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this changes everything
Naomi Klein: Diverse Climate Movement United by Love of Place, Need for Water
Speaking in the UK, Canadian author of the new book, 'This Changes Everything,' says that our atmosphere should be seen as the biggest political tent of. 'We’re all under it and we need to start acting like it.'
Oct 07, 2014
Speaking with the Guardian's Owen Jones in London on Monday night, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein continued to broadcast the message of her new book, This Changes Everything, by arguing that the anti-fracking movement that has taken hold in the United Kingdom is a prime example of people rising up against the fossil fuel industry in ways that were once unheard of. Though these fights are always grounded in the particulars of local politics and dynamics, Klein says, they also share common bonds that are turning otherwise singular battles into a unified global movement.
"The movement against fracking has been heroic," Klein said. "People get involved in fighting fracking not because of climate change but because they're worried about their water. Water is what unites so many of these movements, whether it's against tar sands, pipelines or fracking, coal mining, it's water and love of place."
Klein said the power of the global climate justice movement is not only the number of people involved, but about the movement's inherent and growing diversity. Asked about the recent People's Climate March in New York City, which drew more than 400,000 people to the streets ahead of the UN Climate Summit in September, she said: "To me, it was not just the size of it, this march had a quality to it that I'd never seen at a mass environmental demonstration."
To the applause of the crowd, Klein continued, "I think we need to be very clear about this - the only way you can win against forces with a huge amount to lose is to build a movement of people, many more people, with a huge amount to gain."
From saving our local natural resources to fighting back against what she called the "brutal logic of austerity," Klein said the crisis of climate change is offering new ways to organize against the existing neoliberal order that is ravaging our economies and democracies, our ecological systems, and the places where people live.
"Climate is the big tent we've been waiting for, and why wouldn't it be," she said. "The atmosphere is the biggest tent of all, we're all under it and we need to start acting like it."
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Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver 'People's Shock'
Status quo is not an option if we are to rein in runaway emissions, This Changes Everything author says in address to conference
Sep 03, 2014
"You're having the core conversation of our time."
That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on "concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth."
Klein's opening address to the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which kicked off Tuesday in the German city of Leipzig, made perfect sense, as the themes of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, overlap those of the conference -- that addressing the climate crisis is incompatible with the current growth-focused economy.
"The premise from which my book begins is one that I think we all pretty much agree on," Klein said, "that when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, we ... have failed catastrophically."
The world's track records on climate action "are not something to be proud of," she said, and they have set us on on a trajectory to live in a world that could see as much as a 6-degree rise in temperature from pre-industrial levels.
The "status quo is not an option," Klein said. "Radical change of some kind, whether physical or political, are our only options left."
"This is why the climate crisis challenges centrist liberals most of all because they subscribe to an ideology that is so resistant to the idea of radical change, to the idea of anything but incremental, reformist change."
As she argues in This Changes Everything, she said in her address that "our failure, most of all, has to do with the tragic, bad timing of this particular crisis." Scientific consensus on emissions-drive carbon crisis has been in for over 50 years, yet it took until the late 1980s when noted climate scientist James Hansen testified before Congress about the link between emissions and warming for it to hit a turning point in North America, she explained. Yet, she said, this same moment in time marked a so-called triumph of "liberal ideology." It was the time of the rise of "free trade" and WTO trade tribunals, austerity policies that clash with measures that could prevent and deal with climate disruption, the global north's refusal to own up to climate debts it owes the global south, and the privatization of energy sector fueled by profit motive. These liberal triumphs "systematically sabotaged the actions that were needed to respond to this crisis," she charged.
But "this moment isn't just about dropping out and building our alternatives and talking about our perfect degrowth future, and it isn't just about confronting the carbon criminals. We have to do both at the same time. We have to have our resistance and our alternatives woven together," she said.
Having even a 50/50 chance of keeping the planet under a 2-degree level of warming "is incompatible with economic growth," Klein said.
Instead, "what we need to do is have a deliberate economy. That's an economy that grows in areas that are light on the Earth -- the caring professions, care-giving, teaching, arts -- that expands in how we treat each other and contracts when it comes to the mindless use of resources, particularly finite resources."
