This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits. “How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?” asked Observer columnist Nick Cohen despondently.69 The answer is that you don’t. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer.

  Yoshitani is part of a vibrant activist scene in the San Francisco Bay Area that is ground zero of the green jobs movement most prominently championed by former Obama advisor Van Jones. When I first met Yoshitani, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network was working closely with Asian immigrants in Oakland to demand affordable housing close to a mass transit station to make sure that gentrification didn’t displace the people who actually use subways and buses. And APEN has also been part of an initiative to help create worker co-ops in the solar energy sector in nearby Richmond, so that there are jobs on offer other than the ones at the local Chevron oil refinery.

  More such connections between climate action and economic justice are being made all the time. As we will see, communities trying to stop dangerous oil pipelines or natural gas fracking are building powerful new alliances with Indigenous peoples whose territories are also at risk from these activities. And several large environmental organizations in the U.S.—including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the BlueGreen Alliance, and 350.org—took stands in support of demands for comprehensive reform of the U.S. immigration system, in part because migration is increasingly linked to climate and also because members of immigrant communities are often prevented from defending themselves against heightened environmental risks since doing so could lead to incarceration or deportation.70

  These are encouraging signs, and there are plenty of others. Yet the kind of counter-power that has a chance of changing society on anything close to the scale required is still missing. It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” blackened England’s skies (which, incidentally, was the beginning of climate change). By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with conviction, lending new confidence to the demands for a more just economic model. And yet when demonstrators are protesting the various failures of this system in Athens, Madrid, Istanbul, and New York, climate change is too often little more than a footnote when it could be the coup de grâce.71

  The mainstream environmental movement, meanwhile, generally stands apart from these expressions of mass frustration, choosing to define climate activism narrowly—demanding a carbon tax, say, or even trying to stop a pipeline. And those campaigns are important. But building a mass movement that has a chance of taking on the corporate forces arrayed against science-based emission reduction will require the broadest possible spectrum of allies. That would include the public sector workers—firefighters, nurses, teachers, garbage collectors—fighting to protect the services and infrastructure that will be our best protection against climate change. It would include antipoverty activists trying to protect affordable housing in downtown cores, rather than allowing low-income people to be pushed by gentrification into sprawling peripheries that require more driving. As Colin Miller of Oakland-based Bay Localize told me, “Housing is a climate issue.” And it would include transit riders fighting against fare increases at a time when we should be doing everything possible to make subways and buses more comfortable and affordable for all. Indeed when masses of people take to the streets to stop such fare hikes and demand free public transit—as they did in Brazil in June and July of 2013—these actions should be welcomed as part of a global effort to fight climate chaos, even if those populist movements never once use the words “climate change.”72

  Perhaps it should be no surprise that a sustained and populist climate movement has not yet emerged—a movement like that has yet to be sustained to counter any of the other failures of this economic model. Yes, there have been periods when mass outrage in the face of austerity, corruption, and inequality has spilled into the streets and the squares for weeks and months on end. Yet if the recent years of rapid-fire rebellions have demonstrated anything, it is that these movements are snuffed out far too quickly, whether by repression or political cooptation, while the structures they opposed reconstitute themselves in more terrifying and dangerous forms. Witness Egypt. Or the inequalities that have grown even more obscene since the 2008 economic crisis, despite the many movements that rose up to resist the bailouts and austerity measures.

  I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their amorphous structures—whether that means rejecting identifiable leadership or eschewing programmatic demands. And there is no question that old political habits and structures must be reinvented to reflect new realities, as well as past failures. But I confess that the last five years immersed in climate science has left me impatient. As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford.

  The core of the problem comes back to the same inescapable fact that has both blocked climate action and accelerated emissions: all of us are living in the world that neoliberalism built, even if we happen to be critics of neoliberalism.

  In practice that means that, despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service organizations—are fighting for their lives.

  And the challenge goes deeper than a lack of institutional tools and reaches into our very selves. Contemporary capitalism has not just accelerated the behaviors that are changing the climate. This economic model has changed a great many of us as individuals, accelerated and uprooted and dematerialized us as surely as it has finance capital, leaving us at once everywhere and nowhere. These are the hand-wringing clichés of our time—What is Twitter doing to my attention span? What are screens doing to our relationships?—but the preoccupations have particular relevance to the way we relate to the climate challenge.

