THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING:Capitalism vs. the Climate

 
Naomi Klein: Author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine”

Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of capitalism. On a three-year appointment from September 2018, she is the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.
Klein first became known internationally for her book No Logo (1999); The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentina’s occupied factories, written by her, and directed by her husband Avi Lewis; and significantly for The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics that was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times Bestseller List non-fiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction in its year. In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine’s world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean’s 2014 Power List. She is a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.

 
 
 
“We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we’re really talking about, if we’re honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.”
 
 
 
 

Rebecca Tarbotton ,Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, 1973 -2012

Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is an environmental organization based in San Francisco, California, United States. The organization was founded by Randy “Hurricane” Hayes and Mike Roselle in 1985, and first gained national prominence with a grassroots organizing campaign that in 1987 succeeded in convincing Burger King to cancel $31 million worth of destructive Central American rainforest beef contracts. Protecting forests and challenging corporate power has remained a key focus of RAN’s campaigns since, and has led RAN into campaigns that have led to transformative policy changes across home building, wood purchasing and supplying, automobile, fashion, paper and banking industries
 
 
 
 

“In my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming the glaciers sliding off the redland ice-cap, pumping ocean water into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) comprehensive changing capitalism.”
 
 
 
 

Kim Stanley Robinson ,Science fiction writer, 2012

Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American writer
of science fiction. He has published nineteen novels and numerous short stories but is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Most projections of climate change presume that future changes-redhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea level rise-will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole. In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large scale impacts. At that point, even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially unstoppable processes are set in motion. We can think of this as sudden climate brake and steering failure where the problem and its consequences are no longer something we can control.”
 
 
 
 

INTRODUCTION

 
One Way or Another, Everything Changes.

 
“Most projections of climate change presume that future changes-redhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea level rise-will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole. In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes that have massively disruptive and large scale impacts. At that point, even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially unstoppable processes are set in motion. We can think of this as sudden climate brake and steering failure where the problem and its consequences are no longer something we can control.”
 
 
Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world largest general scientific society, 2014.
 
 
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity.It is the world’s largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members, and is the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science, which had a weekly circulation of 138,549 in 2008.
 
 
 
 
“I love that smell of the emissions”
-Sarah Palin,2011

Sarah Louise Palin (/ˈpeɪlɪn/ ( listen); née Heath; born February 11, 1964) is an American politician, commentator, author, and reality television personality, who served as the ninth governor of Alaska from 2006 until her resignation in 2009.
 
 
 

PART ONE

BAD TIMING
“Coal, in truth, stands not beside but above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country-the universal aid-the factor in everything we do.”

-William Stanley Jevons, economist, 1865
 
William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an economist and philosopher who foreshadowed several developments of the 20th century. He is one of the main contributors to the ‘marginal revolution’, which revolutionised economic theory and shifted classical to neoclassical economics.
 
 
 
 
“How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen.”
 
-Victor Hugo, 1940.
 
Victor Marie Hugo (French: [viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo] ( listen); 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. … In France, Hugo is known primarily for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages).

 
 
 
 

THE RIGHT IS RIGHT

The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change
 
“Climate scientists agree: climate change is happening here and now. Based on well-established evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organization of experts n this field.”

 
Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world largest general scientific society, 2014.
 
 
“ There is no way this can be done without fundamentally changing the American way of life, choking off economic development, and putting large segments of our economy out of business.”
 
-Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on ambitious carbon reduction.
 
Thomas J. Donohue Sr. (born 1938) is the President and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce located in Washington, D.C. The Chamber of Commerce supports pro-business causes and is the largest and oldest trade association in the United States. Donohue has been the Chamber’s president since 1997.
 
 
 
 

HOT MONEY

How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet
 
“We always had hope that next year was gonna be better. And even this year was gonna be better. We learned slowly, and what didn’t work, you tried it harder the next time. You didn’t try something different. You just tried harder, the same thing that didn’t work.”
 
