Re-read review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, by Naomi Klein
I first read this book in 2015 and found it enlightening and rather inspirational in a “people power” kind of way. Re-reading it in 2022, it is still a good book but the feelings it triggers are more complicated. More on that in a minute, though! BTW, as the title will no doubt make prospective readers wonder: This is not a “violently seize the means of production” book, this is a more moderate “Neoliberal capitalism, specifically, has really bad effects on people and the environment; We should do something about that!” kind of book. The recommendations lean toward actions that distribute power to more people and communities.
What is “Neoliberal capitalism”? Essentially the kind that took hold in the 1980s and ‘90s that favors always lower regulation, always lower taxes, privatization of previously government-run public services like railroads, and lots of international free trade agreements. As the title of the first section, “Bad Timing”, suggests, it is unfortunate that the wide adoption of this economic ideology came right at the time when the problem of climate change was starting to be recognized. For example, as Klein points out, regulation is a tried-and-tested method for dealing with environmental problems, especially those connected to pollution/emissions (eg. the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and now aren’t), but embrace of neoliberalism encourages lawmakers to seek more complicated “market based” solutions…or to take no action at all. And the bit about how free trade treaties scuttled a Canadian plan to encourage people to buy locally-made solar panels was very disheartening! Of course, the roots of the “extractivist mindset” go much further back in Western culture, as the final chapter of section one explores.
One part I found fascinating was an inside look at a climate change deniers conference. The speakers had little in common regarding why they thought climate change wasn’t happening or wasn’t something worth worrying about. But many insisted that the idea was a ploy by the left to advance their own social agendas. In fact, it is apparently a common enough idea that the conservative mom of one of my friends asked me about it. I told her that I move in a lot of environmentalist and leftist circles and, while of course we’re going to grab onto a win-win like “investing in public transportation can make it easier for poor people to get to work AND cuts CO2 emissions,” I have never ever heard someone go “the best way to promote socialism is to pretend there’s a global climate crisis1.” As someone growing up and developing a concern about the environment in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it didn’t occur to me at all to link those concerns to, for example, the decline of unionization and I only barely saw a link between tropical deforestation and the history of colonialism2. Thinking about environmental justice is fairly new in the mainstream environmental movement – though of course it has long been a concern among marginalized communities! – and while critiques of capitalism have been gaining steam since the early 2000s, the specific links to climate change made in this book are still not as frequently mentioned as they might be. In fact, the very traditional Marxists (the kind of socialism non-leftist Americans are most worried about) are often not that keen on talking about the environment or racism or anything other than class. It is the social democrats and libertarian socialists (the kind who are very pro-democracy) who are making those connections!
1. I’ve heard some other stuff, mind you, like the occasional “accelerationist” who thinks it is better not to try to take any incremental steps (eg. fighting for a higher minimum wage) so that people will get more desperate and therefore be more inclined to revolution…which is fortunately NOT a mainstream view on the left! So it’s not like leftists are unusually good at never saying weird or morally questionable things – if people were faking fear of climate change I’m pretty sure I would have run across it.
2. And even then only because I happened to have parents with ties to Latin America who knew about that history!
Part 2, “Magical Thinking”, deals with all the things we are encouraged to think might save us that almost certainly won’t. While I was well aware of many of the critiques of geoengineering solutions (more on that shortly), and certainly already believed that “The green billionaires won’t save us3”, the section relating how many large environmental organizations got rather cozy with business, even fossil fuel companies, came as a shock. The Nature Conservancy even got into fossil fuel extraction a bit itself4! Ms. Klein is very skeptical of carbon trading, pointing out the risks involved in its implementation. For instance, not only would paying for reforestation give fossil fuel companies a license to keep operating dirty coal plants in marginalized communities in the US, but – without strong regulation to the contrary – that reforestation could lead to poor villagers being kicked off their land somewhere in the global south. Regarding the geoengineering, she points out that the most developed “carbon capture” technology is actually used to produce more oil: The CO2 is injected into the ground to push more fossil fuels up. That…doesn’t seem like a great idea! As for mimicking the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions by spraying particulates into the upper atmosphere: A) You have to keep doing it to get the effect, and B) if emissions continue, you’d still have the non-temperature negative effects of elevated CO2, like ocean acidification. And, oh yeah: Models suggest that this solution could actually make climate change worse in places like Africa…which are probably not the countries that would be making the decision about whether to do it!
