Naomi Klein: ‘We tried it your way and we don’t have another decade to waste’
The climate-change movement is making little headway against corporate vested interests, says the author of Shock Doctrine. But how does she think her new book, This Changes Everything, will help galvanise people?
the Guardian,
17 September, 2014
Naomi
Klein
is the star of the new American left. At 44, the writer and activist
has twice written blockbusters combining ground-level reporting and
economic analysis that challenged people to take a hard look at what
they took for granted: their shopping choices, America’s place in
the world, and the devastating effects of arcane trade policy and
rampant free market ideology. Along the way she gained a following
that spans academics, celebrities and street and factory protesters.
Her
first book,
No Logo,
about the power of brands over sweatshop workers in Asia who made the
products (and the consumers in America and Europe who consumed them),
politicised a generation of twentysomethings. It became the handbook
of the anti- globalisation protests, and inspired two
Radiohead albums.
Seven
years later, her second book, Shock
Doctrine,
analysed how wars, coups and natural disasters were used as a pretext
to impose so-called “free market” measures. Now Klein is back,
writing about capitalism, only this time the fate of the entire
planet is at stake. With her new book, This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs The Climate, Klein hopes to set off the kind of
powerful mass movement that could – finally
– produce the radical changes needed to avoid a global warming
catastrophe and fix capitalism at the same time. She argues that we
have all been thinking about the climate crisis the wrong way around:
it’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme
anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the
1980s and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening
inequality.
“I
think we are on a collision course,” she says. Twenty-five years
ago, when the first climate scientist was called to testify to
Congress and make global warming a policy challenge, there might have
still been time for big industries to shrink their carbon footprints.
But governments at the time were seized with the idea that there
should be no restraints on industry. “During that time,” Klein
writes, “we also expanded the road from a two lane, carbon-spewing
highway to a six-lane superhighway.”
When
we meet in her Toronto home, Klein is juggling a schedule that
combines the standard author book readings and television interviews
and planning for an event in New York City billed as the biggest
climate march ever seen. Her husband, film-maker Avi Lewis, is out
shooting
a companion film
due for release in January. The two text back and forth during our
chat.
Klein
does not easily fit into most people’s view of a committed
environmentalist. She drives a car (it is a hybrid). She flies,
already a lot more than most people, and is set to rack up air miles
that would make her, by her own admission, “a climate criminal”.
There is a brightly coloured plastic playhouse in the garden that was
probably made in China. Yet she confesses to getting weepy when she
thinks about the future under climate change.
In
a long conversation over the dining table, Klein says she is not
about to purge her life of plastics or fossil fuels. She says she is
not going to be trapped into “gotcha games” about personal
habits. And she is definitely not going to subscribe to the idea that
climate change ranks above all other causes.
“I
think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being
insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying: ‘This is the
issue that beats all other issues’ or, ‘Your issue doesn’t
matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.’” Klein
says committed environmentalists aren’t her target anyway. “What
I hope is less about what the greens will do, but what people who
don’t consider themselves part of the green movement will do,”
she says. “This book is not written for the environmental movement.
It is written much more for people who would never read a book about
climate change but are engaged with economic justice of other kinds.”
That
is where Klein believes she can do the most good. “I want to act,
if I can, as a bridge for people who read Shock Doctrine or No Logo.
People who are sitting out for whatever reasons.”
Klein
admits that even with her reputation for producing brainy economic
analysis, and a crack research team to which she gives generous
credit in the book and in conversation, it took three years of
“marinating” in the material. “I have amazing research help.
Basically what I spend my money on is research,” she says. “The
way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so
abstract and such a boys’ club that it makes a lot of women just
roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified,” she
says. “I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to
write about it.”
The
idea of writing about climate change took hold of Klein around the
time of the
2009 Copenhagen climate summit
– legendary now as a failure of international diplomacy. The summit
of world leaders, convening soon after the US had its
first “green president” in Barack Obama,
was supposed to put the major economies on a glide path to cutting
emissions.
