target for all of us: so far, temperatures have
increased by just .8 degree Celsius and we are already
experiencing many alarming impacts, including the unprecedented
melting of the Greenland ice sheet in the summer of 2012 and the
acidification of oceans far more rapidly than expected. Allowing
temperatures to warm by more than twice that amount will
unquestionably have perilous consequences.14 ( notes.html#intnt14
)
In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by
that target. “As global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees
Celsius, there 15 ( notes.html#intnt15 ) In other words, once we
allow temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the
mercury stops is not in our control.
But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such
great despair—is that because governments did not agree to
binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their
commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed,
emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical
changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a
utopian dream. And it’s not just environmentalists who are
raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released
its report that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world [by
century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global
food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and
life-threatening sea level rise.” And the report cautioned that,
“there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is
possible.” Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director)
of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has
quickly established itself as one of the U.K.’s premier climate
research institutions, is even blunter; he says 4 degrees Celsius
warming—7.2 degrees Fahrenheit—is “incompatible with any
reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and
civilized global community.”16 ( notes.html#intnt16 )
We don’t know exactly what a 4 degrees Celsius world would look
like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous.
Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels by 1 or
possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few
additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some
island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many
coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much
of California and the northeastern United States, as well as huge
swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities likely in
jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles,
Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.17 (
notes.html#intnt17 )
Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of
people, 18 ( notes.html#intnt18 )
And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which
warming is more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does
not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would
occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is becoming safer to
assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely
dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is regularly ice-free in
September, for instance, or, according to one recent study,
global vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable
“sink,” leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored.
Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much
goes out the window. And this process may be starting sooner than
anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and University of California,
Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West
Antarctica roughly the size of France now “appears unstoppable.”
This likely spells doom for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet,
which according to lead study author Eric Rignot “comes with a
sea level rise of between three and five metres. Such an event
will displace millions of people worldwide.” The disintegration,
however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for
emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the
worst.19 ( notes.html#intnt19 )
Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of
mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions
trajectory, we are headed for even more than 4 degrees of
warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency
(IEA) issued a report projecting that we are 20 (
notes.html#intnt20 )
These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in
your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your
street going off as well, one by one by one. They mean, quite
simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for
the human species. The only historical precedent for a crisis of
this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were heading
toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the
planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim
possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast
majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost
certainly going to put our civilization in peril if we kept going
about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were
already doing, which is what the climate scientists have been
telling us for years.
As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a
world-renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010,
“Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid
group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling
skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or
gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to
journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then
are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global
warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced
that global warming poses a clear and present danger to
civilization.”21 ( notes.html#intnt21 )
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. And yet rather than
responding with alarm and doing everything in our power to change
course, large parts of humanity are, quite consciously,
continuing down the same road. Only, like the passengers aboard
Flight 3935, aided by a more powerful, dirtier engine.
What is wrong with us?
22 ( notes.html#intnt22 )
Yes, the threat of war seemed immediate and concrete but so too
is the threat posed by the climate crisis that has already likely
been a substantial contributor to massive disasters in some of
the world’s major cities. Still, we’ve gone soft since those days
of wartime sacrifice, haven’t we? Contemporary humans are too
self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the
full freedom to satisfy our every whim—or so our culture tells us
every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make
collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all
the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights,
our arts and after-school programs. We send our kids to learn in
ever more crowded classrooms, led by ever more harried teachers.
We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the
destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our
lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while
service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public
university education should result in a debt that will take half
a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a
generation ago. In Canada, where I live, we are in the midst of
accepting that our mail can no longer be delivered to our homes.
The past thirty years have been a steady process of getting less
and less in the public sphere. This is all defended in the name
of austerity, the current justification for these never-ending
demands for collective sacrifice. In the past, other words and
phrases, equally abstracted from daily life, have served a
similar purpose: balanced budgets, increased efficiency,
fostering economic growth.
It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this
much collective benefit in the name of stabilizing an economic
system that makes daily life so much more expensive and
precarious, then surely humans should be capable of making some
important lifestyle changes in the interest of stabilizing the
physical systems upon which all of life depends. Especially
because many of the changes that need to be made to dramatically
cut emissions would also materially improve the quality of life
for the majority of people on the planet—from allowing kids in
Beijing to play outside without 23 ( notes.html#intnt23 )
But we are not stopping the fire. In fact we are dousing it with
gasoline. After a rare decline in 2009 due to the financial
crisis, global emissions surged by a whopping 5.9 percent in
2010—the largest absolute increase since the Industrial
Revolution.24 ( notes.html#intnt24 )
So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is 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 our
history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the
scientific community made its 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
came to be called “globalization,” with the signing of the
agreement 25 ( notes.html#intnt25 )
When historians look back on the past quarter century of
international negotiations, two defining processes will stand
out. There will be the climate process: struggling, sputtering,
failing utterly to achieve its goals. And there will be the
corporate globalization process, zooming from victory to victory:
from that first free trade deal to the creation of the World
Trade Organization to the mass privatization of the former Soviet
economies to the transformation of large parts of Asia into
sprawling free-trade zones to the “structural adjusting” of
Africa. There were setbacks to that process, to be sure—for
example, popular pushback that stalled trade rounds and free
trade deals. But what remained successful were the ideological
underpinnings of the entire project, which was never really about
trading goods across borders—selling French wine in Brazil, for
instance, or U.S. software in China. It 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 their goods as cheaply as
possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while
paying as little in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate
wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which would
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 far broader agenda.