3. Unless they are exceptionally selfless they won’t make choices that might hurt their own wealth and, even if they did, relying on charismatic individuals to lead us is, historically, extremely risky.
4. Needless to say, I have been avoiding giving them my money since I learned that! The Sierra Club and Environmental Defense have undergone a change in leadership, and are focusing much more on both climate change and environmental justice than they did in the 1990s. But this book introduced me to a few organizations that had continued fighting the good fight even in the free-market nadir, like Rainforest Action Network. Fighting climate change is, of course 350.org’s whole purpose, and while not mentioned in this book, Earthjustice seems to have taken up Environmental Defenses’ old unofficial slogan: “Sue the bastards!”
The last section, “Starting Anyway”, provides some tenuous hope. Chapter 9, “Blockadia” describes the worldwide phenomenon of grassroots blockades and protests against both extractive industry and economic austerity. “Perhaps this phenomenon shouldn’t even be referred to as an environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival – the health of the water, air, and soil.” These movements are risky, often drawing militarized responses, but there have been successes. “Love will save this place” continues the story by talking how a sense of place can drive these movements, as more and more people find themselves either in the path of extraction (eg. fracking) or impacted by its downstream effects (air pollution and climate change). The indigenous perspective is particularly important for that and, as Chapter 11 points out, there is a lot of indigenous territory that has never been formally ceded; those indigenous groups technically have legal authority to block extraction on those lands! But they don’t have the legal funds, and job opportunities are scarce…which is why they would need backup from everyone else to successfully make that stick. In “The right to regenerate”, Klein gets personal, discussing her own struggle with infertility, and wondering if the prevalence of this is related to the stresses and pollution that all life on earth is now facing. She notes that the effects of chemicals are often tested on adults, not on fetuses, hatchlings, or eggs – but those stages are known to be highly vulnerable and crucial for population survival. And their loss would lead to “No corpses, just an absence – more handfuls of nothing.”
In the conclusion, she explores the question of whether a change as huge as the economic changes needed to tackle climate change has ever been accomplished. She notes that famous social movements (the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, etc.) often included ambitious economic proposals as well, but that this element tended to be less successful. However, there is one equivalently dramatic change: the end of slavery! As with fossil fuels, those who benefitted from the slave economy argued that ending the institution would ruin their civilization…but it didn’t. And, Klein argues, because the social inequalities are fed from many of the same sources as the barriers to tackling climate change, we don’t need a new movement – we need a joining of old ones to tackle the “unfinished business of liberation”.
When I first read that in 2015, I got pretty fired up and hopeful, especially since so many countries were signing on to the Paris Climate Accords. But then the populist wave broke the other way, and we got four years of Trump in the US, while the UK got Boris Johnson, Brazil got Bolsonaro, etc. That meant the US pulling out of the Paris agreement, a ton of environmental regulations getting repealed or ignored, and activists having to split their attention between that and a bunch of other issues where things were also getting rolled backwards. Then we got the Covid pandemic and, while lockdowns certainly cut down on driving, attention again got diverted from the longer-term existential crisis, economic inequalities deepened, and working-class people seem to have been encouraged to split into partisan camps over masks and vaccines. Then, just as it seemed like we might be starting to get past that, the war in Ukraine happened. While some experts were pointing out the obvious “see, didn’t we say the EU and others should stop buying so much Russian gas?”, some governments, instead of investing in renewables, are wanting to build plants to liquify coal. I can’t even blame anyone else for apathy toward climate, because I’m mentally and emotionally exhausted myself!
Yet I also can’t ignore it: In the eight years that I’ve been doing ecology in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, we’ve had six years of drought that have killed millions of trees and every wildfire season seems worse than the last. I had to move my class fieldtrip to see the wildflowers in the local vernal pools up by a month and a half this year because we’d had no rain. And yes, drought and fire are part of the natural pattern here in the west. But the heat that is coming along with the summer drought is not usual; the 2012-2016 drought was estimated to be the most severe in over a thousand years due to that heat. And that, combined with past fire suppression practices that let forests get denser than they otherwise would, has created a mass of dry fuel that goes up with the slightest spark, and kills adult trees where the moderate ground-level fires of the pre-European California wouldn’t have. And dead trees can’t sequester carbon – in fact, they release what they have stored as they burn or decompose – making the climate change problem worse!
