Capitalism’s only reliable guarantee: catastrophic climate change
by Moisha Blechman
“This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs. the Climate” by Naomi Klein, Simon and Schuster, 2014, 576 pages, $30.
The alarm bell could not be louder. The message could not be clearer. Naomi Klein’s book, “This Changes Everything,” spells out in the most compelling and factual way, the imminent—and perhaps irreversible—damage caused by climate deniers and their corporate funders.
I want to go back to 1930. It was then, during the Great Depression, that my father had an insight that radicalized him. He could not fathom that a nation so abundantly rich in resources saw people jumping out of windows. He thought that it was a failure of our economic system, and he held it responsible for the despair that drove so many to early deaths.
First the New Deal, and then the Second World War, put questioning the economic system on hold. Capitalism and its growth mantra became unassailable as the engine of the economy for a long time, and is at the heart of every major media communication when discussing the economy. The crowning message in every State of the Union speech is about the economy and the prospects for growth fueled by fossil fuel energy. More domestic fossil fuel energy and more growth are cause for celebration.
Yet, every time environmentalists try to protect water, air, forests, and the oceans from pollution or annihilation, they are at odds with the corporate entitlement to profit from exploiting our basic resources. Not a single environmental organization has dared to say that our battles on behalf of trees, clean water, endangered species, etc., are the result of a systemic problem, and for that reason every little win is temporary.
Environmentalists could never state that powerful corporations will always ignore any consideration except the creation of profit because profit creation is the job of corporations. Water protection, for example, is not only not their job, but seen as a hindrance to maximizing profits. Capitalism will reliably, even ruthlessly, insist on the rape of life for profit. This has become glaringly obvious.
In “This Changes Everything” Naomi Klein has broken the taboo. She documents the consequences of unregulated capitalism in depth. It is a very welcome breath of fresh air. We can use the word “capitalism” without going to purgatory. I sense a palpable joy among those who understand this, a joy in suddenly being able to confront the role of an economic system that devours life in order to exist.
Crisis is a catalyst for change
Naomi Klein was radicalized by a new awareness that she could no longer ignore—how far-reaching and serious climate change had become. She began to see that climate dysfunction will fundamentally change everything about our lives. Naomi Klein finds the climate is at a crisis point, and on track to change everything to a horrific future. She reasons that, if we are in a rut, changing everything for the worse, let’s restructure the economic paradigm making climate change inevitable. Why not use that “change everything” reality as a catalyst for a systemic revamping that will alter the course of the ship?
She sees that the very system that is causing planetary illness is also causing social and political illness. Addressing one will automatically and simultaneously address the other. Climate change could be an opportunity, she reasons, to change everything. But it can only happen at the fundamental economic level. That means at the level of design.
Naomi Klein has written a book documenting how the capitalistic economic design decides outcome. In story after story she talks about the destructive consequences of fossil fuel extraction, and exposes the imperative for an alternative economic design.
She introduces the book by saying, “. . . we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of the crisis.”
For me, a good example of this is electrical use in New York City. I, as a lay person, can see how the city could reduce electrical consumption by 50 percent, and do it both quickly and cheaply. But those measures are not on the table because growth is a basic requirement of capitalism. The electrical providers are telling the public that more electricity, and the infrastructure that goes with it, is needed.
The public is not only disengaged from even thinking about the emissions produced, but unaware that this “need” becomes the corporate excuse to impound indigenous lands in Canada and to completely alter the ecosystem of indigenous peoples with dams for big hydro-electric. The big grid electricity providers are salivating over the prospect.
We can no longer expect that a government, subdued by corporate largess, will make a plea to the public to use less electricity, either. Unfortunately, this example close to home is not mentioned in her book, but many others are, especially the huge Bakken oil fields.
Exposing deniers
Naomi Klein beautifully exposes denial. The deniers are as obstinate as ever not because they are blind to climate change, but because “they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time— whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that can be left to the magic of the market.”
However, GOP denial has reached a new level of absurdity worthy of a comic opera. The latest issue of Rolling Stone details how our Navy finds that most of its more than 700 installations are facing total inundation due to rising seas and storms as a result of climate change.