In contrast to the kind of "shock doctrine" Klein has written about extensively, "climate change can be a people's shock, a blow from below." It can take power out of the hands of the few into the hands of the many. "It can radically expand the commons rather than auctioning it off in pieces and where right-wing shock doctors exploit emergencies, both real and manufactured, in order to push through policies that make us even more prone to crisis, the kinds of transformations that we must fight for do the exact opposite."
At the core of this, she said, is the notion that the climate crisis "is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts and extinctions, telling us that we need an entirely new economic model, a new way of sharing the planet, telling us that we need to evolve."
Klein began her address with a quote from the late Rebecca Tarbotton, who was executive director of Rainforest Action Network, and which appears at the beginning of her new book: "What we're really talking about... is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet." Indeed, to look at the program (pdf) of the degrowth conference is to see seeds of such transformation. From discussions on post-extractivism to food sovereignty to monetary and financial systems, a new vision of such a transformation is underway.
To get more inspiration for this needed undertaking, livestreams from the event, which continues through Sept. 6, are available from The Extraenvironmentalist and Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung.
Watch Klein's full address in this video uploaded to YouTube by The Extraenvironmentalist:
Degrowth 2014 - Opening Session - Naomi KleinMusical opening with Pablo Paolo Kilian, Opening Speech by Nina Treu and Daniel Constein, Keynotes by Alberto Acosta (live) ...
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'This Changes Everything': Trailer for Naomi Klein's Coming Blockbuster
'This Changes Everything': Capitalism vs. the Climate
Aug 17, 2014
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it's not about carbon--it's about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
The new book by Naomi Klein. In stores September 16 and available for pre-order. For more information, tour dates, or to buy the book: https://thischangeseverything.org/
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate - Book TrailerThe new book by Naomi Klein. In stores September 16 and available for pre-order. For more information, tour dates, or to buy the ...
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Naomi Klein: 'Our Economic Model Is at War with Life on Earth'
New video trailer previews thesis of anticipated new book by Canadian writer and activist
Aug 08, 2014
The book's title is not elusive: 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate'
Due for release in September, the anticipated new work by Canadian journalist, activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein has now been previewed in a video trailer that appears to lay out its main themes and central argument.
"In December of 2012, a complex systems scientist walked up to the podium at the American Geophysics Union to present a paper," the narrator of the video--Klein herself--says as footage begins of urban high rise developments and burnt out croplands.
And the voice-over continues:
The paper was titled, "Is the Earth Fucked?" His answer was: "Yeah. Pretty much."
That's where the road we're on is taking us, but that has less to do with carbon than with capitalism.
Our economic model is at war with life on Earth.
We can't change the laws of nature, but we can change our broken economy.
And that's why climate change isn't just a disaster. It's also our best chance to demand--and build--a better world.
Change or be changed. But make no mistake... this changes everything.
Watch:
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate - Book TrailerThe new book by Naomi Klein. In stores September 16 and available for pre-order. For more information, tour dates, or to buy the ...
According to Klein's U.S. publisher Simon & Schuster, This Changes Everything is a "brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core 'free market' ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems."
Described as more important and further-reaching than her previous best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, Klein's new book will argue
that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It's an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives.
Those arguments won't be new to those who have followed Klein's work--and the similar arguments of many others in recent years--but the expectation is that as with her previous exploration of modern capitalism in the Shock Doctrine, Klein will present her most rounded and complete vision for the predicament of the moment and her vision for the future.
In a speech to one of Canada's largest labor unions last year, Klein told the members of UNIFOR that it was well past time that working people and industrial interests get their minds around what climate science is dictating to humanity about the current economic model of corporate-dominated global capitalism. She also discussed her idea that climate change should not be framed as a disaster, but as an enormous opportunity to reshape the political paradigm and the fight for global justice. She told the crowd of workers:
The case I want to make to you is that climate change--when its full economic and moral implications are understood--is the most powerful weapon progressives have ever had in the fight for equality and social justice.
But first, we have to stop running away from the climate crisis, stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led to our society's prosperity is now destabilizing the natural systems on which all of life depends.
"Climate change," she added, is "not an 'issue' for you to add to the list of things to worry about it. It is a civilizational wake up call."
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