  Because this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake, the late arrival of a migratory bird—noticing these small changes requires the kind of communion that comes from knowing a place deeply, not just as scenery but also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred trust from one generation to the next. How many of us still live like that? Similarly, climate change is also about the inescapable impact of the actions of past generations not just on the present, but on generations in the future. These time frames are a language that has become foreign to a great many of us. Indeed Western culture has worked very hard to erase Indigenous cosmologies that call on the past and the future to interrogate present-day actions, with long-dead ancestors always present, alongside the generations yet to come.

  In short: more bad timing. Just when we needed to slow down and notice the subtle changes in the natural world that are telling us that something is seriously amiss, we have sped up; just when we needed longer time horizons to see how the actions of our past impact the prospects for our future, we entered into the never-ending feed of the perpetual now, slicing and dicing our attention spans as never before.

  To understand how we got to this place of profound disconnection from our surroundings and one another, and to think about how we might build a politics ba
sed on reconnection, we will need to go back a good deal further than 1988. Because the truth is that, while contemporary, hyper-globalized capitalism has exacerbated the climate crisis, it did not create it. We started treating the atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that.

  Moreover, humans have behaved in this shortsighted way not only under capitalist systems, but under systems that called themselves socialist as well (whether they were or not remains a subject of debate). Indeed the roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment Western culture is founded—myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable. This is not a problem that can be blamed on the political right or on the United States; these are powerful cultural narratives that transcend geography and ideological divides.

  I have, so far, emphasized the familiarity of many of the deep solutions to the climate crisis and there is real comfort to take from that. It means that in many of our key responses, we would not be embarking on this tremendous project from scratch but rather drawing on more than a century of progressive work. But truly rising to the climate challenge—particularly its challenge to economic growth—will require that we dig even deeper into our past, and move into some distinctly uncharted political territory.

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  I. Workers in the U.S. and Europe have attempted to emulate this model in recent years during several plant closures, most notably the high-profile Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, which was shut down during the economic crisis and then occupied by its workers. Today many of those former employees are now worker-owners at the reborn New Era Windows Cooperative.

  II. Much of the support for nuclear power as a solution to global warming is based on the promise of “next generation” nuclear technologies, which range from more efficient reactors cooled with gas instead of water, to “fast reactor” designs that can run on spent fuel or “breed” more fuel in addition to consuming it—or even nuclear fusion, in which atomic nuclei are forced together (as occurs in the sun) rather than split. Boosters of these groundbreaking technologies assure us that they eliminate many of the risks currently associated with nuclear energy, from meltdowns to longterm waste storage to weaponization of enriched uranium. And perhaps they do have the potential to eliminate some of those risks. But since these technologies are untested, and some may carry even greater risks, the onus is on the boosters, not on the rest of us, to demonstrate their safety. All the more so because we have proven clean, renewable technologies available, and democratic, participatory models for their implementation, that demand no such risks.

  III. There is a great deal of confusion about the climate benefits of natural gas because the fuel is often given credit for a 12 percent drop in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions since 2007. But this good news does not address the fact that methane emissions have been rising over the past decade, or the fact that U.S. methane emissions are very likely underestimated, since leakage has been extremely poorly accounted for. Moreover, many experts and modelers warn that any climate gains from the shale boom will continue to be undercut not only by potent methane emissions, but also by the tendency of cheap natural gas to displace wind and solar. Similarly, as coal generation is displaced by natural gas in the U.S., coal companies are simply exporting their dirty product overseas, which according to one analysis by the CO2 Scorecard Group has “more than offset” the emissions savings from natural gas since 2007.

  5

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  BEYOND EXTRACTIVISM

  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, 20131

  “The open veins of Latin America are still bleeding.”

