This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.

  This is not hyperbole. In 2011, a think tank in London called the Carbon Tracker Initiative conducted a breakthrough study that added together the reserves claimed by all the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned. It found that the oil, gas, and coal to which these players had already laid claim—deposits they have on their books and which were already making money for shareholders—represented 2,795 gigatons of carbon (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons). That’s a very big problem because we know roughly how much carbon can be burned between now and 2050 and still leave us a solid chance (roughly 80 percent) of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. According to one highly credible study, that amount of carbon is 565 gigatons between 2011 and 2049. And as Bill McKibben points out, “The thing to notice is, 2,795 is five times 565. It’s not even close.” He adds: “What those numbers mean is quite simple. This industry has announced, in filings to the SEC and in promises to shareholders, that they’re determined to burn five times more fossil fuel than the planet’s atmosphere can begin to absorb.”57

  Those numbers also tell us that the very thing we must do to avert catastrophe—stop digging—is the very thing these companies cannot contemplate without initiating their own demise. They tell us that getting serious about climate change, which means cutting our emissions radically, is simply not compatible with the continued existence of one of the most profitable industries in the world.

  And the amounts of money at stake are huge. The total amount of carbon in reserve represents roughly $27 trillion—more than ten times the annual GDP of the United Kingdom. If we were serious about keeping warming below 2 degrees, approximately 80 percent of that would be useless, stranded assets. Given these stakes, it is no mystery why the fossil fuel companies fight furiously to block every piece of legislation that would point us in the right emissions direction, and why some directly fund the climate change denier movement.58

  It also helps that these companies are so profitable that they have money not just to burn, but to bribe—especially when that bribery is legal. In 2013 in the United States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87 percent jump from the 2008 elections.59

  In Canada, corporations are not required to disclose how much money they spend on lobbying, but the number of times they communicate with public officials is a matter of public record. A 2012 report found that a single industry organization—the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers—spoke with federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279 communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country’s broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the Department of Energy and Climate Change roughly eleven times more frequently than green groups did during David Cameron’s first year in office. In fact, it has become increasingly difficult to discern where the oil and gas industry ends and the British government begins. As The Guardian reported in 2011, “At least 50 employees of companies including EDF Energy, npower and Centrica have been placed within government to work on energy issues in the past four years. . . . The staff are provided free of charge and work within the departments for secondments of up to two years.”60

  What all this money and access means is that every time the climate crisis rightfully triggers our collective self-preservation instinct, the incredible monetary power of the fossil fuel industry—driven by its own, more immediate self-preservation instinct—gets in the way. Environmentalists often speak about contemporary humanity as the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water, too accustomed to the gradual increases in heat to jump to safety. But the truth is that humanity has tried to jump quite a few times. In Rio in 1992. In Kyoto in 1997. In 2006 and 2007, when global concern rose yet again after the release of An Inconvenient Truth and with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2009, in the lead up to the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen. The problem is that the money that perverts the political process acts as a kind of lid, intercepting that survival instinct and keeping us all in the pot.

  The influence wielded by the fossil fuel lobby goes a long way toward explaining why the sector is so very unconcerned about the nonbinding commitments made by politicians at U.N. climate summits to keep temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. Indeed the day the Copenhagen summit concluded—when the target was made official—the share prices of some of the largest fossil fuel companies hardly reacted at all.61

  Clearly, intelligent investors had determined that the promises governments made in that forum were nothing to worry about—that they were not nearly as important as the actions of their powerful energy departments back home that grant mining and drilling permits. Indeed in March 2014, ExxonMobil confirmed as much when the company came under pressure from activist shareholders to respond to reports that much of its reserves would become stranded assets if governments kept promises to keep warming below 2 degrees by passing aggressive climate legislation. The company explained that it had determined that restrictive climate policies were “highly unlikely” and, “based on this analysis, we are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded.’ ”62

  Those working inside government understand these dynamics all too well. John Ashton, who served as special representative for climate change to three successive U.K. governments between 2006 and 2012, told me that he would often point out to his colleagues making energy policy that their approach to the development of fossil fuels contradicted the government’s claim to be “running a 2 degree climate policy.” But when he did, they “simply ignored my efforts and carried on as before—I might as well have been speaking in Attic Greek.” From this Ashton concluded, “In government it is usually easy to rectify a slight misalignment between two policies but near impossible to resolve a complete contradiction. Where there is a contradiction, the forces of incumbency start with a massive advantage.”63

  This dynamic will shift only when the power (and wealth) of the fossil fuel industry is seriously eroded. Which is very tough to do: the handy thing about selling natural resources upon which entire economies have been built—and about having so far succeeded in blocking policies that would offer real alternatives—is that most people keep having to buy your products whether they like you or not. So since these companies are going to continue being rich for the foreseeable future, the best hope of breaking the political deadlock is to radically restrict their ability to spend their profits buying, and bullying, politicians.