In other words, a major part of the U.S. military security infrastructure is in danger of a total wipeout due to climate change. But in the Navy’s appeal to the House for relocation funds, it has been instructed to leave the words “climate change” back at the base. Not even an admiral may pierce the denial armor without risking demotion.
UN’s history of failure
Naomi Klein is justified in her argument that our system is incapable of addressing the climate challenge with anything like the power that is required. One example is the record of the UN climate change negotiations itself. She notes that 50 years ago, President Johnson warned that CO2 emissions were accumulating in the atmosphere.
Even though the problems we see today were predictable, there was no discussion about fixing the causes. The entire history of UN negotiations, starting with the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, the Kyoto Protocols, and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, have led to no agreements. Each effort unfailingly stalled any progress on an agreement to reign in fossil fuel emissions. The United States, as the dominant world power, has been the leader in that failure. Klein believes that had there been a binding low-emission agreement in 1992, for example, India and China would have developed low-emission pathways, the stated goal of the IPCC for sustainable development.
Today, almost 25 years later, the news from China and India is of vast populations unable to breathe safely, often sick and dying, because they have fueled their development with coal. At the same time, for the planet as a whole, the opportunity to get a head start on CO2 emission reductions was squandered. These monumental tragedies are playing out under the guidance of the IPCC.
Big Oil behind the curtain
Naomi Klein’s researchers neglected to uncover the source of these failures, namely the documented pressure from ExxonMobil to replace the chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson, with Rajendra Pachauri, who was seen as a “mild-mannered and industry friendly” soul. This explains the contradictory nature of the IPPC’s reports for policymakers. It also explains the switch from the benchmark of CO2 in the atmosphere to the illogical benchmark of going to 2°C. This gives the fossil fuel industry a long leash.
While Klein is skeptical of 2°C in the beginning of the book, and well aware of the profound dismay of the island states (who knew then that total inundation was therefore inevitable), she repeatedly mentions avoiding actions that will bring the planet to 2°C. Instead, she should have seen that the 2°C mantra is really another corporate scam.
Recently, on the same page of The New York Times (February 15), with news about air pollution in Delhi, there was an article on how an Indian Greenpeace activist was barred from flying to London to testify concerning mining projects that would destroy hundreds of thousands of trees, and end the livelihoods of people in villages who depend on forest products. The Indian government argued that her testimony had the potential to damage prospects for “growth” and to scare away foreign investment.
This incident illustrates another theme in Klein’s book: how local people all over the world are subject to the devastation of extreme extraction by corporations. In this scenario, the notion of “security” is corrupted to protect the invading corporation—with armed force against its own citizens. A version of that story is playing out now in New York.
I strongly suggest reading the book for an analysis of world trade organizations, the myths of geo-engineering, the folly of market mechanisms as a CO2 cure, the illogic of joining with any corporation or billionaire sugar daddy as a partner for a climate-change turnaround, and more.
While Naomi Klein offers several means to foil the capitalist winning streak, she has neglected the obvious one, the one at the heart of the matter—a corporate charter rewrite. The planet itself is begging for ecosystem responsibility and a Bill of Rights for every living plant and animal. I believe it has to be in the license to do business. She rightly emphasizes that this can only come about with uprisings from the people. It was exactly what Robert Watson said to me when I attended the 2005 IPCC convention in Montreal. He didn’t get enough support, and was removed from power.
“This Changes Everything” mentions population only twice and in passing.The first time it mentions the importance of depopulation. The second time, toward the end of the book, Klein refers to the beauty of regeneration, objecting to pressure limiting human fecundity.
But let’s look at the situation we have today in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Twenty million people have no water, due to climate change and mismanagement of the ecosystem. The senior official in charge of municipal water advises all 20 million to flee. In an instant we have 20 million refugees. This is where overpopulation and capitalism collide. “Growth” demands an ever expanding consumer base. It explains the unrelenting attacks from the political right against women’s right to choose, another present from capitalism.
With this book, Naomi Klein has sounded the alarm on an economic system that assures climate disaster. Who is listening?
Moisha Blechman chairs the Chapter’s Publications Committee and co-chairs the Climate Crisis Committee.