Breaking Denial, Dreaming in Public, and Answering History’s Knock

By John M Repp
A review of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate 2014 by Naomi Klein
What is wrong with us? Why can’t we answer history’s hard knock on our front door in the form of super storms, record droughts, floods, wildfires, globetrotting diseases, food shortages and finally threats of tipping points like the melting of the West Antarctic glacier and massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost. The answer is denial, denial of climate change.
Naomi Klein tells us exactly when and how she broke through her denial of climate change. It came when she heard a young Bolivian woman tell her in late 2009 that climate change was both terrible threat and an opportunity. When she learned to reframe climate change and see both possibilities clearly, the threat and the promise, she began the research for this excellent book.
I have read 4 reviews, three in the corporate press: LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Associated Press, and one in The Guardian of UK, and even The Guardian review was critical of Klein. So I offer another view.
Climate change will change everything whichever way we choose, continued denial or ”a massive mobilization larger than any in history” (p.5) You get a strong sense when reading this book that things are changing very fast. Klein writes that she had to scramble to keep up. Her argumentation is brilliant as is her reporting directly from the scene. She is asking for system change not light bulb change.
Many people say the world cannot cooperate and they point to the 20 year failure of the UN sponsored meetings. She says not true. Parallel to the failures of climate change negotiations have been the success of globalization and free-trade treaties that actually have teeth in them and are not nonbinding like the climate change agreements. These so-called “free trade” treaties have actually increased greenhouse gas emissions as they have encouraged more trade powered by fossil fuels as well as the manufacturing of goods for developed countries in less developed countries that are powering their industries with coal, like a repeat of the Industrial Revolution in the West.
Many people say we won’t sacrifice. No, she says. People are already sacrificing under the austerity regimes: cuts in jobs, services, loss of homes, pensions, and savings, delayed retirement and abandoned educational plans. True, people are chaffing at these sacrifices, but that is only because there is no universal sharing of sacrifice like during the WWII rationing. Now, the super wealthy, the Wall Street banks and multinational corporations are thriving like never before.
Many people say the technology and policy proposals are not there. Yes they are! writes Klein. Today wind and solar are cheaper than coal for generating electricity. Take away the 1 trillion dollar a year subsidies the fossil fuel industry receives each year on a global basis and stop the “right” to pour carbon emissions cost free into our atmosphere, and the fossil fuel industry would disappear quickly.
In the last chapter, Klein calls for a mass uprising where everyone is an activist. She looks at history to see if what she says we must do is possible. She writes of the abolitionist movement, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement and wants something like all of them combined, plus the worker’s movement which knows how to win economic changes. The abolition movement did not achieve 40 acres and a mule, nor did the women’s movement achieve parity wages or wages for housework, and the civil rights movement the end of poverty. But Klein thinks it is possible for the highest goals of the liberation movements of the last two centuries to finally be achieved. That is how big of a force climate change will be. She also reminds us that popular uprisings take even the organizers by surprise.
The change we need will go deep into the psyches of modern humans. We will have to change our worldview. We must learn to see ourselves not just as “singular gratification units” but as a mass of contradictory desires who can rebuild and reinvent “the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect” (p. 460) To survive we will need to learn to work together to regenerate more life on the earth, not extract more fossil fuels and metals from the ground and consume evermore stuff.
Again, to get a sense of how fast things are changing, just after I read Klein, I read about Rodale’s proposal to use regenerative organic farming to absorb all the excess green house emissions of the last few decades. (To see this proposal Google: Rodale Institute Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change)
If Rodale’s idea works, we change how we farm and the plants and living soil will absorb more greenhouse gas emissions. We have yet another tool to deal with climate change. But Klein’s thesis remains solid. Our economic policies will have to change. Smaller, local, cooperative ventures must be favored over large multinational corporations. Our new economy will require a redistribution of wealth and power. All the rules of the deregulating, privatizing and social program cutting version of capitalism will have to be broken. She reminds us that free market theory was ignored when the banking system nearly collapsed.
In part, Klein is writing this book for progressives. She wants us to stop our denial of climate change and figure out how all our different issues are related. We all face the same power structure. There will not be a separate movement for each of our good causes. But climate change is “the best argument progressives have had” to realize all our demands. She reports on the world-wide movement of local people blocking the efforts of the fossil fuels companies to develop new unconventional sources like gas and oil fracking, shale oil, deep ocean drilling and all the new infrastructure to transport the dirty fuel all over the world, for example, the pipelines and the shipping docks. She calls this “Blockadia” and sees this vibrant movement with new coalitions like the “Cowboy and Indian” alliances in the American West as just the beginning.
This book gives me hopel. Throughout the book, Klein tells us what policies we need to put in place, how to we need to do it, how much it will cost and where we will get the money, and she gives us a deadline, 2017.We had better get busy.