  The good news for the climate movement is that there are a whole lot of other sectors that also have an active interest in curtailing the influence of money over politics, particularly in the U.S., the country that has been the most significant barrier to climate progress. After all, climate action has failed on Capitol Hill for the same reasons that serious financial sector reform didn’t pass after the 2008 meltdown and the same reasons gun reform didn’t pass after the horrific 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Which in turn are the same reasons why Obama’s health reform failed to take on the perverting influence of the medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies. All these attempts to fix glaring and fundamental flaws in the system have failed because large corporations wield far too much political power—a power exerted through corporate campaign contributions, many of them secret; through almost unfettered access to reg
ulators via their lobbyists; through the notorious revolving door between business and government; as well as through the “free speech” rights these corporations have been granted by the U.S. Supreme Court. And though U.S. politics are particularly far gone in this regard, no Western democracy has a level playing field when it comes to political access and power.

  Because these distortions have been in place for so long—and harm so many diverse constituencies—a great many smart people have done a huge amount of thinking about what it would take to clean up the system. As with responses to climate change, the problem is not an absence of “solutions”—the solutions are clear. Politicians must be prohibited from receiving donations from the industries they regulate, or from accepting jobs in lieu of bribes; political donations need to be both fully disclosed and tightly capped; campaigns must be given the right to access the public airwaves; and, ideally, elections should be publicly funded as a basic cost of having a democracy.

  Yet among large sections of the public, a sense of fatalism pervades: how can you convince politicians to vote for reforms designed to free them from the binds of corporate influence when those binds are still tightly in place? It’s tough, to be sure, but the only thing politicians fear more than losing donations is losing elections. And this is where the power of climate change—and its potential for building the largest possible political tent—comes into play. As we have seen, the scientific warnings that we are running out of time to avert climate disaster are coming from a galaxy of credible scientific organizations and establishment international agencies—from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to NASA to Britain’s Royal Society to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to the World Bank to the International Energy Agency. A resurgent climate movement could use those warnings to light a fire under the call to kick corporate money out of politics—not just fossil fuel money, but money from all the deep-pocketed barriers to progress from the National Rifle Association to the fast food industry to the private-prison complex. Such a rallying cry could bring together all of the various constituencies that would benefit from reducing corporate power over politics—from health care workers to parents worried about their children’s safety at school. There are no guarantees that this coalition could succeed where other attempts at similar reforms have failed. But it certainly seems worth expending at least as much energy and money as the U.S. climate movement did trying, unsuccessfully, to push through climate legislation that it knew was wholly inadequate, precisely because it was written to try to neutralize opposition from fossil fuel companies (more on that later).

  Not an “Issue,” a Frame

  The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could—by virtue of its urgency and the fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth—breathe new life into a political goal for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for many of the other issues discussed so far—from raising taxes on the rich to blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be abandoned.

  Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One—why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women’s rights and poverty and wars when it’s blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison.” Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure.”64

  They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency. As Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York, wrote in July 2013, “The fight for the climate isn’t a separate movement, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don’t need to become climate activists, we are climate activists. We don’t need a separate climate movement; we need to seize the climate moment.”65

  The nature of the moment is familiar but bears repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don’t have another couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear deadlines, dogged focus—all of which are sorely missing from most progressive movements at the moment.

  Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late.

  And it is also worth remembering because it’s so very easy to forget: the alternative to such a project is not the status quo extended indefinitely. It is climate-change-fueled disaster capitalism—profiteering disguised as emission reduction, privatized hyper-militarized borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering when things spiral out of control.

  So how realistic is it to imagine that the climate crisis could be a political game changer, a unifier for all these disparate issues and movements? Well, there is a reason hard-right conservatives are putting so much effort into denying its existence. Their political project is not, after all, as sturdy as it was in 1988, when climate change first pierced public consciousness. Free market ideology may still bind the imaginations of our elites, but for most of the general public, it has been drained of its powers to persuade. The disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world’s wealth exposes the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives continue to be sacrificed for the few.

  The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since 2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent encampments of the angry and dispossessed. It’s also why there are now more calls for fundamental change than at any point since the 1960s. It’s why a challenging book like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, exposing the built-in structures of ever-increasing wealth concentration, can sit atop bestseller lists for months, and why when comedian and social commentator Russell Brand went on the BBC and called for “revolution,” his appearance attracted more than ten million YouTube views.66

  Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another w
ay, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.

  Al Gore called climate change “an inconvenient truth,” which he defined as an inescapable fact that we would prefer to ignore. Yet the truth about climate change is inconvenient only if we are satisfied with the status quo except for the small matter of warming temperatures. If, however, we see the need for transformation quite apart from those warming temperatures, then the fact that our current road is headed toward a cliff is, in an odd way, convenient—because it tells us that we had better start making that sweeping turn, and fast.

  Not surprisingly, the people who understand this best are those whom our economic model has always been willing to sacrifice. The environmental justice movement, the loose network of groups working with communities on the toxic front lines of extractive industries—next to refineries, for instance, or downstream from mines—has always argued that a robust response to emission reduction could form the basis of a transformative economic project. In fact the slogan long embraced by this movement has been “System Change, Not Climate Change”—a recognition that these are the two choices we face.67

  “The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time,” Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), explains. “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.”68