So imagine my delight when the 2022 IPCC report on the mitigation of climate change noted as early as page 3: “Recent literature4 highlights the growing role of non-state and sub-national actors including cities, businesses, Indigenous Peoples, citizens including local communities and youth, transnational initiatives, and public-private entities in the global effort to address climate change”. They also state “…climate change mitigation action designed and conducted in the context of sustainable development, equity, and poverty eradication, and rooted in the development aspirations of the societies within which they take place, will be more acceptable, durable and effective.” In fact, the report echoes a lot of ideas that ‘This Changes Everything’ had highlighted seven years prior. That might not seem notable, but the IPCC is actually kind of cautious. Because their reports are meant to reflect the strongest scientific knowledge and a consensus among experts from across the globe, there is a lot of arguing before anything gets put in, and neither alarming nor promising ideas supported by just 1-2 studies make the cut!
4. Here meaning “scientific research that has been peer reviewed and published”, not Jane Austen!
This is NOT a report that is going to openly call out capitalism. As an example of cautious wording: “Public and private finance flows for fossil fuels are still greater than those for climate adaptation and mitigation.”! However, they do note that “Limiting global warming to 2ºC or below will leave a substantial amount of fossil fuels unburned and could strand considerable fossil fuel infrastructure”. This “stranding” – making investments in infrastructure unrecoverable – is something Ms. Klein pointed out fossil fuel companies will fight really hard to avoid. While the IPCC doesn’t say that, they do stress that leaving most fossil fuels unburned is crucial.
The report continues to highlight equity, noting that per-person emissions vary widely by country and region. The 10% of households globally with the highest per-capita emissions contribute 34-45% of all household greenhouse gas emissions, while the bottom 50% contribute only 13-15%. They note, however, that eradicating extreme poverty and providing decent living standards is do-able without significant global emissions growth by basically skipping over intermediate technologies (eg. going straight to solar). They note that care should be taken to avoid displacing people or food crops when engaging in reforestation or production of biofuels. Also: “Removing fossil fuel subsidies would reduce emissions, improve public revenue …and yield other environmental and sustainable development benefits; subsidy removal may have adverse distributional impacts especially on the most economically vulnerable groups which, in some cases, can be mitigated by measures such as re-distributing revenue saved.”
One thing the
report stresses quite highly is the need for BOTH emissions reductions and
carbon capture. They note that nature-based solutions – stopping habitat
destruction, restoring forests and other ecosystems, building up carbon in soil
– could contribute a considerable amount fairly cheaply and with co-benefits
such as improving wildlife habitat. However, more “industrial” solutions could
also help. They note “CO2 capture and subsurface injection is a mature
technology for gas processing and enhanced oil recovery,” but, weirdly,
don’t clearly address whether it can be used outside of the context of
fossil fuel extraction! In terms of emissions reductions, they say that carbon
pricing instruments (eg. carbon trading) have been good at incentivizing
low-cost but not high-cost emissions reduction actions. Another interesting
statement: “There is sufficient global capital and liquidity to close global
investment gaps…but there are barriers to redirect capital to climate action.”
Yeah, no kidding! The list of barriers that follows is somewhat vague and
jargony, such as “inadequate assessment of climate-related risks and
investment opportunities”. By this, I think they may be referring to all
the analyses that suggest acting on climate change will be cheaper than NOT
doing so and suffering the consequences…and yet for some reason action
still isn’t taken! Of course, there isn't a lobby for "the economy", only for specific industries - and those that process or are reliant on fossil fuels still have deep pockets.
The good news is that this report suggests we CAN still keep warming under 1.5ºC if we make serious cuts in emissions before 2030. And it offers lots of ways to make progress on that, many of which are win-win scenarios for climate and human health, climate and wildlife, or climate and social justice. So…I guess check out both the IPCC report and ‘This Changes Everything’ for a roadmap on both what needs to be done, and some strategies for pushing through the opposition.