Wayne Lewis, Dust Bowl survivor, 2012.
Wayne Lewis spent his childhood and most of his adult life in Gate, a small Quaker community on the eastern edge of
the Oklahoma panhandle. Education was a priority in the Lewis household – his father had received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Haverford College – and, throughout the 1940s, Wayne intermingled schooling and farming, attending classes whenever possible. During World War II, he was classified 4-F by the draft board. “I wasn’t mentally fit to be a soldier,” he says. “Quakers believe in doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. So war wasn’t an option.”
In 1947, Wayne graduated from Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, with a degree in chemistry. The next year he married schoolteacher Mary Catherine Mills. Together they raised two children. Though the couple continued to farm, Wayne devoted his life to teaching – in his hometown community of Gate and in Holtville, California. Instilled with a love of learning, he took classes throughout his career, as well, logging some 300 hours of continuing education credits from twelve different universities. After retirement, Wayne took up photography, became active in local museums, and built his own solar-powered home.
Wayne was laid to rest in early 2012. He felt most fortunate to have lived a life of love, learning, and service. “The best thing that ever happened to me was the family I was born into,” he says. “They were educated; they were Christians; they were ambitious. Everything they believed in was something good. They gave me that foundation.”
 
 
 
 
“As leaders we have a responsibility to fully articulate the risks our people face. If the politics are not favourable to speaking truthfully, then clearly we must devote more energy to changing the politics.”
 
– Marlene Moses Ambassador to the United States for Nauru, 2012.
 
Her Excellency Marlene Inemwin Moses (born 1961 in Aiwo) is a diplomat and a political and administrative figure from Nauru. She has served since 2005 as the current Nauruan Permanent Representative to the United Nations, with ambassadorial rank, having previously held consular responsibilities in Japan and New Zealand. She is also an expert in health administration.
 
 
 
 

PUBLIC AND PAID FOR

Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy
 
“We have no option but to reinvent mobility…much of India still takes the bus, walks or cycles-in many cities as 20% of the population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich.”
 
Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment, 2013
 

Ms Sunita Narain is a Delhi-based environmentalist and author. She is currently the Director General of Center for Science and Environment (CSE) and Editor of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth. Ms Narain plays an active role in policy formulation on issues of environment and development in India and globally.
 
 
 
 
 
“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Gorings bombing-planes.”
 
-George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941
 

George Orwell (June 25, 1903 to January 21, 1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism.

 
 
 
 
 

Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement
 

“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media adds to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”
 

-John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous, 1991
 

John Berger, in full John Peter Berger, (born November 5, 1926, London, England—died January 2, 2017, Antony, France), British essayist and cultural thinker as well as a prolific novelist, poet, translator, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel G. and his book and BBC series Ways of Seeing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“A reliably red company is one that is required to be red by law.”
 

-Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
 

James Gustave Speth. James Gustave “Gus” Speth is the
former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, founder and president of the World Resources Institute, and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Confronting the Climate Denier Within
 
“The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out”
-Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 2013
 

Stephen Ernest Stockman (born November 14, 1956) is an American politician who was a member of the Republican Party. He served as the U.S. Representative for Texas’s 9th congressional district from 1995 to 1997 and for Texas’s 36th congressional district from 2013 to 2015.
 
 
 
 

“The open veins of Latin America are still bleeding.”
-Bolivian Indigenous leader Nilda Rojas Huanca, 2014
 
“It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite. Steady exponential material growth with no limits on resource consumption and population is the dominant conceptual model used by today’s decision makers. This is an approximation of reality that is no longer accurate and (has) started to break down.”
 

-Global systems analyst Rodrigo Castro and colleagues, paper presented at a scientific modelling conference, 2014
 
 
Assistant Professor.
Departamento de Computación.
Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales,
Universidad de Buenos Aires.

 
 
 
 

MAGICAL THINKING
 
“Vast economic incentives exist to invent pills that would cure alcoholism or drug addiction, yet much snake oil gets peddled claiming to provide such benefits. Yet substance abuse has not disappeared from society. Given the addiction of modern civilisation to cheap energy, the parallel ought to be unnerving to anyone who believes that technology alone will allow us to pull the climate rabbit out of the fossil fuel hat…The hopes that many reds place in a technological fix are an expression of high-modernist faith in the unlimited power of science and technology as profound-and as rational-as Augustine’s faith in Christ.
 
-Political scientist William Barnes and intellectual historian Nils Gilman
 

Nils Gilman is the Associate Chancelllor and Chief of Staff at UC Berkeley. Prior to that, he was the Executive Director of UC Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and Director of Research for Monitor 360 , a geostrategic futures consultancy in San Francisco.
Nils holds a BA, MA and PhD in intellectual history from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2003) (2011), an anthology that explores how globalizing black market economies pose an emerging challenge to state authority. He is the co-editor of Humanity , an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism, and development. In addition to his publications, Nils has lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Columbia University, National Defense University, the European Futurists Conference and PopTech, among other venues.
 
