This Changes Everything Should Mean Everything

Thursday, June 8, 2017

This Changes Everything Should Mean Everything

Several years ago, (six to be precise) I posted a column by Naomi Klein titled Capitalism vs. the Climate. It is a brilliant piece that was published in The Nation, and it was refreshing to read thoughtful research that explained to a mainstream, albeit left-leaning, audience the environmental and economic correlation between peak oil and global warming, i.e. the Carbon Crisis. I've been a fan of Klein ever since I read The Shock Doctrine so I was glad to see that in her research she had come to a lot of the same conclusions I had. She spelled out quite clearly that we cannot have an economy based on infinite growth when we're stuck on one planet with finite resources, that the Carbon Crisis has brought civilization to the point that in order to survive, "it demands a new civilizational paradigm." Klein even referenced the positive efforts of the Transition Town movement and warned of how Jevon's Paradox could undo the savings from energy efficiency if that savings is "simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted."







Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything Source: Wikimedia Commons


When I found out Klein was writing a book on climate change and capitalism, I was eager to read her further research. Not too eager; the hardcover edition of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was published in 2014 and I waited until last year to read it when the paperback was on sale. My take on it? It is extremely well researched and well written. I would grade it as being a very good book, but for certain reasons I'll elaborate on later, it falls shy of being a great book. Klein does succeed in elaborating on the immediacy of our predicament and the necessity of the "new civilizational paradigm" mentioned in the initial column. As she writes on page 347, "We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need."

This Changes Everything is really good when it takes on the shortcomings of politicians and activists on both sides of the issue. It's pretty easy to tear apart the mindset of deniers, which Naomi Klein does with aplomb. But she is even more incisive in her critiques of so-called environmentalists that have grown cozy with Big Business, green billionaires like Richard Branson that talk a good game to the press, but don't always put their money where their mouth is, and anyone who thinks that carbon offsets constitutes a sound policy to stop global warming. To quote her on page 223: "The problem is that by adopting this model of financing, even the very best green projects are being made ineffective as climate responses because for every ton of carbon dioxide the developers keep out of the atmosphere, a corporation in the industrialized world is able to pump a ton into the air, using offsets to claim the pollution has been neutralized. One step forward, one step back. At best, we are running in place."

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http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2017/06/this-changes-everything-should-mean.html