Klein
came to the meeting planning to write about the great fight between
rich and poor countries over the historic responsibility the US and
Europe bore for causing climate change. She had dared to hope at one
point that a climate deal would be the great equaliser –
compensating Africa and Asia for colonialism. But the summit
collapsed under the weight of those expectations. Leaders from Africa
and small south Pacific Island states, which are slowly drowning
under rising sea levels, wanted a more aggressive action that would
limit the temperature rise to 1.5C; leaders from rich countries
deemed the proposal bad for businesses and rejected it for fear it
could cost them votes.
“I
wasn’t prepared for the naming of that inaction by the
industrialised world as racism,” Klein says. “I was struck by the
fact that African delegates were using words such as genocide,
describing a two-degree temperature target as allowing Africa to
burn.” She pauses. “I found the Copenhagen experience pretty
devastating.”
It
was a difficult time for Klein personally as well. After the
publication of Shock Doctrine, she was on the road for almost two
years. She barely saw her husband. While she was travelling the world
giving speeches and being hailed as an inspirational figure, Klein
found herself in a rut. “I think I was profoundly depressed about
2008-2009,” she says. “I have always told myself that I would not
spread hopelessness.” There are figures on the American left who
just get up on stage and do these doom and apocalyptic presentations
and it can be quite compelling. But I have seen it enough that I have
told myself that if I ever get to that point, I will stay home.”
She became convinced it was time to retreat, at least for a while. “I
just didn’t feel that I had anything to offer, where I wasn’t
just indulging my own despair.”
There
were other difficulties. Klein writes in the book of the surprising
realisation that she did want children after all, and of her
struggles through what she calls the “fertility factory” and
miscarriages before she finally became pregnant. Her son, Toma,
turned two this summer. The book is dedicated to him. But as she was
preparing for publication, Klein was diagnosed, and operated on, for
thyroid cancer; she says flatly she will not discuss the illness
beyond that.
For
readers of Klein’s earlier works – or of Thomas
Piketty’s
analysis of inequality – the central message of the book will sound
familiar. Capitalism, since it was unshackled by the deregulation of
the 1980s, has widened the gap between rich and poor. The top 3% held
55% of all wealth last year, up from 45% in 1989. The bottom 90%
controlled 24.7% of wealth, according to statistics released this
month by the Federal
Reserve.
“It
is not like everything is fine except for the problem that the
temperature is going up a little bit,” Klein says. “If the only
problem with capitalism was this slight temperature increase, we
would really be cooked. But the fact is that there are lots of
problems with this system, and on top of all of those problems, it is
destabilising our planet’s life support system.”
Klein
believes the gap between the 1% and everyone else and the
powerlessness of local governments to take control are casualties of
global capital. To follow the course of action she prescribes would
require a hostile takeover of large parts of the environmental
movement. But that would be entirely warranted, it seems.
Environmental groups have wasted time trying to recruit big business
and billionaires to adopt pro-climate measures, she says. In the
meantime, economies have continued to spew out carbon pollution,
making a climate fix far more difficult.
“We
need an ideological battle. It is still considered politically
unthinkable just to introduce straight-up, polluter-pays punitive
measures – particularly in the US.” To Klein, environmentalists
should have just gone to war on business, and on the whole concept of
capitalism.
In
a devastating chapter, she details how the US’s biggest
environmental group, the
Nature Conservancy,
earned money from oil and gas drilling on a parcel of Texas land it
had set aside for conservation. She writes about the nightmarish
scenarios surrounding geoengineering, or hacking the planet, by
spraying seawater into the sky to create cloud cover, or simulating a
volcanic eruption to fill the lower atmosphere with ash.
Elsewhere,
Klein takes on Richard
Branson
for failing to live up to his promise to set aside $3bn to fight
climate change. “So much hope was put in this parade of
billionaires to try and reconcile capitalism with climate,” she
says. “When Branson entered the climate game, he posited it
specifically as an alternative to regulation. He said ‘the
governments aren’t going to do this, we’re going to do this. Go
to the UN climate summit in a couple of weeks and it’s all going to
be the new green economy and the head of Bank of America sitting down
with the president of Mexico – and we are all going to do it
together.’” She remains irritated. “That is a dangerous idea at
this stage of history. We now have two decades to measure that model.
We are not talking about a theory here, we are talking about a track
record. I think it’s fair to say: ‘OK, we tried it your way and
we don’t have another decade to waste.”