 
 
 

“The leaders of the largest environmental groups in the countryhave become all to comfortable jet-setting with their handpicked corporate members, a lifestyle they owe to those same corporate moghuls. So it is little wonder that instead of prodding their benefactors to do better, these eladers-always hungry for the next donation-heap praise on every corporate half-measure and at every photo opportunity.”
 
-Christine MacDonald, former employee of Conservation International, 2008
 
Ms. Christine MacDonald, a freelance journalist who left
the field in 2006 to work in the communications division of Conservation International, one of the largest conservation organizations on the planet, was, by her own description, quickly disillusioned by wanton nepotism, executive salary bloat, and an all-too-cozy relationship with corporate donors.
When her position at Conservation International was eliminated within one year, Ms. MacDonald decided to mine her disillusionment and uncover reasons for it elsewhere within the “business” of environmentalism. “red, Inc.,” which was officially released last month by Lyons Press, is the result of that journey.
In detailing the salaries and other compensation enjoyed by some of the environmental movement’s chief executives (she reports that Steven E. Sanderson, the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society, collected $825,000 for his efforts in 2006; Peter Seligmann, president of C.I., drew a modest $391,000 in 2005), Ms. MacDonald suggests that big bucks transform these leaders — and their organizations — into mere stewards of their corporate benefactors.

 
 
 
 

 
The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big red
 
“Our arguments must translate into profits, earnings, productivity, and economic incentives for industry”
 
-former national Wildlife Federation President Jay Hair, 1987
 
On November 15, Jay Hair, former boss of the National Wildlife Federation, died of cancer at the age of 56. The New York Times eulogized Hair as “a passionate defender of the environment”. But the Times’s wistful cruise through Hair’s career managed to glide right by his real significance: he established a corporate model for environmentalism that thrives to this day.
Whether the Hair approach amounts to a defence of the environment from plunder is another question altogether, a question that Hair himself didn’t seem that troubled about.
For grassroots reds, Jay Hair came to personify nearly everything that’s wrong with the mainstream environmental movement: elitist, pr-driven, politically calculating, and cautious. In fact, Hair helped to shape many of the more odious excesses: the plush offices, obese salaries and cordial affiliations with big business.
Hair was an environmental executive for the go-go 90s. He didn’t see unfettered capitalism a threat, but an opportunity to cash in on the bonanza.
Hair perfected the art of environmental triangulation long before Dickie Morris showed up at the backdoor of Bill Clinton’s White House with his black bag of trickery. He never lost an opportunity to stab the knife in the back of an environmental group (or idea) that he considered too radical or impolitic-even the middle of the roaders at the Sierra got tongue-lashings from Hair, their policies on wilderness and trade publicly ridiculed as unrealistic. Hair was an insider and a powerbroker. Usually, he got entr?e to politicos such as Al Gore by giving ground. It was the only thing he had to offer.
Hair wasn’t an organizer. He didn’t led a mass movement of outraged reds. In fact, there’s every indication that he despised grassroots environmentalism. He even tried to suppress the independence of the chapters within his own federation, sparking a rebellion of sorts that was put down forcibly by Hair’s lieutenants.
Hair embraced corporations without question. He stocked his board with corporate honchos from companies with dirty reputations, such as Waste Management. He took their money, redwashed their crimes and then often did their bidding on the Hill.
His first big moment of betrayal came when he offered to lobby his fellow executives in the DC environmental caucus about the virtues of NAFTA. Not once, but twice. First he hawked the trade pact for Bush, then for Clinton. Unlike many of his colleagues, who operate as adjuncts of the Democratic Party, Hair wasn’t a partisan. He worked for whoever was in power and for whoever paid the bills.
And they were big bills.
Hair believed that if he was going to hang out with corporate execs, he should be paid like them. He was the first environmentalist to crack $200,000 a year in salary and benefits, setting a high bar that others have rushed to match. (When he left NWF in 1995, his salary was $293,000.)
He once attended a press conference in DC addressing the issue of global warming. As Hair pontificated about hydrocarbons and SUVs inside, he ordered his chauffeur to keep his limo idling outside the building, with the air condition blowing full-blast so that the great man wouldn’t break a sweat on the drive back to NWF’s lush headquarters.
After Hair was finally run out of NWF, he landed in Seattle, where he got a gig doing PR for the Plum Creek Timber Company, a logging outfit so rapacious that a Republican congressman deemed it the “Darth Vader of the timber industry”.
When the great David Brower at age 84 was on the streets of Seattle during the WTO’s confab, cheering on the protesters and cursing the police, Jay Hair was cashing in whatever remained of his red credentials for hackwork with the World Mining Congress and the World Bank. Gold mining may be the most destructive and toxic industry on the planet, often involving the use of cyanide and other poisons. But that didn’t stop Hair from fronting for the likes of Newmont Gold, one of the industry’s biggest and nastiest outfits. “Mining gold can be a pretty messy issue,” Hair said last summer. “But the gold industry, at least the (companies) I’ve talked to, are sensitive about cleaning up their acts.” That’s classic Hair.
His last big project was lobbying for the completion of a giant dam in Chile. This monument of environmental destruction dwarfs even Glen Canyon dam and will destroy nearly nearly a 500-miles of river, hundreds of villages, drown thousands of acres of forests and forcibly displace indigenous people.

