Climate Change Changes Everything

Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, discusses climate change and the economics of the energy industry.

Economic models were on my mind, so the title of this Bloomberg interview caught my eye.  I hadn't run into Naomi Klein before, but I wanted to find out who she was and what she did.  I Googled her book and watched a couple of her other interviews and talks, and honestly I wasn't quite taken by her tact with This Changes Everything.  For example, her talk at The New School in New York City Climate Action Week: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein | Capitalism vs The Climate struck me at first blush as a lot of yakking and motivation rant about winning the war against capitalism.  It is the win-lose proposition, alarmist tact that many activists assume, which I argue is not wholly effective or sustainable.  Nevertheless, I didn't dismiss This Changes Everything; I simply set it aside for the time being.  I found Klein's preceding book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism immediately compelling and far more disturbing.  So I spent several weeks studying up on it.

Now I've cycled back to environmental issues, and focus on Klein's perspectives and ideas this week.

So what changes everything?  Climate change changes everything.  Climate activism, Klein says, is the movement of movements.  (Sort of a meta-movement, I suppose.)  To deal with the dire ramifications of climate change, we need economic and political change.  But we’re still locked in the view that government should stay out of the way of big business and economic growth (i.e. a conservative view à la economist Milton Friedman, who is a main subject of The Shock Doctrine).  We're still locked in a short-term push for results à la Wall Street and its merry band of analysts.  It’s very profitable to invest in fossil fuels, and North America is on a fossil fuel boom.   (In fact, when I first consulted for a major oil and gas producer, our client told us that their profit margins exceeded those of top companies in the world combined.  So fossil fuels is obscenely and googly profitable.)  In the meantime, carbon emissions keep going up.  We need a serious debate on what values we need to govern our society.   How do you recognize all these competing interests? Klein challenges false dichotomy, such as economic well being (and dire environmental impact) vs climate driven changes (and economic jeopardy).  (She refers, too, to the stark battle implied in her tagline: Capitalism vs the Climate.)  The fossil fuel business is a very powerful industry (an understatement to the order of John D. Rockefeller since the late 1800s).   So far, all that we’ve done, she says, are marginal improvements, none of which add up to the level of change we need to make.