The three policy 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. Much has been written about the real-world costs
of these policies—the instability of financial markets, the
excesses of the super-rich, and the desperation of the
increasingly disposable poor, as well as the failing state of
public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has
been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very
first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response
to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this
ideology was reaching its zenith.
The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic
secured over public life in this period made the most direct and
obvious climate responses seem politically heretical. How, for
instance, could societies invest 26 ( notes.html#intnt26 )
With hindsight, it’s hard to see how it could have turned out
otherwise. The twin signatures of this era have been the mass
export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning
carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model
of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of
the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels).
Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process
powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil
fuels from the earth, 27 ( notes.html#intnt27 ) The “free” market
simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of
emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic
collapse or deep depressions.
I’ll be delving deeper into those numbers in Chapter 2, but the
bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our
planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy
is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.
What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in
humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to
avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of
rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so
that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are
equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most
responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of
our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while
high-carbon sectors are encouraged to contract. The problem,
however, is that this scale of economic planning and management
is entirely outside the boundaries of our reigning ideology. The
only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a
brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of
all.
28 ( notes.html#intnt28 )
That’s tough for a lot of people in important positions to
accept, since it challenges something that might be even more
powerful than capitalism, and that is the fetish of centrism—of
reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the difference, and
generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the
habit of thought that truly rules our era, far more among the
liberals who concern themselves with matters of climate policy
than among conservatives, many of whom simply deny the existence
of the crisis. Climate change presents a profound challenge to
this cautious centrism because half measures won’t cut it: “all
of the above energy” programs, as U.S. President Barack Obama
describes his approach, has about as much chance of success as an
all of the above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed by science
require that we get very worked up indeed.
By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the
planet, I am not saying anything that we don’t already know. The
battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning
hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is
used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or
for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins
when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crisis
is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas
drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not
ending up 29 ( notes.html#intnt29 )
All this means that the usual free market assurances—A techno-fix
is around the corner! Dirty development is just a phase on the
way to a clean environment, look at nineteenth-century
London!—simply don’t add up. We don’t have a century to spare for
China and India to move past their Dickensian phases. Because of
our lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it
possible? Absolutely. Is it possible without challenging the
fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not a chance.
One of the people I met on this journey and who you will meet in
these pages is Henry Red Cloud, a Lakota educator and
entrepreneur who trains young Native people to become solar
engineers. He tells his students that there are times when we
must accept small steps forward—and there are other times “when
you need to run like a buffalo.”30 ( notes.html#intnt30 ) Now is
one of those times when we must run.
Power, Not Just Energy
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I was struck recently by a mea culpa of sorts, written by Gary
Stix, a senior editor of Scientific American. Back in 2006, he
edited a special issue on responses to climate change and, like
most such efforts, the articles were narrowly focused on
showcasing exciting low-carbon technologies. But in 2012 Stix
wrote that he had overlooked a much larger and more important
part of the story—the need to create the social and political
context in which these technological shifts stand a chance of
displacing the all too profitable status quo. “If we are ever to
cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical
solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The
relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is
trivial by comparison.”31 ( notes.html#intnt31 )
This book is about those radical changes on the social side, as
well as on the political, economic, and cultural sides. What
concerns me is less the mechanics of the transition—the shift
from brown to green energy, from sole-rider cars to mass transit,
from sprawling exurbs to dense and walkable cities—than the power
and ideological roadblocks that have so far 32 (
notes.html#intnt32 )
Will he ever see a moose?
Then, the other day, I was slain by a miniature board book called
Snuggle Wuggle. It involves different animals cuddling, with each
posture given a ridiculously silly name: “How does a bat hug?” it
asks. “Topsy turvy, topsy turvy.” For some reason my son reliably
cracks up at this page. I explain that it means upside down,
because that’s the way bats sleep.
But all I could think about was the report of some 100,000 dead
and dying bats raining down from the sky in the midst of
record-breaking heat across part of Queensland, Australia. Whole
colonies devastated.33 ( notes.html#intnt33 )
Will he ever see a bat?
I knew I was in trouble when the other day I found myself
bargaining with starfish. Red and purple ones are ubiquitous on
the rocky coast of British Columbia where my parents live, where
my son was born, and where I have spent about half of my adult
life. They are always the biggest kid pleasers, because you can
gently pick one up and give it a really good look. “This is the
best day of my life!” my seven-year-old niece Miriam, visiting
from Chicago, proclaimed after a long afternoon spent in the tide
pools.
But in the fall of 2013, stories began to appear about a strange
wasting disease that was causing starfish along the Pacific Coast
to die by the tens of thousands. Termed the “sea star wasting
syndrome,” multiple species were disintegrating alive, their
vibrant bodies melting into distorted globs, with legs falling
off and bodies caving in. Scientists were mystified.34 (
notes.html#intnt34 )
As I read these stories, I caught myself praying for the
invertebrates to hang in for just one more year—long enough for
my son to be amazed by them. Then I doubted myself: maybe it’s
better if he never sees a starfish at all—certainly not like this
. . .
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 it 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 will
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.
Because the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing,
is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we
can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders.
It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is
inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole
lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start
happening right away.
Can we pull it off? All I know is that nothing is inevitable.
Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a
very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
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