  —Bolivian Indigenous leader Nilda Rojas Huanca, 20142

  “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 modeling conference, 20143

  For the past few years, the island of Nauru has been on a health kick. The concrete walls of public buildings are covered in murals urging regular exercise and healthy eating, and warning against the danger of diabetes. Young people are asking their grandparents how to fish, a lost skill. But there is a problem. As Nerida-Ann Steshia Hubert, who works at a diabetes center on the island, explains, life spans on Nauru are short, in part because of an epidemic of the disease. “The older folks are passing away early and we’re losing a lot of the knowledge with them. It’s like a race against time—trying to get the knowledge from them before they die.”4

  For decades, this tiny, isolated South Pacific island, just twenty-one square kilometers and home to ten thousand people, was held up as a model for the world—a developing country that was doing everything right. In the early 1960s, the Australian government, whose troops seized control of Nauru from the Germans in 1914, was so proud of its protectorate that it made promotional videos showing the Micronesians in starched white Bermuda shorts, obediently following lessons in English-speaking schools, settling their disputes in British-style courts, and shopping for modern conveniences in well-stocked grocery stores.5

  During the 1970s and 1980s, after Nauru had earned independence, the island was periodically featured in press reports as a place of almost obscene riches, much as Dubai is invoked today. An Associated Press article from 1985 reported that Nauruans had “the world’s highest per capita gross national product . . . higher even than Persian Gulf oil Sheikdoms.” Everyone had free health care, housing, and education; homes were kept cool with air-conditioning; and residents zoomed around their tiny island—it took twenty minutes to make the entire loop—in brand-new cars and motorcycles. A police chief famously bought himself a yellow Lamborghini. “When I was young,” recalls Steshia Hubert, “we would go to parties where people would throw thousands of dollars on the babies. Extravagant parties—first, sixteenth, eighteenth, twenty-first, and fiftieth birthdays. . . . They would come with gifts like cars, pillows stuffed with hundred-dollar bills—for one-year-old babies!”6

  All of Nauru’s monetary wealth derived from an odd geological fact. For hundreds of thousands of years, when the island was nothing but a cluster of coral reefs protruding from the waves, Nauru was a popular pit stop for migrating birds, who dropped by to feast on the shellfish and mollusks. Gradually, the bird poop built up between the coral towers and spires, eventually hardening to form a rocky landmass. The rock was then covered over in topsoil and dense forest, creating a tropical oasis of coconut palms, tranquil beaches, and thatched huts so beatific that the first European visitors dubbed the island Pleasant Isle.7

  For thousands of years, Nauruans lived on the surface of their island, sustaining themselves on fish and black noddy birds. That began to change when a colonial officer picked up a rock that was later discovered to be made of almost pure phosphate of lime, a valuable agricultural fertilizer. A German-British firm began mining, later replaced by a British–Australian–New Zealand venture.8 Nauru started developing at record speed—the catch was that it was, simultaneously, commiting suicide.

  By the 1960s, Nauru still looked pleasant enough when approached from the sea, but it was a mirage. Behind the narrow fringe of coconut palms circling the coast lay a ravaged interior. Seen from above, the forest and topsoil of the oval island were being voraciously stripped away; the phosphate mined down to the island’s sharply protruding bones, leaving behind a forest of ghostly coral totems. With the center now uninhabitable
and largely infertile except for some minor scrubby vegetation, life on Nauru unfolded along the thin coastal strip, where the homes and civic structures were located.9

  Nauru’s successive waves of colonizers—whose economic emissaries ground up the phosphate rock into fine dust, then shipped it on ocean liners to fertilize soil in Australia and New Zealand—had a simple plan for the country: they would keep mining phosphate until the island was an empty shell. “When the phosphate supply is exhausted in thirty to forty years’ time, the experts predict that the estimated population will not be able to live on this pleasant little island,” a Nauruan council member said, rather stiffly, in a sixties-era black-and-white video produced by the Australian government. But not to worry, the film’s narrator explained: “Preparations are being made now for the future of the Nauruan people. Australia has offered them a permanent home within her own shores. . . . Their prospects are bright; their future is secure.”10

  Nauru, in other words, was developed to disappear, designed by the Australian government and the extractive companies that controlled its fate as a disposable country. It’s not that they had anything against the place, no genocidal intent per se. It’s just that one dead island that few even knew existed seemed like an acceptable sacrifice to make in the name of the progress represented by industrial agriculture.