In
truth, Klein is vague in her book and our conversation about exactly
how this would come about. In the book she talks about “an
effervescent moment” – when popular protests converge to bring
about real change – which comes after a section in the book titled
“Magical Thinking”. There is a curious failure to really get to
grips with questions about a real-world solution – Klein must have
anticipated being asked. Especially given that she has often been
acutely focused on what popular movements need to do to bring about
concrete change; her message to Occupy, for instance, was that the
movement needed to impose clear structures and institutions. If
capitalism is going to destroy the world, why wouldn’t capitalism
fix itself – if only for its own survival?
“I
don’t know if capitalism wants anything. The system itself doesn’t
think as an entity – it thinks as a collection of self-interested
profit-seeking units.” Asked why Obama is such a peripheral figure
in her book, Klein is ambiguous. “I do think Obama is interesting
but more in the sense of an absence,” she says. “Obama should
have used the economic bailout of 2009 to impose new rules on car
companies,” she says. (In fact, Obama used the bailout to spend up
to $100bn on home retrofits, subways, and other climate-friendly
measures. Klein overlooks these entirely.) “The fact that Obama
blew that moment, to me, is one of the great tragedies of our times.”
The
fix she proposes broadly relies on scattered groups of climate
organisers, grassroots and indigenous people’s groups that have
been ready to take on corporate power in a way that Big Green is not.
Klein admits that most environmental groups are too white, male, and
middle class to connect with women, African-Americans, Latinos and
the poor who will bear the brunt of climate change. She recalls that
in their first manifestos, the Occupy protesters never even mentioned
global warming.
Naomi
Klein at Occupy in 2011. Photograph: David Shankbone
Klein
is on the board of one of those emerging grassroots groups: 350.org
has played a lead role in reframing a mundane pipeline project, the
Keystone XL, until it was seen as one of the most critical
environmental decisions of Obama’s presidency. The Keystone XL
project, meant to transport tar sands crude from the vast Alberta tar
sands, would probably be well on its way to completion, if the
protests by 350.org and Nebraska landowners had not made the project
a national issue. Obama has repeatedly put off making a decision
about the pipeline. But the deciding factor in that delay was almost
certainly the wealthy Democratic donors pushing behind the scenes,
and threatening to cut off election funding.
Even
so, Klein continues to sees the Keystone fight, widespread local
protests against fracking and campus divestment campaigns as the way
forward on climate change. She argues there is little scope for
individuals on their own to accomplish much, giving the examples of
Toronto’s impressive carbon-cutting efforts. “It’s been kind of
disastrous,” she says. “While we are all doing these green
things, our country’s emissions are soaring because of the tar
sands. People start feeling kind of like jerks. We are just sort of
like suckers.”
She
goes so far as to lump centrist environmental leaders together with
groups such as the Heartland
Institute,
which denies the existence of climate change. “Between the
Heartlanders who recognise that climate change is a profound threat
to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific
reality, and those who claim climate change requires only minor
tweaks to business-as-usual and therefore allow themselves to believe
in its reality, it’s not clear who is more deluded,” Klein writes
in the book.
Those
are fighting words. Over the past few years, the oil and coal lobbies
and, increasingly, super-rich ultra-conservatives in America have
spent close to $1bn a year building a network of rightwing
organisations that have blocked efforts to cut the emissions that
cause climate change – often by claiming that climate change is not
even happening. More than half of the Republicans elected to Congress
now deny the existence of climate change.
There
are already signs of a pushback on Twitter from some environmental
bloggers, even before the book’s release. But Klein – who over
the years has endured pro-corporate backlash of her two earlier books
and a ferocious assault for criticising Israel’s conduct against
the Palestinians, says she is ready for it. “I think I have been
through attacks that are far more personal and far more intense than
what I am going to experience with this book.”
She
says she sees a new breed of climate activist, ready to go after
corporate power in a way that Big Green is not. “They are going
after the fossil fuel companies directly as opposed to just trying to
go into business with them and gently cajole them into doing the
right thing,” she says.
At
the same time she argues there has been a shift in attitudes about
how people treat one another.
“I
am not in despair. I am excited by what I am seeing. I think that the
task is enormous. I think we are nowhere close to where we need to
be, but I think we are on a track. There is a track,” she says.
• This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein is
published by Allen Lane on 16 September.
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