 
 
 
 
 
“I know this sounds antithetical, but the bottom line is not whether new coal-fired plants are built….If the new coal plants are coming online under a cap that is bringing total emissions down, then it is not the worst thing in the world. Coal isn’t the enemy. Carbon emissions are.”
 
-Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, 2009
 
Fred Krupp has guided EDF for three decades. A leading voice on climate change, energy, and sustainability, he is a champion for harnessing the power of the marketplace to protect our environment. Under Krupp’s leadership,EDF has become one of the world’s most influentialenvironmental organizations.
 
 
 
 
 

The Green Billionaires Won’t Save Us
 
“I had always got away with breaking rules and thought this was no different. I would have got away with it as well if I hadn’t been greedy.”
 
-Richard Branson, on getting caught dodging taxes in the early 1970s
 
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is a British business magnate, investor, author and philanthropist. He founded the Virgin Group in the 1970s, which controls more than 400 companies in various fields. … He opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records—later known as Virgin Megastores—in 1972.
 
 
 
 
 
“You got to lead from the front. Nobody is going to start it from the grassroots.”
 
-Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, 2013
 
Michael Bloomberg. Michael Rubens Bloomberg KBE (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, politician, author, and philanthropist. As of April 2019, his net worth was estimated at $62.1 billion, making him the sixth-richest person in the United States and the ninth richest person in the world.

 
 
 
 
 

The Solution to Pollution Is …Pollution?
 
“Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year.”
 
-Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2008
 
Newton Leroy Gingrich né McPherson, June 17, 1943) is an American politician, author, and historian who served as the 50th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. A member of the Republican Party, he was the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 6th congressional district from 1979 until his resignation in 1999. In 2012, Gingrich was a candidate for the presidential nomination of his party.
A professor of history and geography at the University of West Georgia in the 1970s, Gingrich won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1978, the first Republican in the history of Georgia’s 6th congressional district to do so. He served as House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995. A co-author and architect of the “Contract with America”, Gingrich was a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. In 1995, Time named him “Man of the Year” for “his role in ending the four-decades-long Democratic majority in the House”.
As House Speaker, Gingrich oversaw passage by the House of welfare reform and a capital gains tax cut in 1997. Gingrich played a key role in several government shutdowns, and impeached President Clinton on a party-line vote in the House. The poor showing by Republicans in the 1998 Congressional elections, a reprimand from the House for Gingrich’s ethics violation, pressure from Republican colleagues, and revelations of an extramarital affair with a congressional employee 23 years his junior resulted in Gingrich’s resignation from the speakership on November 6, 1998. He resigned altogether from the House on January 3, 1999.
Political scientists have credited Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining democratic norms in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisanship.
Since leaving the House, Gingrich has remained active in public policy debates and worked as a political consultant. He founded and chaired several policy think tanks, including American Solutions for Winning the Future and the Center for Health Transformation. He has written or co-authored 27 books. He ran for the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential election, but ultimately endorsed front runner Mitt Romney, who won the nomination.

 
 
 
 
 

“Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
-William James, 1895
 
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 27, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. … James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism.
 
 
 
 
 

The New Climate Warriors
 
“Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
 
-The United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992
 
Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, often shortened to Rio Declaration, was a short document produced at the 1992 United Nations “Conference on Environment and Development” (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit.
Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992
 
It was aimed at reaffirming the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, adopted at Stockholm on June 1972. … The Rio Declaration states that the only way to have long term economic progress is to link it with environmental protection.
 
 
 
 
 

“An honest and scrupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank as a museum piece.”
-U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes
 
Harold LeClair Ickes was an American administrator and politician. He served as United States Secretary of the Interior for 13 years, from 1933 to 1946, the longest tenure of anyone to hold the office, and the second longest-serving Cabinet member in U.S. history after James Wilson.