The irrepressible Naomi Klein has come up with yet another big idea. At first sight it is a very attractive one, at least to those of us who have long felt angry yet powerless before both the global triumph of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution and the rapidly accelerating environmental degradation that threatens to make the 21st century a period of catastrophic climate change.
Klein’s idea is very simple. She links capitalism and human-generated climate change as cause and effect, and asserts that the urgency of one will enable us to effectively confront the evils of the other. Climate change, she writes, “is a civilisational wake-up call . . . telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”Amen to that. But her big idea begs a bigger question: how do we get from here to there, from dystopia to utopia, or at least to a better, more equitable and habitable place? And that’s where Klein remains, as so often before, infuriatingly fuzzy.
Her first book, No Logo, from 1999, exposed the intimate relationship between the overconsumption of cleverly branded consumer commodities and the sweatshop misery that produces them. Remarkably, her work both predicted and inspired the protest rallies that converged on international meetings of the rich and powerful in the early years of this century.
Klein often lauded the anti-globalisation movement’s refusal to build cohesive organisations, or even clearly formulate its positions, favourably contrasting its diffuse, spontaneous nature with the authoritarianism and dogmatism of the old left. As it finally imploded, however, she was forced to admit: “We were too ephemeral.”
Her 2007 book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was uncannily prescient about how the panic unleashed by the world banking crisis would be used to transfer wealth on an enormous scale to the richest of the rich from the rest of us, with the willing support of a servile and morally bankrupt political class. Again, however, her acerbic analysis of the disastrous triumph of the 1 per cent was unmatched by any clear notion of how the 99 per cent might turn the tide.
Lot to ask
It’s a lot to ask an author of this kind of book to not only tell us what’s wrong but also indicate convincingly how we might put it right. But that’s what Klein sets out to do, especially in the last third of the book.
First, however, she sets out the case that unregulated capitalism is driving climate change. And it’s a pretty convincing one. Two key tenets of the “free market” – privatisation of public utilities and deregulation of corporations – have enabled already powerful fossil-fuel interests to rapidly expand their global activities. So carbon emissions are soaring while the best science is telling us we must reduce them.
This creates a vicious circle: with every passing day we need to take more radical action to cut emissions than we would have needed to take yesterday; we will probably soon pass tipping points after which the effectiveness of any such remedial action will rapidly decline. We should be very afraid, very angry and very active on this issue. Mostly, however, we are not.
In a deluge of rather dry data – the early part of the book is sometimes quite heavy going – Klein details the nefarious ways in which big oil continues to do to our atmosphere in this century what big tobacco did to our lungs in the last one, and the depressing failure of national governments and international agencies to impose effective controls.
Much of this material is fairly familiar to anyone who has followed the debate, but she is particularly interesting on the way free-trade agreements have been used to close down green-energy programmes, as they often require high local subsidies to get off the ground. On the positive front, it will surprise many to learn that Germany is taking the lead, municipally, in bringing energy grids back under public control in order to switch to renewable-power sources.
In the book’s middle section Klein is scathing about several strategies that have been advanced to mitigate climate change while allowing the fossil-fuel industry to do business as usual, from carbon-trading markets to outlandish geoengineering projects that promise to “dim the sun”.
She castigates “big green” organisations, such as the Nature Conservancy, for partnering with the oil companies rather than confronting them. And she pours scorn on the idea that a billionaire superhero will ride to our rescue – Richard Branson in particular emerges with his green image in flitters.
Her tone here is often more partisan than analytical. Carbon markets are indeed often poorly conceived, too weakly supported and sometimes criminally manipulated. But surely they may still be a helpful strand in any strategy to mitigate climate change.
And there are occasions – far too few so far, for sure – when mining companies have been persuaded to invest in remarkably effective reparations. The exemplary restoration of a biodiverse forest by Alcoa in Australia is a case in point. But Klein rarely does nuance and generally prefers to preach to the choir than to convince sceptics.
Climate movement
Who, then, does she envisage as forming this unprecedented “climate movement”, in which “everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for immigrants to reparations for historical wrongs such as slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand project for building a non-toxic, shockproof economy before it’s too late”?
In her concluding chapters she puts great emphasis on some successes achieved by indigenous peoples, especially in North America, in resisting tar-sand and fracking operations on their traditional lands. And, indeed, there have been remarkable instances where geographical position coupled with the invocation of treaty rights has enabled such resistance to be effective. More remarkably still, such groups have sometimes formed unlikely coalitions with neighbouring farmers who, like them, feel threatened by such operations.
Klein is also rightly mindful of the core principle of “climate justice” – although it would have been good to see Mary Robinson’s work in this field acknowledged here. She quotes harrowing speeches from representatives of impoverished communities worldwide, who are often most directly threatened by climate change, although they have least responsibility for causing it.
It would be justice indeed, and poetic justice at that, if some of the world’s poorest and most abused peoples could become the vanguard of sweeping social transformations that will simultaneously put manners on the free-market bandits who pillage our planet and rescue our environment from the consequences of that pillage.
I dearly hope I’ll be proved wrong, but I fear that most of the evidence, including the evidence in this book, suggests that the fossil-fuel lobby is still way ahead of the curve of the opposition.
We desperately need a new manifesto for a fairer and greener world, to galvanise the billions who have most to gain from radical change but are more preoccupied with survival – or with apocalyptic religious hysteria – than with politico-environmental theory. It hasn’t been written yet.
